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For a minute, let’s talk about games in terms of movies. Most first-person shooters are a bit like a Michael Bay film. Your hero might be vulnerable, but he’s stronger, faster, and can shoot straighter than the competition. Violence is a spectacle, a gunfight an excuse for slow-mo heroics and feats of derring-do. Each big set-piece flows smoothly on to the next. Every location has its own pop video glamour.

For SWAT4, you should think less of Michael Bay, and more of Michael Mann. Mann’s gunfights – the bungled bank job in Heat, the nightclub assassination in Collateral – are full of sudden, deadly shocks. Bullets fly wild. They wound, incapacitate or kill without prejudice or warning. A split second’s hesitation - or just being in the wrong place in the wrong fraction of a second - is all that separates the living from the dead. In all the noise and confusion, only those who keep their head together will keep their head intact.

In other words, this is one of the few games around where violence isn’t a cheap solution. For those unfamiliar with SWAT, the game puts you in charge of two two-man SWAT teams, with you, the commander, issuing orders on the fly while taking a direct role in the proceedings. Your unit is sent to a variety of locations – ranging from suburban houses to dingy night-clubs to glamorous corporate HQs – with the emphasis on capturing suspects, filing evidence, rescuing civilians and following correct police procedure.

This in turn means that, on anything above the easy difficulty level, the “one many army” approach is not going to net you great results. For one thing, taking a single gunshot can weaken you significantly, while two or three will incapacitate or kill you. For another, shooting more than one suspect without due warning will instantly earn you enough penalty points to fail the mission.

That doesn’t just go for you, but for your men too, which makes your tactical input just as vital as your shooting skills. SWAT4’s genius is in the way it integrates both aspects so brilliantly from within a single interface. Aim your crosshair at a door knob and a default ‘open and clear’ command appears. Press the space-bar and it’s issued. Right click and hold, and its replaced by a context-sensitive command menu, where you can pick from other options, usually involving a more dramatic entrance aided by flash grenade, stun grenade or tear gas. For additional strategic scope, you can split your squad into two two-man teams, commanding or taking direct control through a special pop-up viewport. You can even make use of snipers stationed from a controlling viewpoint outside the crime scene. It works brilliantly, keeping you in real-time all the time, and ratcheting up the tension until you can’t take anymore.

Remember Halo, with its thirty seconds of fun, over and over again? Well, SWAT4 does pretty much the same trick. You cluster your men around a door, then send them into action, hoping and praying that they won’t blunder straight into an ambush. You lead or follow in after, screaming at suspects to drop their weapons, sweating over whether it’s time to open fire before the frantic perp can aim their gun. Careless moves or slow reactions can put you or your men on the ground. Once the suspects are down or surrendered, it’s time to restrain them and any civilians (you can’t trust anyone, after all), while gathering evidence and reporting back to base. Then it’s on to the next door, or maybe the stairs, or maybe the next narrow corridor. Once the level is cleared of hostages and perps, and all primary objectives have been met, it’s on to the debrief screen. If you’ve failed to obey police procedure, this is where you’ll find out that you’ve failed.

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