496Andy GarciaSWAT Force puts you in command of a two-man strike team as they take on seven urban crisis situations where the ultimate goal is to save and protect lives. Your squad consists of a sharpshooter and an explosives expert, each with different capabilities that must be used at the appropriate moment. The sharpshooter is a weapons expert and will be the main source of firepower to overtake the enemy. Tools at his disposal are rifles, flash bang grenades and the ability to cause surrender. The explosives expert can detect and defuse traps and bombs, arrest criminals and use the Optic Cable camera to peer into locked rooms. Switching between them with a press of a button, you can take control of either at any time to perform the specialized and necessary tasks. Missions include freeing hostages, capturing terrorists and stopping bomb threats among others. They normally involve infiltrating buildings, traveling from room to room and disarming the threat. They can be somewhat short but if you’re not cautious enough, expect to hit the retry button a couple of times. This is because the game forces you to use all of the tools at your disposal, making the game very tactical in nature. There’s a constant need to swap team members to be successful from point to point. Most games of this nature might tend to complicate the controls because of the many options that are available to your officers. SWAT Force smartly uses an indicator that pops up when a second-tier (not shooting or walking) action must be performed and let’s you access it through a quick scroll of the menu. This makes the game ever so easy to control. If only one of your officers is killed in the line of duty, the mission is a failure and you must restart again. However, there are checkpoints through each mission that will allow you to begin from there. The game also incorporates an awareness gauge that builds when enemies are encountered. If firefights ensue, the meter will build until it is full at which point the mission will also be declared a failure since your squad was detected. The only way to keep this meter from filling is to get the enemies to surrender or using the flash bang grenades to stun and arrest them. I found the game play in SWAT Force to be a more casual version of the hardcore PC game but it still included many of the ideals to make it worthy. The use of two squad members with separate abilities gives a more accurate account on what can transpire in the mission situations and it’s also good to know that you can be rewarded by NOT killing the enemies. I found the control scheme to be very effective for commanding the officers but I was still a little disappointed at the length of the game. Either way, it presents a decent challenge and a solid tactical experience for those looking to do more than aimlessly waving their gun around.