S.W.A.T 4 - a game from 2005 and still one of the best games out there

S.W.A.T 4
The only reason i still have a windows parition.

Its been another shit day, want somewere to go were the idiocracy of the outside world goes away.
Have a few laughs, play some good games and remember that life should be enjoyed.
For years my place of sanctuary was swat4.

The offline gameplay on its own is a really good game.
You lead a Swat team on missions to arrest the bad guys, save the hostages and defuse explosives.

The single player missions start off with a quick briefing giving you your objectives, some maps/missions have a choice of entry point,
info on the suspects & civilians, and a time line of events up to the point where your swat team enters the scene.
useful info to read up on before heading over to the equipment tab where you get to outfit yourself and your team with the weapons and equipment you are going to need for the mission ahead.

Single player mode had a good mixture of campaigns to play,

Bringing order to a nightclub were a gang gun fight broke out,
Rescuing a hostage from a silence of the lambs style kidnapping.
Dealing with robberies gone wrong and turned into a hostage situation.
and many more.

But the real gameplay for me was the multiplayer online modes.
where i spent many many hours playing.

Barricaded Suspects:
Nice and simply, kill or arrest has many players from the other team has you can.
Team with most points win
arrest = 5 points, kill = 1 points, and team kill = -3 points

AAR Arrest And Rescue:
The team to arrest all the player from the opposing team wins, or the team with the most point at the end of round time wins.
Once arrested you are pretty much out of the game until one of your team mates rescue you.
But until you are rescued you can still crawl around on your knees, shout for help, block closed doors(if the player on the other side of the door pulled the pin on nade,gas or flash they can not breach the door until they throw it).

VIP Escort:
The Swat team has to safely escort the Vip from the starting point to the extraction point.
The vip is picked by server at random from the swat team.
The suspects need to capture the vip and hold him for 2 minutes and then execute him.
When captured the swat team needs to rescue the vip before he is executed and carry on helping the vip reach the extraction point.
If the swat team kills the vip the suspects win, if the suspects kill vip before capturing him and before two minutes are up swat wins.
Vip drops from game, vip suicide , or the round time runs out = draw
The story line for vip escort? who really cares it's great gameplay.

Rapid Deployment:
Normally between 3 - 5 bombs placed through the map. the Swat team need to find and disable the bombs before time runs out.
Suspects need to protect the bombs till the round time runs out.
If camping is your style of gameplay this was the gamemode to be a suspect on.

Co-op:
This was the same has single player mission mode, with other players taking the place of the AI.
Many server's used to have custom maps and missions, bringing fresh life to the campaigns mode.

and thanks to the great radio chat messages you can communicate with other players without having to use text chat. "TRAILERS" "COPY THAT" "GO GO GO" "DON'T SHOT THE VIP"

There is still a small but strong swat4 community online, in october 2012 Gamespy removed the multiplayer master server, so when you install the game and went to 'JOIN GAME' nothing would show up. But there are servers still running which you can join with 'DIRECT IP'
To find servers checkout. https://swat4stats.com/servers/

While still being one of the best games out there this game made me go off proprietary games.
The swat4 community have done a really good job of keeping this game alive.
They made a patch to fix gamespy removing the master server.
They made really good new maps.

Would be nice is the source of this game could be released and license changed so fans can maintain it now it's pretty much abandoned.
And what really cheesed me off, the makers of swat4 were making a really good zombie game called Division9.
But they never shipped it, and the game was left for dead.