Video Game / Intravenous

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Intravenous is a series of top-down Stealth Based Games (think Hotline Miami meets Splinter Cell) from Explosive Squat Games, published by Hype Train Digital. The series describes itself as "a love-letter to tactical stealth action".

• Intravenous: (July 2021) The first game follows a man named Steve Robbins who loses his brother Charles to drug addicts in a mugging gone deadly: cue Roaring Rampage of Revenge as Steve becomes a Vigilante Man with the support of a Mysterious Backer. A remaster of the campaign is available as a DLC for the second game.
• Mercenarism: (January 2024) A very short playable interlude between 1 and its sequel, following the story of an amoral mercenary named Gideon. Mostly serves as a prequel for 2, and sets up Gideon as The Dragon for 2's main villain.
• Intravenous 2: (August 2024) The second major title follows a down-on-his-luck hired killer named Sean who tries to be a Hitman with a Heart, only going after truly 'evil' individuals, in order to pay for medical treatment his father needs - but this gets his father kidnapped when a job goes wrong, and Sean ends up teaming up with Steve (who has found he cannot return to a normal life) to find the man responsible and end everything once and for all.
• Intravenous 3: (TBD) The third and currently unreleased title that promises a continuation of Sean and Steve's adventures as they are now the target of a massive and relentless manhunt.

This series provides examples of:

• Achievement Mockery: You can get achievements for getting killed by your own grenade shrapnel, overcooking grenades until they blow up in your hands, and getting knocked out by a guard kicking a door open.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Several missions have air vents you can crawl through to get past guards and/or locked doors. They can also make passable hiding spots in a pinch, but be careful, as you can't do anything after exiting them until you're done with the standing-up animation - which might leave you in a tight spot.
• Ambiguous Time Period: Mission times are only ever given as date and time, no day, month, or year is specified. The existence of cryptocurrency as money pickups and weapons like the Kriss Vector (2010+) suggest it's quite contemporary, but the overall feel is a little more dated and nostalgic at times.
• Artificial Brilliance: Guards are usually smart enough not to charge into what their AI thinks is a killzone, and will typically try to outflank you or wait you out. On certain levels they'll even hide in corners whilst covering particular doorways, so that if you rush through carelessly they can shoot you in the back. This is especially dangerous if you kill the lights to a building using the breakers, as certain guard sprites can be almost invisible in the dark even if you have your goggles active. Higher level guards will also tend to move in groups rather than let themselves get picked off one by one.
• Artificial Stupidity: Aside from the usual gameplay conceits of a stealth-based game (guards wandering off alone, etc.), you can easily manipulate the AI.
  • Make a lot of noise in one area of the map to draw most of the guards there, then use that distraction to get your actual objective done.
  • The guards will never secure the area, even though they saw you flee to a windowless room with only one door, with the only other exit being a vent shaft, whichs exit they also have under control. Nor, for that matter, will they just loose a grenade into the shaft, even if they know you have to be in there.
  • They will investigate the noise caused by throwing a gas grenade, walking into the gas cloud and breathing it in in the process. Then another guard comes along, spots the unconsious guards and rushes to check on them, right into the gas cloud. Then a pair of guards come along... This is also possible at a distance, with a silenced weapon, using bodies as bait to attract more soon-to-be-bodies.
  • If guards watching the cameras spot you they will actually drop their post and go personally to investigate/take you out, leaving their cameras unattended and safe to wander next to.
• Assassins Are Always Betrayed: Steve, in 1. The "Accomplice", who supplied him and set him up to take out the first gang? Secretly the leader of another gang. He exploited Steve's anger, used Steve to take out his competition, and then tried to tie up that "loose end". Unfortunately for him, Steve is something of a survivor.
• Assassin Outclassin': Shortly after dealing with the "Baker" in 1, a gang of mercenaries pay Steve a visit. It doesn't end well for them. When the dust settles, one of the mercs turns on his employers out of spite, giving Steve some useful information and tells Steve to take his phone. If you killed all of the mercs (which is the easier way to tackle this mission, as you do not get to pick any of your gear; you start with a basic unmodded pistol and that's it) then the merc will be the last survivor with a nasty gut and spine wound combo, and requests a Mercy Kill. This leads to Steve raiding the headquarters of Empathetic, an assassin contractor, to learn who placed the hit. Considering Steve just murdered/stealthed his way through an army of heavily armed goons to get into his office, Empathetic politely complies and points him towards the Mole.
