[h1]Just think of this game as a rotten McDonalds cheeseburger that you accidentally left behind your couch to find it again decades later.[/h1]
Police Quest SWAT is a mix between classic point-and-click adventure and interactive movie. You take the roll as a new rookie member of the famous LAPD Unit to complete three increasingly tactical missions. The game could be fun, but the problem is that the gameplay is super random and frustrating with zero accessability. It's simple in principle though: Just like in a classic point-and-click adventure, you move from area to area, use your equipment in the proper ways and give orders to your squad mates. In reality however, what ruins the game is that all your steps and commands need to be in a very specific order with absolutely no tolerance for mistakes. Even if you just slighty deviate from the exact order of things the game wants you to do, you or your team mates will be shot. It's basically pure Trial-and-Error and nothing else at all. This thing feels like it was already super-outdated and messed up in late 1995 and if you are looking for an actual tactical simulation, you couldn't be more wrong here.
As mentioned, the game has only three missions (with a couple of minutes inbetween, where you can waste your time on the shooting range or watch some interviews with actual SWAT members while you wait for the next mission to start). If you know exactly what to do, the whole game can be completed in 2 hours, but even with a (in my opinion absolutely obligatory) walkthrough it took me more than six hours to finish it because of the clumsy controls, snail-paced gameplay and generally random and unpredictable nature of the game.
Now I'm not saying that it's a completely worthless game, because actually there is some entertainment value due to the absolutely cheesy acting (that's where the McDonalds cheeseburger comparison comes in) and early 90's nostalgia feel, and believe it or not, the game has absolutely zero compatibility issues and runs perfectly fine on modern machines without any patches or fixes whatsoever. It even has a tiny bit of replay value in trying to figure out different solutions for the missions. But I shall be struck by lightning if I dare to recommend this game to anybody else than nostalgia freaks who already mastered this game back in '95. Just skip this and go straight to SWAT 3 from 1999, now that's an awesome SWAT game and the sole reason why I wanted to try this in the first place.
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POLICE QUEST SWAT
Genre: Adventure / Interactive movie
Release: Q4 1995
( ) 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.
(X) 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.
( ) 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.
