Publisher: Sierra
Developer: Sierra
Year: 1995
Platform: DOS; Windows; Mac

Score: 5

With his sophomore attempt, Gates succeeds at creating an effective simulation that takes one facet of police work and mimics it very well.

You play a member of the LAPD SWAT, and you will have your chance at three different scenarios. You must coax an actively psychotic woman out of her barricaded home, rescue a kidnapped man in an abandoned warehouse, and save the president of a local company who is being held hostage by terrorists. Each of these scenarios has variations so that multiple playthroughs require slightly different tactics. Additionally, accessing the final mission requires you to work towards a promotion; you can either be the element leader, directing your fellow team members through the mission, or a sniper, waiting on a roof and ready to act at a moment’s notice.

At the beginning of the game, your element leader is Officer Pacmeyer, an encouraging, friendly supervisor who will help guide you through your training. You must first read through training manuals and watch instructional videos on the dos and don’ts of being on a SWAT team. While this exercise might sound dry, I found it to be compact enough to be informative and entertaining. After this, you will move on to small arms training and combat training; while this feels a bit repetitive, it still succeeds at creating immersion.

Once you’re fully trained, you can go to your first mission, the one with the woman who has barricaded herself. You will be directed to interview a neighbor before Sergeant Rooker calls a briefing to give everyone their instructions. Shots ring out, Rooker yells “The fat’s in the fire!” and your element leader guides you through the scenario.

Full-motion video is used, with actors green-screened and then inserted into static, scanned photographic backgrounds. The action is viewed from a first-person perspective, and the acting, while not Oscar-worthy, is pleasantly engaging and enthusiastic. Once the mission starts, you will need to pay attention to your element leader, who will either use hand signals to direct you where to go or use the LASH (Los Angeles SWAT Headset) system to guide you. It’s more or less a fancy way to talk to your teammates, with a throat microphone picking up vocal-cord vibrations so that whispers can be amplified in your headset while leaving the perps none the wiser.

Unfortunately, it’s this very LASH system that takes what could have been an excellent thrill-ride and turns it into a mostly frustrating curiosity. When you need to talk over the system, you are given a word list to choose from, using verbs and nouns to direct your teammates. However, your wording must be exactly what the game expects. If you say something slightly different, even if any reasonable person would know what you meant, your teammates get confused. At best, your element leader will admonish you. Or he may send you home with a reprimand. At worst, somebody will wind up dead. Oftentimes the dead person will be you. While I don’t mind some trial-and-error, every time you die, a brief video sequence of your funeral plays, with everyone’s favorite bagpipes providing the commentary. Even for those who love finding every way to die (including yours truly), that experience is robbed of its joy thanks to the bagpipes.

You might also misunderstand your element leader’s instruction and turn the wrong way or enter a room at the wrong time. In real life, making such a mistake might have no consequences! But in SWAT, you are never allowed to get lucky. If you make one tiny mistake, the bad guy will automatically appear. But if you do what you’re supposed to do, the bad guy will magically be somewhere else. It was precisely then that I realized that the game was less interested in simulating an unpredictable real-world situation than it was in punishing me for not being a perfect officer.

However, just to prove I’m not a complete sourpuss, I really appreciate that you are allowed to go berserk. You can blatantly disobey orders or discharge your firearm like a disgruntled employee with a vengeance. And everyone around you responds appropriately to the new madman hired by the LAPD.

The music is also a treat, with a professional score that not only has a police procedural vibe but ramps up the tension at just the right moments.

While I was definitely entertained playing SWAT, it becomes frustrating and repetitive pretty quickly. You will be doing a lot of saving, a lot of restoring, and a lot of praying to the universe that you never hear a bagpipe for the rest of your life. That said, I still recommend it for those interested in the subject matter. There’s some genuinely earned tension, and if nothing else, you will learn quite a bit about real-life SWAT tactics.