• Asshole Victim: In no short supply here, especially since Sean makes a point of only targeting assholes (unless he gets tricked, of course).
• Bad Guy Bar: Empathetic's headquarters is a bar/diner frequented by mercenaries and hitmen, as it maintains a list of contracts and acts as a sort of middle-man for the services of its usual customers.
• Back Stab:
  • Attacking an unaware enemy, whether with a gun or a melee weapon, will result in a One-Hit Kill. This quirk is particularly important when using the VP9, as its slow rate of fire makes it so that you don't get a second shot before the alarm is raised.
  • Approaching a guard from behind gives you the option to perform a Choke Hold or, if you have a throwing knife, slit their throat.
• The Bait: After running into a dead end in pursuit of the Baker, Steve gets the idea to use himself as bait so that the Baker will send a hit squad, allowing Steve to interrogate a Mook for the drug kingpin's location (if you kill them all, Steve instead finds a phone with Baker's address). Taking on the small army of goons forms the level "Abandoned Complex".
• Blinded by the Light: Flashbang grenades will blind anyone looking at them (even you!) when they go off; affected enemies will stagger around and fire blindly, making it much easier to sweep in and take them all down whilst they're disorientated.
• Blood Knight: Steve makes it quite clear to Sean that he very much enjoys putting scumbags six feet under. He doesn't tolerate Sean killing civilians or cops, though.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Any gun chambered in .45 ACP - it's plentiful in that enemies often carry weapons using it, it does pretty good damage, and it's naturally subsonic, meaning suppressed weapons using it are some of the quietest you can get short of a few very special weapons like the VP9.
  • Holstering your weapons and using your bare hands to quietly take down enemies. Punches are faster than a Pistol Whip or chokehold, and can be easily spammed using primary fire rather than the dedicated melee key; allowing you to feasibly take out closely-grouped enemies in relative quiet if you rush them before they get a shot off.
  • The humble combat knife is the workhorse of a stealthy-but-lethal playthrough. It's silent and fast like bare-handed melee above, but can also be thrown to silently kill at a distance or as a distraction.
• Bulletproof Vest: You have a choice between kevlar, a ceramic plate, or both; kevlar offers the least protection but the best speed and stealth and overall durability, whilst the ceramic plate will absorb a greater proportion of damage at the cost of breaking sooner and being a bit heavier and noisier. If you take both, you are even slower and even louder than with just the plate, but the kevlar will remain after the plate breaks, and you get an extra magazine for your guns.
• Bullet Time: In Mercenarism and 2, Gideon and Sean can use stims to get a few seconds of bullet time on-demand. Steve instead automatically has it kick in when he's severely outnumbered, representing his combat experience.
• City Noir: The games take place in an unnamed, but clearly very crappy, American city. Corruption and crime seem to be pretty rampant, and there's a thriving underground business in hitmen and mercenaries. The game's atmosphere and entire colour palette are pretty noir too, being mostly desaturated, lots of shades of brown and grey, and it's frequently raining.
• Chekhov's Skill: In Intravenous, Steve is introduced at a firing range with his brother, establishing his familiarity with guns. So, when the pair are mugged and Steve's brother dies of his injuries, Steve is prepared to arm himself and embark on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Choke Hold: Approaching an enemy from behind gives you the option to strangle them. While slower than a Tap on the Head, it ensures that the enemy leaves no blood trail and the sound of a falling body won't attract attention on higher difficulties.
• Chromosome Casting: Apart from Steve's date (who doesn't even get a proper dialogue portrait) the cast is entirely male.
• Closet Shuffle: You can use closets to hide from enemies. Like air vents these have a bit of a lengthy animation for entering/exiting so they're not a great way to escape pursuit, but they can be handy in a pinch.
• Commonality Connection: The Accomplice is secretive about his motives, but admits that he lost someone to the gangs, giving him some common ground with Steve. It's all a lie; the Accomplice is actually a crime lord himself, manipulating Steve with a vague sob story similar to his own.
• Concussion Frags: Averted; frag grenades realistically explode into fragments that pepper their surroundings; they're as fast and deadly as regular bullets, so you'll want to take cover after throwing them. The first game even has an achievement for getting killed by shrapnel from your own grenade, titled "Illusion of Safety".
