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Mission 19 - Design & Production Notes
World SWAT Challenge

We had the opportunity to work in conjunction with Maxim magazine to offer a Kuma mission based on the World SWAT Challenge. Because this was a two-day competition involving intricate, multi-faceted events, we had to figure out the best way to translate the experience into an action game while still presenting a similar sense of urgency and the importance of honed tactical skill.

We chose to make you a lone SWAT officer competing again the clock. This gives you a chance to tackle the mission over and over again to improve your mission time. The course starts with the least challenging of all the events and then gets progressively more difficult. You progress from static targets to spinning targets to a combination of both. By the end of the mission, your "targets" are shooting back at you. Even though adding enemies to the SWAT challenge ventures away from the original model, the idea was to "kumafy" the experience a little.

Our favorite event is the grenade toss. This objective is almost as tough to complete as it was to create. Early in development, a thrown grenade would activate both targets. We had to create a special area with two plateaus as a work around.

This level’s timing element is a first for Kuma. At the end of the mission, you’ll be able to see how your time ranks. Part of the testing of this map required figuring out what constituted a good time versus a great time.

Blackwater USA, the facility that hosted the World SWAT Challenge, has more than 6,000 acres of private land. This was well-suited for the kind of side-by-side, live fire competitions SWAT teams were running. We modeled the World SWAT Challenge terrain in the spirit of this outdoor arena. The organic environment gives the map an accurate range feel.

And finally, instead of modeling one specific SWAT uniform, we made your SWAT guy’s outfit an amalgam of several team uniforms from around the world.