[h1]Police Quest SWAT 2 is proof that you should always give a game a second chance.[/h1]
Another one of those games that I remember seeing at the store as a kid and thinking that I'd buy this immediately if i only had the necessary 20 Deutsche Mark. So here we are 25 years later, and i finally can afford those 6 Euros. Great Success.
While it's predecessor came in the form of an extremely cheesy and frustrating adventure / interactive movie mix, Police Quest SWAT 2 is finally a proper realtime tactics game in the tradition of games like Commandos and Jagged Alliance. As is obvious from the title, you command a SWAT Team through a 15 missions long campaign full of domestic violence situations, bank roberries, hostage takings and psychopaths on a rampage. In a neat twist, there is a second campaign with 15 more missions that lets you play as the bad guys, but the missions in this second campaign are either so ridiculously easy or so ridiculously frustrating that it feels downright broken at times. Many of the missions can be completed in under a minute or two just by taking your squad and immediately running off to the edge of the map (bad guys escaped = win!), others are so cryptic that you'll almost certainly need to look at a walkthrough. It's really nothing more than just a stupid little gimmick. Calling this a game with two fully fleshed out campaigns would be basically false advertising, really.
Now when I first started the game, I thought it really sucked, and that was mainly because of the fiddly and ponderous controls. The UI is actually not that bad and pretty clear if you take a minute to look at all the buttons and internalize what they do, but to develop an adequate understanding of how to actually get your squad to do what you want them to admittedly took me a couple of hours. Additionally, thanks to the extremely outdated visuals, everything is so small and undetailed in this game, which makes it pretty hard to see what's really going on at first. Seriously, if you compare this to the first Commandos, which was released just a couple of months later, Police Quest Swat 2 looks like a bucket full of barf. Unfortunately, the game runs pretty choppy on modern systems, too (not so much that it becomes unplayable, though) and all together the outdated, miniscule visuals, antiquated controls and pretty erratic AI almost made me dismiss SWAT 2 as just one of those games that are simply way too old to still be enjoyable. But boy, after i gained more and more understanding of the controls and mechanics and finally disovered the omnipotent power of the almighty gas grenade launcher, the game made quite a recovery and turned from a initially frustrating mess into a surprisingly easy and increasingly entertaining affair. It's no Commandos Behind Enemy Lines for sure, but in total I had a lot more fun with this than I thought I would during the first two hours. It's all about playing the game until you get it instead of just immediately throwing it to the sharks because it appears horribly ugly and unmanageable at first.
However, even though I managed to pull through until the game somewhat clicked for me, I am perfectly aware that barely a few modern gamers would have the same patience. After all, I'm kind of a SWAT series enthusiast because I really liked SWAT 3 ever since it's realease in 1999 and it's a matter of nostalgia, too, so I can't really recommend this to everybody. Maybe I personally would want to give it a slightly higher rating, but I guess objectively a 4/8 will have to do. Still pretty solid for a 25 years old ugly tactics game that looks like ass and controls like sh*t, though.
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POLICE QUEST SWAT 2
Genre: Realtime tactics
Release: Q2 1998
( ) 0/8 Simply one of the worst games ever made. Don't waste any money on this.
( ) 1/8 Bad. Seriously flawed with barely any redeeming qualities. Worth a couple of Cents at best, if at all.
( ) 2/8 Sub-par. Only for hardcore-fans of respective genre / series. Don't pay more than 5 bucks.
( ) 3/8 Meh-diocre. It‘s okay. Don't pay more than 10 bucks.
(X) 4/8 Decent, but not for everybody. Don't pay more than 15 bucks.
( ) 5/8 Good game, Must-play for genre- / series-fans. Worth 20 to 25 bucks max, if you are not a fan.
( ) 6/8 Great game, universal recommendation. 30 bucks would be a steal for this.
( ) 7/8 Outstanding game, a milestone of it‘s respective genre. Definitely worth its full prize.
( ) 8/8 Simply one of the best games ever made. Get this, the prize doesn't matter.