• Corrupt Politician: The main villain of 2 turns out to be a major politician who's been using hitmen and dirty tactics like Blackmail to remove his competition from the playing field. When you finally confront him, he has the nerve to say that you (and everyone else) should be thankful he's the one with the job, because otherwise who knows what kind of absolute scumbag might have his job instead?
• Critical Existence Failure: While normally played straight, the second game introduced a difficulty option (enabled on the True difficulty) that makes you slow down if your health is low. To counteract this, medkits and painkillers (the latter only available with the option turned on) will apply an effect that allows you to ignore this penalty, as indicated by the purple portion of the health bar.
• Crouch and Prone: The slowest movement stance shows you as moving in a sort of half-crouch. You can also crawl, which lets you use low obstacles to avoid detection, such as crawling under a window to get past without being spotted by the guard looking out of it. You also automatically crawl when using air vents. Crawling is slow though, and you can't shoot or do much of anything whilst prone - you have to spend time getting up, which has a fairly slow animation.
• Cutting Off the Branches: A piece of dialogue in 2 implies that Steve canonically spared the Baker in 1. Steve and Sean still working together in 3 also makes the good ending of 2 canon.
• Dead Man's Chest: Maps sometimes have dumpsters you can use to hide bodies. You can also grab trash out of them if you need something to make a noise with.
• Dirty Cop: The police chief in 2, Theo, is in on the main villain's racket, and is part of how said villain is able to deal with so many of his competitors so easily. Just drum up some charges and plant some evidence, boom, done.
• The Dragon: Amoral mercenary Gideon and his posse serve as a major thorn in Sean's side during the events of the second game. One side-mission sees you heading to Gideon's private mansion in order to deal with him before the final confrontation, with the implication that if you don't he'll show up as an enemy in said final missions. That said, aside from using an Ace Custom assault rifle, Gideon isn't much different from any of the other mooks you blow through and goes down pretty fast if you get the drop on him.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In the first game, there's no Gun Accessories or money to spend; no Skill Scores and Perks; no Bullet Time; no smoke or fire; and no civilians or day-night variants to levels. Enemies also lack status indicators beyond a quick flash above their heads when suspicious, making it difficult to determine who has a radio without trial and error. The purpose of IV1 Remaster for Intravenous II is to update the first game's levels to match the standard of the sequels.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: A softer version, in that the game politely tells you that Easy mode might be so easy that it just isn't a fun challenge, though there's also the fact that you can't carry over gear to higher difficulties when playing on New Game Plus. The first game plays it straight, however, with the achievement "Games Journalist" for finishing the story on Easy.
• Electricity Knocks You Out: Being hit with the electric discharge of a broken circuit breaker or a taser dart will cause the enemy to stand in place for a few seconds, then pass out.
• Emergency Weapon: You can use your fists to fight, but they're hard to use in a game where every enemy has a gun. They're more useful while sneaking around, as they faster to use than the Quick Melee attack, allowing you to easily KO enemies before they raise the alarm.
• EMP: You start with an EMP "pistol" that can be used to silently and temporarily disable lights to create darkness and disable cameras at a distance, making it easier for you to sneak around. This is especially important for cameras, as destroying a camera will alert the camera operator (if present) and anyone in the guard room, causing them to immediately investigate, but if you just use your EMP gadget on the camera then they brush it off and don't seem to care. You can also buy a version that emits a radial pulse centered on your location. These tools have infinite uses, but the tradeoff is that they recharge based on your movement, so if you're very slow or stationary it takes them longer to recharge.
• Enemy Mine: A couple of examples;
  • In 1, if you spare the "Baker", he gets in touch with you after the assassination attempt, and bankrolls your crusade against the (initially unknown) perpetrator thereof. This is useful as it lets you keep your black market access and use custom loadouts for the final missions, which you otherwise lose access to without the support of the Accomplice and the Baker. This is, of course, because the Accomplice is the one who tried to have you killed.
  • In 2, Sean briefly works with one of the bad guy's underlings because said underling was scorned and, out of spite, has tipped Sean off to where said bad guy keeps a stash of guns and money. Cue Sean heading out to blow it all up. Unfortunately, this gets Sean captured by Gideon at the end of the mission, but then Sean ends up sharing a cell (well, store-room) with the aforementioned underling, who also tells Sean where his father is being held.
