SWAT: Global Strike Team

Written by Bryan Montford  on November 21, 2003

Full Review: Didn't we just get a first person tactical shooter involving a small elite team trying to save the world from the evils of organized crime/terrorism/bad haircuts?

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Maybe I'm getting crotchety because of all the FPS shooters that seem to be pouring in profuse abundance from every conceivable developer on the planet. Or maybe it was the silly incessant bobbing of your weapon, even when you're crouching and moving slower than a frozen snail. Whatever the cause, SWAT: Global Strike Team fell a little short of my current Уmission objectivesФ. It's not a bad game! But, it's not a great game either.

You are Mathias Kincaid, former member of the US Army's famed Delta Force. You volunteered for GST duty and now command a three-person team of elite specialists. Your two team members and first lieutenants are a skilled sniper named Kana Lee, and Anthony УTJФ Jackson, an excellent field technician.

Two rival gangs fight a bitter turf war. On one side you have the Omega Cartel, a group of wealthy executives intent upon manufacturing and distributing a designer drug called УSpikeФ. On the other side you have the Whispering Dragon Clan, street thugs intent upon securing a large portion of the global market for themselves. The fighting has spilled into the streets of major cities worldwide. And helpless citizens are the hapless victims of the violence wrought by the two warring factions.

So what does it have going for it? Well, it's got a very nice gaming engine with some very advanced lighting techniques being employed. This proves to ultimately be its most saving feature. The game engine is second only to the Voice Recognition system you can optionally use. Voice recognition allows you to give immediate voice commands to teammates, and the ability to shout at enemies, possibly making them easier to subdue. The feature seems to work well enough and proves both novel and useful. (You will have to buy a special USB headset to employ this feature however.)

The weapons are nice, somewhat varied, and pleasantly enough, upgradeable. You have a fair variety and that sometimes helps to break some of the monotony of game. I also found the user interface pretty straightforward. It should present little challenge to master for most gamers. Indeed, the game is nothing if accessible. You can pretty much pick it up and play it, as long as you don't stupidly change the controller settings. I thought maybe the УBeginnerФ controller setting would be good since I was new to the game. My friends and ever-present readers, I'm here to tell you, that was a serious mistake.

So what's so bad? Bad? Well, I don't know about badЕ. How about УuninspiringФ, and Уminimally challengingФ? You've got 21 campaigns with three difficulty levels to traverse if you want to complete this game, so there are quite a few hours to be played. But enemies never run or hide and can always be found in the same places. Once you engage one they will stand and shoot at you until you subdue them, kill them, or get killed by them. So there's not too much to the AI in this game, neither for your teammates nor for the enemies. You often find yourself doing little more than finding a place to happen and then covering your teammates while they do their thing.

You also have the magical capacity to carry never-ending amounts of ammo. Personally I don't mind this in some games, but I have to say it does up the ease factor way into the unbalanced side in favor of the gamer. Said shortly, it makes a lot of it too easy. You simply never have to worry about running out of ammo. If you're big into tactics or strategy, this isn't going to hold your interest long.

My biggest surprise though was the lack of online play. Sure, you can do 4 players. But I hope you have 4 controllers, a big couch, and a bigger TV. I'm blown away by the games that don't include online play still yet. For games like this it's past being a natural choice, and has moved into the realm of necessity. I simply don't buy many games that do not support online play anymore.