A great tactical shooter, unique in it's premise.
You play, obviously, as a Special Weapons and Tactics officer. While the expansion Stecthkov Syndicate has a storyline running through the game, it's really the stories of the missions themselves that stand out. Amazing presentation helps with this aspect. Briefing screens show you team preparing to go in. Sirens keep it looking interesting, and meanwhile you'll read the briefing and listen to the 9-1-1 calls. The calls are pretty entertaining, usually filled with civilians that are utterly stupid, or completely scared witless. One thing you should learn from them is to make a habit of memorizing the address of whatever you go, as this seems to be the number one thing callers forget.
Anyway, onto the missions themselves. Missions are quite dark and deal with the seedier aspects of life. While they're not as morbid as Hitman Contracts, there are plenty of clearly evil people at work. You'll hunt a serial killer who's been kidnapping girls from a local college. You'll bust drug operations, and deal with a violent cult threatening to blow up the city. The environments are rather damp, and dark, and almost always at night. You'll also be disgusted by some things, and rightfully so, such as all the murdered children of a cultist group. A few missions deal with more misguided individuals, rather than evil, but it's clear that they need to be stopped. Some of the later missions fall apart from implausibility, but overall...
Since you're a police officer and not a soldier, you can't kill everyone you see, they are considered suspects after all. You may only open fire and kill a suspect if he points a weapon at you, another teammate, or any civilian. This creates some tense moments are you charge into a room, screaming for him to get down, and waiting tensely to see if he complies. Unfortunately this also generates one of the game's biggest frustrations. Enemies can't be ridiculously obstinate, and they can laser in on you ridiculously fast. It's common for an enemy to fake surrender, and bam! A millisecond later you're on the ground, a bullet in your brain (oh, he was also facing the completely wrong way). The accuracy of the AI can be irritating at times. This is also noticed by the fact that you're teammate AI isn't always fast enough to react to a non-compliant suspect.
Of course there are some tools to help suspects consider surrender. Besides shooting them in the leg, if you're good you can snipe the weapon out of their hands. If you prefer there are beanbag shotguns, and pepper ball guns which can be used to reduce the enemy's resistance. You can also carry tazers, pepper spray, and various grenades; including CS Gas, and flashbangs, and stingers (frag grenade that is filled with rubber pellets) If all else fails, there is sniper support, though this is usually extremely limited, and will cost you points of unlawful force. (in the expansion, there is also a melee attack that can disarm individuals. If you're quick, you can smack them and scoop up their weapon, rendering them harmless.)
You're team consists of four members, each pair split into a separate team; red team and blue team. The teams can be given a myriad of orders, including various types of room clearings , as well as lock picking, breaching, door wedging, and deploying various types of weaponry against non compliant individuals. There is a quick context sensitive command that can be issued by tapping the spacebar, but otherwise you hold down the RMB and scroll for an option. Releasing the RMB close the menu, and issues the selected order. It's simple and efficient way to control your team. The only gripe, is that until the expansion there was no way to coordinate multiple entries easily. You would have to open a teams helmet camera, press caps lock, give the order, close the helmet cam, and then finally (and quickly) give the other team an order. Whew! The expansion added a delayed order system to make things easier, but it's still rather complicated, and generally unecessary (just wedge the other entries and pop in a CS canister).
At the end of a mission, you'll be scored depending on your unlawful uses of force and lethal force, as well as if you injured a civilian or teammate. On the other spectrum you gain points for successful arrests (rather than killing them, sometimes impossible), being uninjured, and beating the mission without losing any officers. You don't actually lose points for taking out a suspect, assuming he wouldn't comply. On the normal setting the game can be quite challenging, and a lot of times you'll scrap by with the required 50 points. On the hardest setting, elite, you must have 95 out of 100 points. You will fail for killing even a single suspect, losing more than two team members without committing an infraction, or committing any infraction in addition to being injured. I haven't managed to beat Elite yet, but I'm working on it.
The game is powered by the Unreal 2.5 engine (believe it or not, the same engine that powered Irrational's next game: Bioshock). It's not nearly as nice looking as newer unreal titles, but it's still solid. While textures can be washed out, and modeling not quite up to snuff. Lighting and animation is really good. I especially love seeing the police sirens splay over a scene. Overall it's a solid title, that is definitely dated, but still has some life in it.
Sound design is the real standout in SWAT 4. Voice-acting is suburb and sets the tone perfectly. Your teammates crack jokes, and respond to situations which gives them character. Briefings are superbly set with sirens and crackling radios. Environments also are realistic with there own noses and quirks. The best part is when everyone rushes into a room yelling. Hearing yourself and your men yell, while suspects and civilians yell back is tense. Then all of a sudden a gunshot goes of and it gets messy. Music sets some great ambiance per situation, though the action music strays too close to hip-hop for my tastes. If you like the music genre though...
SWAT 4 is worth looking into if your a fan of tactical shooters. Irrational did a great job with this title (when haven't they? Even Tribes Vengeance, their underdog, had a killer story). The rush from trying to arrest suspects never gets old, and the required arrests give things a different pace than, say Rainbow Six. There are problems though. Teammate AI is too slow, and enemy AI too fast. There are some situations when a guy will flat out refuse to drop his weapon, but until he fires it you have no jurisdiction, something I doubt SWAT officers would wait around for. Still with great action, suburb sound, and some solid visuals (make sure you look up a widescreen tweak guide if you have a 16:9 or 16:10 monitor) make it well worth playing.