• Escort Mission: A couple of missions in 2 see you escorting defenseless friendly characters out of hazardous areas. In particular, one mission has you, as Steve, rescuing a bruised and beaten Sean after he was kidnapped. There are also a couple of instances where you get to fight alongside Steve as Sean, but in these cases Steve is quite capable of fighting and it's more just a case of telling him to wait/follow if you don't want him blowing holes in bad guys prematurely.
• Explosive Instrumentation: Breaker boxes hit by stray bullets will arc to nearby characters, stunning them. This includes you, so watch where you stand during a gunfight.
• Friendly Fireproof: Averted - enemies aren't invulnerable to their own bullets, and with some trickery you can make your foes shoot each other. Works the other way too - in 2 on missions where you're accompanied by a friendly ally you may end up shooting him if you're not careful, or he can shoot you if you're in his line of fire.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Generally pretty competent, and moreso the higher you ratchet the difficulty. On the lowest, guards are pretty stupid, but will still avoid some obvious pitfalls (they can see laser sights, they generally won't rush in to attack you if they think they know where you are, they'll notice dropped guns, etc.) and on higher ones they're more alert, more responsive, and will check in on each other more often. They still make some of the really obvious mistakes though, such as investigating weird sounds or unexpectedly open doors by themselves, ignoring minor camera malfunctions, and so on - if only as a concession so that the games aren't nigh impossible to complete.
• Gun Accessories: Introduced in the second game is the ability to customize guns. The accessory slots (with each gun missing at least one) include the barrel, muzzle attachment, underbarrel rail, fore-end, sight, magazine well, recoil spring, magazine, magazine well, trigger group, stock, grip, and trigger. You can also choose to start what type of ammo to start with.
• Gun Porn: One of the main features is collecting guns, then tooling them out with all sorts of Gun Accessories and ammo types. You can even go onto the Steam Workshop and get Game Mods to add more guns and gun accessories.
• Hand Cannon: You can find and use the Desert Eagle, a massively powerful handcannon of a pistol. It's let down by low capacity and few enemies using it though, so ammo is in short supply. The IV2 Supporter Pack unlocks a .44 Revolver as well, which has similar issues.
• Heroism Won't Pay the Bills: The Medical Bills, specifically, as it turns out. Sean's father is slowly going blind, and Sean secretly turned to hitman work to scrape up the money to pay for surgeries to try to stop it from getting worse. But it's been getting hard for Sean, as only going after the worst society has to offer tends not to pay very well. Steve also says something to this effect, when offering to train Sean for a very reasonable fee.
• Hitman with a Heart: Sean refuses to go after targets who are in some way innocent or otherwise relatively clean, preferring to only target those who are corrupt, violent, or otherwise generally pretty bad people by most standards. Steve is a darker shade of grey but still nominally heroic, as he refuses to target civilians and other innocents, and if you kill civilians or honest (if disguised) cops during certain missions whilst playing as Sean your Trust level with Steve will drop.
• Hollywood Darkness: Outdoor areas are dark enough for the player to be unseen at a distance, but not completely dark, so care should still be taken when moving near guards. Complete darkness is only found indoors after you've killed the lights.
• Hollywood Silencer: Not here. Guns can be quite loud even when fitted with a suppressor, so unless you're using one of the few ultra-quiet weapons you still have to be careful about when, where, and who you shoot, lest you be heard through a wall. You can get subsonic ammo for a lot of guns but it can only do so much; if you want to be silent, you need to use inherently quiet guns (or better yet, silent tools).
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Eating pizza or other foods will heal you for a (very) small amount, implying this is in effect.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Easy, Normal, Hard, True (the intended difficulty), Throwback, and Custom. These alter how much damage you take (and sometimes, deal), how many stims and saves you get per level, enemy reaction times, armour effectiveness, enemy behaviours, and other stats. Notably, Throwback straight up states that it is an homage to the gameplay of 90s and 00s stealth shooters, is not in line with the game's design, and is thus not recommended for your first playthrough.
• I Have Your Wife: The inciting event of Intravenous II. After Sean refuses to complete a hit after realizing that his target isn't the human trafficking scumbag he was led to believe, the Big Bad kidnaps his father and threatens to kill him unless he continues doing their dirty work, at one point threatening to send a Finger in the Mail for every job Sean fails to complete.
