

The Stetchkov Syndicate is the story of your metropolitan Yankee police department's struggle with a mob of arms dealers. This new single-player expansion campaign, the Stetchkov Syndicate, maintains this capable atmosphere, with all the new scenarios being both entertaining and coherent as part of a larger tale. True gaming brilliance is in the details, and SWAT 4 was full of them. Even the 911 calls, which are of no real concern to the budding Swatistician, are competently acted and lifelike in delivery. Dialogue, briefings, situations - they're all naturalistic and integrated into the muscular corpus of the game. It's a testament to the excellence of breach n' flashbang sim SWAT4's writing that you barely notice how believable and well scripted it is.

These days, though, the standard is rising - developers don't rely on Dull Tony in the programming and fiddliness department to write all the dialogue, and instead they knuckle down in drama class and start to make things a little bit more convincing. Incidental background writing isn't something that games are traditionally very good at.
