Cruise and James, about to kick ass.
SWAT Police is a 2001 arcade Run-and-Gun game published by Korean company ESD made via MAME, and a homage to older arcade shooters... right up to "borrowing" the backgrounds from them.
Like many arcade shooters before it, SWAT Police follows an Excuse Plot, where this time the players are a pair of elite SWAT operatives, Cruise and James - apparently the only members available on their team - and they're up against a terrorist syndicate whose ranks include assorted machines and robots.
Not to be confused with ESWAT, who sometimes goes by SWAT Police.
SWAT police contain examples of:
- Boss-Only Level: The final stage simply consists of the Final Boss.
- Bottomless Magazines: Your default weapon is an MP5 Machine gun that fires unlimited rounds, and doesn't even need to be reloaded.
- Bullet Hell: In the later levels, when the game starts dispending swarms of mooks at you as well as sending robots who can rapid-fire their bullets all over the place.
- Fire-Breathing Weapon: This game has a flamethrower weapon, though unlike other shooters it's depicted as a weapon that shoots fireballs as projectiles. Unfortunate mooks immediately becomes a human pyre upon being hit, and it deals decent damage on robots and bosses too.
- Guns Akimbo: Used by some of the enemies. There's a human mook clad in black who uses two handguns at once, and a robot enemy with two Arm Cannons firing simultaneously.
- Hopping Machine: One of the less-recurring robot enemies is a four-legged Spider Tank who prefers hopping around instead of walking.
- Job Title: Well, your player characters are members of an elite SWAT unit.
- Lightning Gun: One of the best power-ups, which sends a charged bolt of electricity into the air where you stand before landing on an intended target. It can also travel in a Chain Lightning pattern hitting multiple targets and effortlessly clearing a whole screen's worth of enemies within seconds.
- Macross Missile Massacre: The game's rocket launcher gives you a generous default ammo count of 40, all which you can fire at rapid pace at enemies onscreen. It can even be boosted to between 60 or 80 rounds by picking up space cahces, which the game's pretty generous with. There's also the Homing Missiles which functions the same, but smaller, faster, and with the added ability to home in on enemies.
- Mecha-Mooks: Several robot-based enemies will show up during the game to attack you, alongside the human mobsters. From human-sized robot mooks to mechanical tanks and hovering Attack Drones.
- Rewarding Vandalism: You may be a SWAT officer taking on the mob, but that doesn't mean you can't damage some public facilities around the city. You can in fact shoot up windows and walls, storefronts, dumpsters, passing cars, destroy all sorts of public property and ruin the displays in the art museum stage, and the game award you points for doing so.
- Retraux: It's a shooter game played from a behind-the-back perspective, in the vein of Cabal and Blood Bros and made for arcade machines... released in 2001. There couldn't possibly be a demand for games like these back then, but here goes.
- Spider Tank:
- There are small, four-legged mechanical tanks which moves by hopping while taking potshots on you.
- The boss of the art museum stage is a huge spider-like tank, with twin pincers and a Cyber Cyclops-style single blue visor for it's head.
- Stuff Blowing Up: Once you get the rockets, you can expect plenty of explosions all over the place, which the game's pretty generous about. Defeated robot mooks also explodes upon being defeated.
- A Winner Is You: Your reward for beating the game is a simple "Congratulations" screen with your two protagonists.