• I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: Early in "Druggie Slums", the second level of Intravenous, you'll come across a trio of thugs, with one bragging about his new pistol. After carelessly waving it around, he shoots one of his buddies, prompting him and the third member to scatter in a panic.
• Infinite Flashlight: Night-Vision Goggles are part of your kit regardless of your other choices for the mission, and they never run out of battery. Mooks meanwhile sometimes have flashlights attached to two-handed guns that never seem to run out as they patrol.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The AS VAL, unlocked in a side mission near the end of 2 after a tipoff from your local friendly Gunsmith, is a near-perfectly-silent assault rifle with excellent performance. It is not necessary for the finale missions, but is pretty helpful given they're all in tight quarters in a game where sound can and will travel through walls. It is somewhat let down by the fact it uses the rare 9x39 ammo (which you can't find in missions, as no enemies carry the gun on the default gameplay settings) so you only get what you start with; use that ammo carefully.
• Insecurity Camera: Cameras will alert the map the very moment the player crosses into their vision, but their short field of view is marked by a bright spotlight, and they can't see the player if they pass directly beneath them.
• Instant Sedation: The tranquilizer rifle will KO the target within a few seconds.
• It's Probably Nothing: Guards will briefly investigate certain distractions before resuming their idle patrol, which can be exploited to set up takedowns. This includes thrown items, light switches turned off, and even flipped circuit breakers. Using an EMP to short out lights and cameras just elicits a complaint about the building's crappy electrical grid or cheap bulbs. However, there are some things that will set them off immediately, like the sight of blood or a door left open.
• Jacob Marley Warning: Steve, to Sean, especially if you have high Trust; Steve doesn't want to see the younger, idealistic man become anything like himself, and does everything he can to steer Sean away from becoming a monster. If your Trust gets too low and/or you kill enough civilians, Steve puts a bullet in Sean at the end of the campaign.
• Karma Meter: What the Trust level effectively serves as in 2. Getting it high enough and sparing all three targets gets you the best ending. Letting it get low enough and/or killing too many civilians gets you the worst ending.
• Kill the Lights: Turning off light switches or fuseboxes plunges rooms or entire buildings into darkness, allowing the player to move unseen in the pitch black (provided the bad guys don't have flashlights). Mooks will try to turn the lights back on by seeking the relevant switch or fusebox, which can be exploited to lure patrolling guards into ambushes. You can also shoot out individual lights (since not all lights are connected to a convenient switch), or use an EMP device to temporarily short out lights around you.
• Knockout Gas: Sleep gas grenades, which create a very large and fairly long-lasting cloud that will quickly send anyone to sleep. As the description notes, they'll knock you out too, so be careful where you throw them. The Multilauncher can also fire sleep gas ampoules.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Empathetic accepts a contract on Steve and sends his hitmen to attack his house, but when Steve survives and shows up in his lair demanding to know who placed the hit, Empathetic calmly relents and points Steve towards the Mole, who knows the identity of the Big Bad. Though, he still has two of his mooks come in from Behind the Black to train their guns on Steve, so that the angry vigilante will play nice in turn.
• Land Mine Goes "Click!": You can get "motion mines" (that look suspiciously like claymore mines) as a lethal trap option. As the name implies, they are motion sensitive, so be careful not to set off your own mines!
• Laser Sight: In conventional and infrared flavours. Unlike many other examples of this trope enemies can see and will react to regular laser sights, which can be a blessing and a curse. If you don't want them to do that, you can instead fit infrared lasers which are only visible when you have active night-vision goggles, which no enemies have. The tradeoff is that you can't see an infrared laser or benefit from its stat bonuses if your goggles are turned off.
• Master of Unlocking: Sean and Steve can pick their way through pretty much any locked door, except certain special keycard-only doors (though some of those can still just be kicked open). The catch is that picking locks takes time, which may leave you open to being spotted by guards or cameras. You can also break locks (which takes about half the time) whilst picking them, but this is also noisy.
• Mercy Rewarded: You have several opportunities throughout the series to spare your targets, which can prove to have good outcomes later in the story:
  • If you choose to spare the Baker (the single opportunity to spare a target in the first game) he makes good on his debt to Steve. When Steve is on the run and unable to contact the Accomplice, the Baker answers his call for help and becomes his new benefactor, preserving access to weapon loadouts in the game's third act.
