the stetchkov syndicate

The third mission in SWAT 4: The Stetchkov Syndicate is a perfectly clear example what the game is all about: decision making under pressure. The mission puts you in charge of defusing a hostage situation involving a group of armed maniacs that stormed an auditorium intent on ridding the world of devil-worshipping rock stars. I had approached the stage from the rear with Blue Team backing me up, only to see that one of the perpetrators had taken a band member by gunpoint. I had Red Team come through another entrance to gas the backstage area, but this had no effect. On a catwalk above the stage, another gunman who spotted the standoff opened fire on me and my team. Blue Team returned the fire, killing him - this startled the man with the hostage. My team and I urged the man to surrender. Clearly aggravated, he turned to what he felt was his only option: he shot his hostage and ran offstage. An innocent dies, and a mission fails. SWAT 4 puts a lot of power in your hands as the player. The control of two fire teams to assist in neutralizing hostiles and the arsenal of high-powered automatic weapons to do it with; the ability to preserve life and the power to take it.

Immediately noticeable in The Stetchkov Syndicate is the more aggressive, and at times unpredictable, AI. Suspects will no longer stay on their knees once they've submitted to a flashbang or gas grenade. They will occasionally pick up their weapons and run away, or worse - open fire in room full of hostages you're trying to protect. This adds a significant amount of weight to the decisions made under fire. Is a suspect apprehended immediately, or do you secure the entire room, running the risk of them escaping only to ambush you and your team later? The behaviour of enemy AI is not random - it is irrational. It makes every mission both challenging and entertaining.

The Stetchkov Syndicate includes a story interspersed in its meager seven additional missions, in an attempt to create some kind of higher purpose to the game. The story is very dilute - the missions are only loosely strung together by the Stetchkov Syndicate, a group that is putting guns in the hands of the small time crooks you'll be facing in the first few missions of the game. Even though the story provides an ultimate goal - putting an end to the gun dealers by sacking their warehouse in the final mission - in the end it didn't matter, because the improvements in gameplay grossly outweigh any slight players may have felt in the first game's seemingly random encounters.

In keeping with the theme of decision making under pressure, the fourth mission drops you and your team into the partially demolished offices of the Department of Agriculture after a group of heavily armed farmers accidentally detonated one of the bombs they were holding the building hostage with. After you've found one of the remaining bombs, a timer begins. You have fifteen minutes to find the rest of the bombs and defuse them, while neutralizing any hostiles and securing innocents along the way. There's no time for the systematic approaches that may have been successful on the preceding levels. This mission was about prioritizing. As the clock unsympathetically expired, I was forced to burst into rooms throwing gas grenades ahead of me, hoping that it might catch any armed suspects off guard. I used a pepper ball gun instead of a lethal weapon to make sure I didn't accidentally kill someone during this hasty room clearing. I felt helpless the first few attempts of the mission, but not to the point of frustration resulting from arbitrarily assigned time limits. There was a singular purpose to this mission, and along with its many distractions provided a genuine test of skill.

The Stetchkov Syndicate also has a series of unlockable equipment that is available after the successful completion of each mission. A new taser is available from the beginning, but you can expect to find a grenade launcher and night vision goggles available by the end of the campaign. Night vision goggles are more of a convenience thing, as flashlights can be used by default - you just run the risk of alerting adversaries to your presence. As devastating as the grenade launcher sounds, it's quite effective at stunning all of the occupants of an enclosed room using a Stinger grenade (an explosive that fragments into a cluster of nonlethal rubber balls). These new additions become invaluable against the game's challenging AI.

Though by far the best addition to the game is the "Hold Command" feature, which is something that makes planning assaults a lot easier than trying to coordinate through each fireteam's viewfinder. Part of Rainbow Six's appeal for me was the ability to plan out an entire mission on a map before execution, and create a series of "go" commands so each fireteam waits before executing key maneuvers. When done right, holding commands in SWAT 4 can lead to impressive looking room-by-room takedowns that look like they were culled from police training videos. And when they result in the live apprehension of suspects and the safety of hostages, there's something strangely satisfying about the whole thing.

After getting used to using the Hold feature in my routine, I noticed a shortcoming about remote command issuing via each fireteam's viewfinder. If you issue a command through the viewfinder (for example, mirroring under a door), you never hear the results unless you are physically standing near the team performing the action. In the face of the game's reverence for realism, having to accept that my fire teams cannot communicate to each other through their radios is absolutely ridiculous.

But what of Massive Incorporated's streaming ads? It's something I completely ignored in my review, but it seems to be the reason SWAT 4 is getting any attention at all, after Sierra's dubious partnership with the company put actual ads into the game world with the version 1.1 patch last summer. Unfortunately, installing the expansion automatically updates the game with this patch, so there's no real way around it. Massive assures gamers that no player-specific information is collected, but I have my doubts about any piece of software that passively contacts a remote server with encrypted data. While Massive's methods are a bit suspect, and Sierra has essentially taken advantage of the players that are supporting this game, I can't say they had an adverse effect on the gameplay itself. The ads make sense in the game environments (they showed up as movie posters, mostly) and they were easily ignored in favour of the immediate tasks at hand. Similar to how banner ads on websites have become commonplace, I'm not sure that this approach will yield the kind of results advertisers are expecting.

For players of the original SWAT 4, this expansion doesn't need a recommendation. The recently released Gold Edition would be an ideal way for those that missed out the first time around to get acquainted with one of the best games released last year. The Stetchkov Syndicate effectively confirms SWAT 4's status as the model upon which tactical shooters should be based. While SWAT 4 may be a policing simulator first and foremost, that shouldn't mean that military tactical shooters can't adopt the same AI behavioral models for both adversarial and team NPCs. Let the tactical shooter return to its implications of logical decision making under fire instead of sophomoric gunplay. Because the power of carrying a gun should also include the responsibility of knowing when to use it.