SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle für Windows

I'm seeing a lot of good reviews of this game. I'm a very hardcore gamer, I buy every game just to try it and keep or return them in accordance with what I feel is worth keeping. Let's just say I bought it, tried it, and returned it. Maybe if it was cheaper I might keep it, I think around the $15 dollar range would be nice, but I do not feel it is worth the $44.95 I paid for it. The game looks great, I'll rate the presentation an 8 out of 10, but I'm not one that looks at all that, I like to PLAY. The gameplay was where it failed. They included many features that help it retain the realistic look and feel. The presence of these features assured me when I first started playing it, that it'll meet up to Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear's realism. I got real excited and decided to use one of the features, I pointed past the corner and selected for the teams to clear the area. To my amazement (in the bad way), what I saw was my men sidestepping out one by one just to get shot. The game just started, all my men are dead, or squirming as they are shown in the game, and not one shot was fired by my side. I was kind of pissed, but felt I could complete the mission without them. I was more dumbfounded to step out and see that all my men were killed by one stupid guy sidestepping back and forth grunting something stupid. I took him out, piece of cake, but hoped someone else in my team could have done the same. I gave the command of evacuating each of my downed team members just to watch them disappear magically one by one.
I started screwing around with the environment to see what's interactable, and found that my gun is not powerful enough to break a window in that game, bullets go through, but it never breaks completely. The environment looks great though, the characters are perfectly rounded and not boxy like in some games, shape and joint movement are also accurate. Lighting, like in most other Sierra games, is nicely done.
Looking at the game, I feel it'll be a lot better and more realistic if there were more teams and they can start from two separate areas. Instead, you only have a blue and red team, and starting positions are predetermined and are usually right next to each other.
As with movements, it seems the characters in the game does not react at all to your gunshots until they start to die. One really annoying thing about your partners, is the friendly fire aspect. Most kids, at the first sight of your teammates turning against you when you shoot at them would probably think it is so realistic. This is not the case, at close quarters, friendly fire happens, also, your partners will totally disregard the terrorists and come after you, leaving the terrorists to escape or take out both teams while they are busy coming after you. The real SWAT team will NEVER do this, nor will any other organized group.
The men and women at Sierra seemed to pay attention to the little things that do not really matter, leaving no space for the gameplay enhancing factors. One realistic thing is during reloading, your character throws down the empty magazine before reloading. It's nice to look at and adds a bit of realism to it, but it really serves no purpose. In fact, special forces teams rarely leave any of their equipment behind, empty mags are usually stored on their body.
Don't get me wrong, they worked hard at the game to make it good and enjoyable, and a good job they did, but it seems they missed a couple REALLY important factors to it. The game is almost bug-free, did a good job of ensuring minimal bugs, but other things make playing this game difficult, leaning sticks and you have to press another button to straighten out, sidestepping is kind of slow, and gun reaction time is a bit slow for close-quarters combat. All-in all, give this game a try if you have $44.95 to spare, if you feel that you want to keep this game, be aware that these complications are not noticeable when you first start playing, so I recommend you wait for the price to drop, or buy it used.