SWAT: Global Strike Team

Quick and Dirty : If you are looking to get your aggressions out by slaughtering rooms full of terrorists without consequence, then you might want to look elsewhere. If you are looking for good game play and with a mildly interesting story line, then SWAT is your game.

Gameplay: The controls are easy to get accustomed to, although there were many times when I found myself hitting the X button to fire, when primary fire is R1. Movement is easy to control, with strafe and room look ability. The lack of a jump function is a little disheartening. The ability to use voice commands to order your team is a handy option, and I found myself screaming at the game more than a couple of times.

The story is a little dry, and I found myself skipping over the mission overview and getting back into the game for some of the final of the 21 single player missions. The 10 Co-Op missions are well balanced, requiring team play to complete many of the missions. One twist that I found myself continually forgetting is that you can’t just shoot unsuspecting terrorists. You have to tell them that they are under arrest first by shouting at them to get down. If you don’t, you loose points for ‘Unauthorized Force’. This basically rules out opening a door and rolling a grenade to kill your opponents. Also, you have to restrain everything you don’t kill. If you don’t, you’ll find that they come back to life and roll a live grenade in your direction.

There are many multi-player options, including 3 different deathmatch mode (homocide (total kills), timed, and Last Man Standing), a Bag man (where you get points the longer you carry a briefcase), a capture the flag variant where you have to control all the command points in the map, and a king of the hill variant where you get must stand in various points around the map for 2 minutes. Each one is well planned, but the maps are usually too big or too small for just 4 players.

There are three mode, Rookie, Veteran, and Elite. The Elite mode is not recommended if you are you just learning to play the the game, but it is almost a necessity to keep the final missions tough enough to keep my interest in the game. Once you start under one mode, you can’t change, you have to complete each mission in that mode to move forward.

Graphics and Audio: The game does a pretty good job with the lighting and video effects. There are a couple artifacts between wall joints that caused me to go exploring for terrorists to kill on a number of occasions. By the 19th mission, I finally learned to ignore them. The audio is well done, especially when pumped through a surround sound system.

The Characters: you have three different characters that you have to use throughout the missions. One of which is a sniper. The sniper weapon is an awesome machine, especially since most AI characters in the game don’t move until you shout at them or kill them.

The Gear: You have a full range of cool gadgets available. You have night vision goggles that are (unfortunately) just as useful in the daytime as they are in the pitch black. You also have three different grenades, a gas mask, binoculars, and glow sticks to throw down on the ground so you don’t get lost. You also have 4 different weapons to choose from, a shotgun, a machine gun, an assault rifle (my favorite), and the sniper rifle.
I would recommend the shotgun until you get accustomed to moving around and aiming. As you move through the missions, you receive weapon upgrade points, allowing you to customize and build your weaponry. It is pretty cool that no matter how many rounds you expel in the game, you’ll always be able to get more. Even though you have to reload, you’ll always have a clip handy. This is not true for grenades, though.

Cheats :
For invincibility, press pause while in the game, enter the options screen, then hit : Up, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, L2, R2 and return to the game.

To unlock all missions. Do this while viewing the