• Mission Control: You have no fixed 'mission control', but a few different characters do occasionally chime in during certain missions - particularly Steve during some of Sean's later missions in the second game. The closest person you have to a fixed mission control is probably Lee Da, who feeds you a lot of useful information in-between missions in 2.
• More Dakka: The IV2 Supporter Pack nets you access to the iconic P90 and ultra-high-RPM Kriss Vector, for all of your rapid-fire needs. In the assault rifle category you can also get the FAMAS, likewise known for its high rate of fire.
• Multiple Endings: 2 has a few;
  • Downer Ending: Kill at least one of the three targets you have a choice to spare. Steve quietly walks away after killing the corrupt politician.
  • Golden Ending: Spare all targets when given the choice, and do enough side missions and talk to Steve enough to raise his Trust to 100%. Sean's father is rescued, and Sean and Steve spend a while in the final office just talking things over; Sean eventually convinces Steve that maybe there is another chance for him to settle down and return to the civilian life, and Steve agrees to try, conceding that it's what his brother would want.
  • Bad Ending: Kill 10 or more civilians or have less than 30% Trust. Overrides the other endings. Steve kills Sean. Automatically not the canon ending given the premise of 3. This also requires doing none or very few of the side missions (as each gives +10% Trust) and killing multiple civilians in any of the maps that have civilians (each civilian wounded/killed is -4% Trust), so you have to be pretty intentional about it.
  • Worst Ending: Kill all three targets you have a choice to spare. Sean survives, but remains in the politician's building as the police close in, lost to despair and likely to face the death sentence or life in prison.
• Mysterious Backer: Shortly after beginning his crusade against crime, Steve is contacted by a wealthy man calling himself the Accomplice, who offers resources, information and a safehouse. Accomplice is eventually revealed to be a crime lord himself, using Steve to eliminate his rivals in the drug trade.
• Neck Snap: The lethal takedown option if you sneak up to an enemy from behind. If you prefer nonlethal you can choke them out instead.
• New Game Plus: Once you've beaten a campaign, you can start it over with all the stuff you've already unlocked for that campaign, letting you use certain weapons more than you might have otherwise. Notably this only carries over for the same difficulty, so you can't unlock the AS VAL and all of its accessories on the easiest difficulty, then use it to breeze through a harder difficulty; you'll have to earn those bragging rights!
• Night-Vision Goggles: Default gear for both Steve and Sean, and very useful given many missions take place at night and/or have lights that can be broken to reduce enemy visibility. You can also get infrared laser sights that are only effective (and visible) when you have your night vision goggles turned on. Steve doesn't get the goggles in his very first mission though, as he doesn't have the Accomplice backing him at that time.
• No-Gear Level:
  • In Intravenous:
    • The first level, "Druggie Ghetto", gives the player nothing but an unsilenced pistol to start with. Loadouts aren't available until the second level, provided by the Accomplice who contacts Steve after his first mission turns up empty-handed.
    • "Steve's House" takes place during a home invasion with a half-dozen goons. With no opportunity to choose a loadout, the player is forced to quickly arm themselves with weapons found around the property, or grab one off a mook.
    • If you choose to kill the Baker, the entire third act of the game from "Steve's House" onward has to be completed without loadouts, since Steve has gone into hiding and no longer has a wealthy benefactor to supply him with gear. To compensate, the final few levels have lots of weapons and ammo to find.
• One Bullet Clips:
  • In full force in 1. There's no (micro)management of bullets and magazines, though you do drop an empty magazine if you reload when empty.
  • Averted in 2 with the default settings. When you reload whatever remained in the clip goes away - however you can actually pick it up from the ground, adding the lost ammo back to your pool.
• One-Hit Kill: In almost all cases, any kind of strike on an unaware enemy is an instant kill or knockout regardless of the weapon used. There are a couple of elite enemy types that might survive a single pistol shot at long range even if unalerted, but they're relatively rare.
• "Open!" Says Me: In the event that just shooting out the lock is too passé for your tastes, you can go all the way and blast some doors into kindling. This tends to take several shots from an assault rifle or shotgun, and is rather hard to do with a pistol or submachinegun.
