Doe posted...
How do they handle lethality options? iirc in the unmodded SWAT 4 the Less Lethal Shotgun is kinda busted.
Does this game have the stuff like putting the mirror under the door to check for hostiles?
From what I've seen, there are two pepper guns (assault rifles) and one beanbag shotgun. There's supposed to be a taser somewhere but it's not in the pistol options and I haven't looked to see if it's in equipment (literally just thought of that lmao).
The mechanics feel a little wonky. I have been penalized once for unauthorized use of force, and I don't know if it's because I peppered someone with a gun before shouting at them or if the pepper randomly hit a civilian. Pepper pellets don't seem effective 100% of the time - you'll hit a suspect and they'll blink and then just go back to shooting at you. And I've noticed that sometimes there's a gas effect (blurry vision) when you walk to where a pellet exploded but sometimes not...
It does seem that you need to go non-lethal for attaining a maximum rating of S, though. Did a "perfect" run with regular weapons on the first mission, had to kill a couple suspects, and still only got an A+.
Yes it has the mirror wand, and wedges for blocking doors and sting grenades and breaching shotguns and C2 charges. Those mechanics feel very much the same as SWAT. The only thing I don't think it has is being able to take control of subteams through the tactical cameras. You *can* queue up simple commands (like, have one team queued up to shotgun and flash a room and queue up the second team to open a door and sting the room and they enter at the same time). But this feels very limited, I liked in SWAT 4 that you could just continue clearing room after room with one team when necessary.
A couple other random thoughts:
There's a dumb glitch where my mouse buttons just stop working at random... So I can't ADS or issue commands, neither of which are ideal obviously. The function resumes after a couple seconds but I don't know why it happens.
There are some cool randomized encounters. For instance, the second level is about clearing some condominiums. The first time I played it, there was a random woman in a living room and a guy with a gun in the kitchen right nearby. A later time I played it she was alone in the apartment. Then another time he had actually taken her hostage... and I only had lethal weapons so I ended up accidentally killing both of them...
The subtitles are trash. Like you'll tell guys to jam a door ("door jam it") and the caption will say "George J it". Or if they mirror a door and see no contacts, the captions say "no context" lol. Or you tell them to the mirror the door and the caption says "Merit". I don't understand that, it's not like there's a lot of dialogue that needed captioning...
There are no cool pre-mission briefing sequences like in SWAT 4. You choose your mission from the planning room, then you can look at the details and objectives on a tablet.
Finally, there's a little bit to the police station that's kinda cool I guess... it doesn't feel 100% necessary. But as you collect evidence from missions it goes into the evidence room, and the briefing room updates based on the mission you've selected.