Aw hell yeah. SWAT 4, one of my favorite shooters back once more! I still have my old boxed copies but in the past I've had some trouble with getting them to work properly, so for that price I'm willing to buy them a second time for convenience sake.
President Bagel said:
I discovered this earlier and when I checked it out I saw that SWAT 3 had just been put on sale for $2.49. Having been interested in this particular game for awhile, I decided to pick it up. SWAT 4 also sounds fantastic, but the game's AI is legendarily stupid. I watched some of Spoony's Let's Play for SWAT 4 and often found myself laughing at how utterly incompetent your teammates are. Hopefully someone will find a way to improve upon this down the road.
It genuinely isn't as bad as he makes it out to be in those videos, in fact I'd go so far as to say the AI is quite good. Enemies have erratic and unpredictable behavior that ensures even repeated playthrough of the same level never go quite the same, they might open fire at you on sight or give up on a dime, they'll try to fake you out before attacking, and sometimes they'll try to run away only to potentially ambush you later on. Stetchkov Syndicate even gives them the ability to drop their weapons and later, if you didn't secure them or their weapons properly, potentially pick them back up again to try and ambush you. To add even more randomness there are also varying levels of stubbornness. Some enemies will again give up easily while others even when stunned and coughing, unable to fight back, will still stubbornly try to get away in order to recover. It can be vicious sometimes.
Same goes for the allies. The big thing that Spoony kept doing is that HE kept getting in THEIR way. Yes, I know it became a reoccurring joke that he'd yell he wasn't, but he was The AI isn't perfect so when you ask it to do something it will follow procedure to the T, meaning if you interrupt that procedure by say being in their way they'll pester you about it till the procedure is allowed to finish leading to sometimes, as you saw, comical effect. I suspect he started getting in their way on purpose later on for comedy sake, no way he couldn't have figured this out by then. Otherwise however they're extremely competent and strike a great balance between being capable but not godlike. Use your teammates properly and they're leagues better than most companions even in modern shooters.