• Optional Stealth: You can sneak around and silently take out guards, but there's no penalty for coming into the level armed to the teeth and blasting your way through, besides the difficulty of fighting so many enemies head-on.
• Pacifist Run: You're free to choose non-lethal means to subdue Mooks, such as tranquilizer darts, stun guns and your bare fists. Each game has achievements for completing every level bloodlessly (besides when the game forces you to kill).
• Permanently Missable Content: There are special guns that you can't buy outright; instead you have to find them and exfiltrate from the mission area whilst carrying those guns in order to unlock them. On the plus side, this unlocks those items for free (so it's also a good way to pick up normal guns you want for cheap). Probably the biggest example is the AS VAL in 2, which can only be unlocked by doing its side-mission right before the final missions; if you skip it, you have to play through the campaign again to get it.
• Price on Their Head: After crippling the Baker's crime ring, Steve finds himself under attack in his own home, and learns from one of the assassins that somebody went to Empathetic and placed a ten million dollar hit on him.
• Real-Time Weapon Change: You can have two weapons and three support items at a time. However, there is a momentary delay between selecting a different item and it being readied in the character's hands, which makes the player vulnerable if they're changing weapons to react to an enemy.
• Regenerating Health: If you have armor, part of your health will regenerate after taking damage, as indicated by a yellow portion on your health bar; this can be disabled as a custom difficulty feature and is also disabled on Throwback difficulty. You can also heal using bandages and medkits (but only up to a certain point; if you take too much damage, you can't use them to recover).
• Remaster: A DLC for the second game allows you to play the first game in its version of the engine, which means all of the improvements and features - some of which were meant to be in the first game but got cut due to time or budget constraints.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge:
  • In the first game, Steve embarks on one against the Degenerate, the junkie gang leader who killed his brother, before expanding the scope of his revenge to hunting distributors of the drug trade.
  • After he learns the Accomplice had been manipulating him from the beginning (and had placed a hit on him when he outlived his usefulness), Steve wastes no time in heading to his base and going on a rampage. The objective of the final level is simply "kill everyone": Every non-lethal attack is made lethal, and Steve will start roaring threats at the mooks once he's been detected.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Both the player and enemies are very fragile, and a Bulletproof Vest only provides enough damage reduction to shrug off a few extra hits. This can be cemented by playing on the Harder Than Hard difficulty, which makes it so that the player character and their enemies both die in one hit from any attack.
• Run, Don't Walk: There are no less than five standard movement speed options, ranging from full run to crouch-walking, cycled between using the mousewheel (and you can hold Shift to run regardless of current stance). The faster you go, the more noise you make. Your gun will also sway more, so shooting whilst running is pretty inaccurate.
• Score Screen: After each mission you get a breakdown of how you did; shots fired, shots hit, accuracy rate, damage taken, enemies KO'd / killed / alerted, times seen, and so on. You also get placed on a graph showing your stealthiness vs carelessness, and given a score/title such as "Commando", "Bloodthirsty", or "Panther".
• Shoot Everything That Moves: A couple of missions in 1 and side-jobs in 2 boil give you the objective "eliminate all enemies" and provide a counter of targets remaining. The game makes it pretty unambiguous that these are all terrible people like human traffickers and the like, at least.
• Shoot Out the Lock: Don't have time to pick the lock and don't care about stealth? Just aim at the handle and blast it open! Shotguns are good for this. Other guns can do it too, but something like a pistol or SMG will require several bullets to do it.
• Silliness Switch: There are a few mutators available in the second game, some of them useful, some of them funny, some of them chaotic. Two mutually exclusive ones give all guards Hand Cannons or Sawed Off Shotguns. One set changes whether it's always raining, never raining, or if it's a 50-50 chance of rain on any given level. Two mutually exclusive ones make enemies explode like frag grenades or flashbangs on death (hell of a way to encourage nonlethal playthroughs!), and there's one that makes it so bullets always ricochet.
• Slashed Throat: If you have a throwing knife in your inventory, approaching a guard from behind gives you the option to slit their throat.
• Soft Glass: Not here! If you melee-strike windows with your bare hands in order to break them, you'll take a small amount of damage - it's better to use a weapon.
