>>11787381
It's a specific taste of game.
Compare to Doom, Quake, or Half-Life, where you don't really need to know shit about about real life infantry combat tactics or weapon handling (even though a little bit actually does help you in those games), and you actually can just drop into them fairly casually. There's shitloads of hidden depth if you pay lots of attention to these games, but the casual players won't notice them or use them, nor need them for the stock levels.
Compare also to the really serious types of oldschool flightsim games, where you didn't just drop in casually, no, there was nothing fucking casual about those, you had to STUDY the game's manual and set up dozens of binds, probably really invest in a proper flighstick for convenience's sake.
SWAT 4 would fall somewhere around the middle of those ends.
You'd want to be actually a little bit interested in military tactics and history, police procedurals, guns and shooting, etc. Not to a huge extent, mind, as SWAT 4 still takes quite a lot of liberties with guns and police procedural for the sake of gameplay. (There's shit you'd do in that game sometimes which would NOT fly IRL, and probably would lead to litigation and maybe even prison time.)
It's not quite a full blown Autists Only kind of game, it had a wider appeal in its day and audience than that, and its complexity is only moderate, but it takes more topic interest and commitment than average action shooters. That said, on lower difficulties, SWAT 4 is more tolerant of a full blown Robocop approach to suspects (in the shooting on sight sense, not your durability), just don't hit any hostages or bystanders.
