SWAT: Urban Justice [PC]

All along, the SWAT series has tried to capture the dilemma the police face when it comes to using lethal force. Unlike the military, whose wartime job is to kill people and break things, the police have to tread more carefully. So when you're making a first-person shooter about the police, how do you present that?

SWAT 4 takes its cue from 1999's underrated SWAT 3, which put players in dynamic situations where they had to ask questions first and shoot later. Just as important as the fire button was the "order to comply" button, which demanded that a target drop its weapon.

In SWAT 4, players are also given all sorts of non-lethal weapons that will allow shooting first and asking questions later. You can use a paintball gun that fires little balloons of pepper spray, a taser pistol, a shotgun loaded with beanbags to stun your victim, flashbangs, CS gas grenades, a handheld pepper spray canister, and a stinger grenade that explodes into non-lethal rubber balls. Each weapon has a unique effect on the victim, from the way a tased suspect jerks and quivers to the cool blurred vision effect caused by CS gas.

The gameplay is slow and deliberate, with no jumping and a cautious run being the fastest speed for movement. Your guns tend to have very limited ammo, with each player only getting four clips for his primary weapon.

The single-player games consists of a set of unrelated missions, which will give the developers at Irrational Games the freedom to create distinct and cinematic situations. One of the levels we've seen is clearly influenced by serial killer movies like Silence of the Lambs and Seven.

The game is aiming for replayability with a quick mission builder that allows you to change any number of options, such as the victory requirements, whether you can use lethal force, your starting location, the weapons available to your team and the enemies, how likely the bad guys are to surrender, and even how likely bystanders and hostages are to freak out when you try to rescue them.

You'll be in command of a team of four SWAT members, each with unique devices and weapons based on their class. Your commander will have a tactical camera that can watch any team member's perspective through an inset window on your screen. There are all sorts of ways to breach doors, from shotguns to lockpicks to C4 charges. There are optiwands, which are handheld view-screens with fiber optic cameras at the tip, used to see under doors. There are also wedges used to jam doors shut. And while these offer all sorts of possibilities in the single-player game, the news twists they add to multiplayer will really make SWAT 4 unique.

The multiplayer will have three game modes. There's a team vs. team battle and a rapid deployment mode that involves SWAT trying to defuse a set of bombs while the "suspects" try to prevent them long enough for the explosion. "Suspects" is apparently the properly ambiguous way to say "bad guys", especially since "terrorist" is such a loaded term these days.

The most intriguing multiplayer mode is VIP. In this mode, one player on the SWAT side is a lightly armed VIP who has to be escorted to an extraction point before a timer runs out. The suspects have to capture the VIP alive by disabling him with a non-lethal weapon and then handcuffing him. And then they have to keep SWAT from freeing him for two minutes. Once the two minutes is up, they'll win by executing the VIP (if they kill the VIP too early, they lose the round, which leads to some interesting tactics in which the VIP puts himself in harm's way). The default setting for this mode has killed players respawning into the game, so there's constant ebb and flow as the SWAT team tries to get the VIP closer and closer to the extraction point.

Players get a primary and a secondary weapon slot, so unless you want to rely on non-lethal grenades or pepper spray, you'll probably use one of those slots for a non-lethal weapon. Do you use the taser in your secondary slot, hampered by its limited range and long reload time, so that you can take a primary gun with some real punch? Or do you take the beanbag shotgun and rely on a pistol to take out the VIP's escorts? It's an interesting scenario that will encourage players to use a variety of weapons, as well as making pistols actually useful.

The VIP mode also makes the maps much more dynamic. Wherever the VIP is when he's cuffed becomes the focus of the map for a tense two-minute standoff. Although he can still move by walking on his knees, you can continue to pelt the VIP with non-lethal weapons if you want him to stay in one place. If there's one thing more satisfying than fragging your friends online, it's cuffing them and repeatedly macing them in the face so they stand still.

The graphics are sharp without being too demanding in terms of hardware requirements. SWAT 4 is built from the Unreal engine Irrational modified for its Tribes: Vengeance game. Only this time, instead of being used to re-create wide-open outdoor areas, it's creating detailed and atmospheric urban settings.

SWAT 4 takes place entirely in a fictional Northeastern American city, using lush lighting and weather effects for atmosphere. Although the physics seem to consist mainly of ragdoll effects and limited interaction with some objects, there is a sophisticated ballistics model. This will allow certain weapons and types of ammunition to shoot through some materials, so you won't always be safe behind a wall or door.

Among the choices for your loadout are light or heavy armor. The latter will protect you from lower caliber shots, but it slows you down considerably. You'll also have to choose whether to wear a helmet to guard against headshots or a gas mask, which shuts out your peripheral vision but makes you immune to CS gas.

By forcing players to make these sorts of hard choices, SWAT 4 plays very differently from all the other tactical first-person shooters. At a time when military shooters are a dime a dozen and they all seem to blur together into one big loud noisy war movie or Counter-Strike clone, SWAT 4 is something refreshingly different.