Performance woes
Other touches that have really impressed me are things like the way that you can open a door or window in increments so as to reveal a bit of the room at a time instead of just flinging it open and shouting 'come and get it boys!' Similarly, there is now the option to move fluidly from one position to the next without snapping to a position, which is very useful for slowly peeping over or around an obstacle without bouncing up and finding yourself staring down the barrel of the enemy's gun. This particular manoeuvre is definitely something that requires a bit of co-ordination as you have to hold down the fluid-movement button, while using the mouse to change your stance (up and down-ness), and your leaning position. Now this is fine and all, but while you're doing this you can't rotate, so if you lean out to see round a door and find that the bad guy is in sight but not in your crosshairs, simply moving the mouse in the direction of the bad guy (which is what you'll be used to doing) will cause you to pop your head back behind the obstacle rather than targeting the enemy. Instead, you have to sneak your head round, remember to release the fluid-movement button, then aim the weapon round the door and shoot the bugger. Now this doesn't sound like such a complicated job, but you have to remember that this game trades on tension and with the amount of concentration required pretty much every second of the mission this is occasionally just a little bit of a mental overload. That said, it's still a brilliant system and I can't really use my ham-fisted assaults on the keys as an excuse to criticise it.
The graphics are very detailed, as were the graphics on the other games (certainly for their times), and very smooth with it. For those of you who've not read any of my other reviews (and if not, why not?) I'll state my PC's vital statistics: it's a 1.2GHz Athlon, 320GB RAM, GeForce4 64Mb video card, 512K Sound Blaster card, and I'm running it all under XP Pro with NTFS on my main drive. So not exactly a slouch, but still far from the top-end computers that a lot of games seem to be designed for these days. I'm running the graphics at 1024x768 with 32-bit colour and all of the options except for shadows set to high. With this rig the graphics are pretty bloody impressive, I can tell you, and I'd imagine they'd be really spectacular with a properly powerful set-up. I don't think that I've had a single stutter, jerk, or clipping incident throughout, and I can't remember the last time I could say that. I have to say, though, that the graphics do come across as being somewhat 2D in a bizarre and hard-to-define kind of way, but to be honest that seems to be a trait of this kind of game - for instance the first time I played SWAT3 I thought I'd got the wrong glasses on - but once you get used to the style it's very effective. Also, especially cool on the graphics front are the effects, and there is a pretty impressive range of them. A good example of this (my favourite, in fact) is when you throw a flashbang and it lands too close to you. The result is that the whole screen goes white with really trippy after-images whenever you move. It's totally disorienting and lasts for quite a while, and on top of that all sound is muted except for that high-pitched weeeeeeeeee noise that you get after a really good Metallica concert. There are several effects of this style, and they're all top-notch.