SWAT 3: Close-Quarters

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Review: SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle

This series of Special Weapons and Tactics police games has begged for first-person treatment since the its launch in the mid-'90s. (After all, Infogrames managed a brilliant 2D/3D SWAT-like game called Hostage back in 1989.) But Sierra initially chose the trendy over the immersive--full-motion video in the first game and real-time strategy in the second--with inconsistent results.

No more.

As leader of a five-member "element" in the Los Angeles Police Department's SWAT division in the year 2005, you'll run 16 missions during the week leading up to the LA signing of a no-nukes treaty. You plug in your name, pick a squad, suit up, attend a wonderfully detailed briefing and then you're off to the home of a freeway sniper. Compared to the baddies to come, he's pretty much a pussycat, and this mission is an opportunity to familiarize yourself with a range of SWAT 3's small beauties in a low-risk setting,

The first is the simple, memorable menu of keyboard commands in the upper left-hand corner. From here, using your aiming reticule to establish the in-game context, you can do almost anything cleanly and quickly, whether that means ordering the Red team to search right or the Blue to clear an area or restrain a suspect. (If you'd rather do it yourself, you also have function-key access to an opti-wand for mirroring doorways, a toolkit for disabling devices, CS gas, lightsticks, flashbangs, C2 charges and handcuffs.)

Moreover, each mission--played individually in any order or in sequence as a campaign--unfolds in slightly different fashion every time you go through it--and rest assured that, if you want to improve your end-of-mission leadership score, you'll go through each one repeatedly. This doesn't really lend itself to replayability--the overall task and level design remains the same--but changes in the placement of goals and enemies preserve the challenge from play to play. You can't just recklessly storm through a scenario thinking you know it. It's a shortcut to getting shot.

Your team does a very respectable job of obeying your directions. Ordered to fall in behind you, they'll find your element leader even at a significant distance without your intervention and with a narrow staircase en route. Ordered into an unexplored stairwell, backing up slowly and sliding sideways up the stairs, these realistic, smoothly animated figures looked and sounded for all the world just like a SWAT team in a stairwell. (And it's well that they're cautious. It's not always clear-cut who is and isn't an enemy, but the real ones will take the shot.)

Graphically and sonically, there's nothing generic or cookie-cutter about SWAT 3. Everything seems to have been designed for the express purpose for which it was used. It's terse and to the point, but also human, and it's hard to listen to watch a hostage mother freak out over her children or a terrorist growl in agony from your bullet. Characters' eyes and mouths move and you can distinguish the injured from the dead at a glance. The game follows up diligently on the status of evacuated suspects, hostages and comrades in arms, and the current status of your objectives is a key press away.

And should you slip up yourself and take one for the team, you'll have the oddly disturbing out-of-body experience of watching a SWAT member with your name sewn into his back slump to the ground.

To be sure, SWAT 3 has room for improvement. I'd like to be able to order specific officers to take specific positions. The manual leaves out, or consigns to the pre-mission "Gear" screen, some fundamental details, and I wound up figuring out how to clear out restrained suspects on my own. Troopers who supposedly pick the locks on doors usually don't come anywhere near them. While each has a distinct personal portrait in the squad selection screen, they all look identical through their masks. (Got skins?) Characters occasionally walk through one together, tread on downed suspects and fellow officers and get tangled up with each other in tight places.

And, amazingly, you can't play cops 'n' robbers with your friends. Sierra plans a multiplayer version for spring, but, to me, that's like waiting until the next morning to clean up the previous night's dinner party. By then, the champagne has lost its pop and the food has hardened onto the plates. Do it once, and do it right.

For the most part, Sierra does it right here. SWAT 3 isn't everything it might have been, but it's much more substantial than its predecessors--and essentially right in feel. The third time really was the charm.-- Peter Olafson / GamePro