• So Much for Stealth: Guards react extremely quickly to disturbances. While they won't think much of thrown distraction or a light being turned off beyond a brief investigation, they'll become alert immediately if they hear a loud noise, see a Trail of Blood, or just see a door left open. They'll stay alert indefinitely, searching the area and notifying any guards they meet to join the hunt. A gunshot will bring dozens of mooks within hearing range rushing to the rough position of the disturbance before they fan out, which can swiftly put the whole map on alert.
• Spanner in the Works: Steve, in 1. His revenge-rampage has the gangs in fits of paranoia, and this is a big problem for the undercover cops who were trying to bring those gangs down legally. Steve ends up having to save an undercover cop from one of the gangs in order to get information on who put out the hit on him.
• Starter Villain: The first three missions of Intravenous are spent hunting for the Degenerate, the leader of the Gangbangers responsible for murdering Steve's brother in a mugging. After that, Steve shifts his Roaring Rampage of Revenge to the people responsible for the drug trade, whose operations are much better fortified.
• Static Stun Gun: Tasers work this way, causing targets to shudder uncontrollably for a few seconds then drop unconscious. Short ranged and slow to fire, but quiet and good for nonlethal takedowns.
• Stealth-Based Game: The games are heavily stealth-based, though they can be played aggressively if you wish - you have plenty of tools to even the odds in your favour, such as combat stims, grenades, mines, and more. You can also do the classic Metal Gear trick of throwing empty weapon magazines to create noise in order to distract guards or lure them away from their patrol routes or sentry locations, and have other stealth tools like noisemakers and the aforementioned EMP gadgets.
• Stupid Crooks: One mission in 1 opens with 3 thugs showing up at Steve's apartment to try and collect the hit recently on him. If you wait long enough, they'll start arguing; the leader with the shotgun will kill the guy with the pistol, then the guy with the SMG will kill the leader, leaving a single, very fearful enemy to sneak up on. Amusingly, the objective to take out the three thugs will update as they shoot each-other.
• Suspicious Ski Mask: Steve wears a classic ski mask to conceal his identity from the thugs he goes after. Sean, meanwhile, wears a slightly more plain neckwarmer that only covers up the lower half of his face.
• Tae Kwon Door: You (and enemies) can kick open closed doors. Time this well and you can knock enemies out, or at least stun them for a few seconds.
• Tap on the Head: Hitting someone with a weapon or your bare hands a couple of times is enough to leave them out cold for the rest of the mission (unless their friends find them). The same thing will happen if you shoot them with a shotgun loaded with beanbag shells.
• Taunt Button: The series includes microphone integration, which serves as a way to lure guards to your position, or briefly confuse them by speaking nonsense.
• Telepathic Sprinklers: From Intravenous II onward, smoke indoors (from smoke grenades or fires) can trigger a building's sprinkler system, alerting everyone inside the building as they get drenched.
• Throwing the Distraction: Bottles, stones, soda cans, empty magazines, and straight up noisemakers can all be used to create noises (noisemakers in particular are remotely triggered, so you can throw them into a particular location and then create a noise on-demand). You can also throw things at light switches to turn lights off at a distance - or just throw them at the light itself to break it.
• Top-Down View: The camera is situated in an overhead view, with a rather limited range of vision to keep you on your toes and discourage blindly advancing into unfamiliar territory.
• Tracking Device: Part way through 2, Steve has Sean swallow a tracking bug. This comes in handy several missions later, when Sean gets KO'd and kidnapped by Gideon at the end of a mission - cue Steve launching a one man rescue mission.
• Trail of Blood: Killing a guard will leave spatters of blood on the ground that other guards will become alerted by when they see it, and if you move the body it'll create a trail that those guards may possibly follow. If you need to remove a patrolling goon discretely but permanently, stun them, then move the body and Neck Snap them at the destination. Just don't forget to pick up and hide their dropped weapon too.
• Tranquillizer Dart: A long-range alternative to tasers, the tranq rifle does pretty much what it says on the tin. Ammo is rare, but it's a pretty stealthy nonlethal option at least. It takes a bit longer for enemies to fall asleep after being hit compared to the stun time of the taser though.
• Treacherous Quest Giver: The Accomplice is eventually revealed be a crime boss using Steve to take out his rivals in the drug trade. After the Baker's business is dismantled, the Accomplice puts a hit on Steve to clean up loose ends.
• Trick Bomb: One of your possible gadgets is a remotely-triggered 'taser mine' that zaps anyone nearby. What makes them extra weird (and useful) is that guards will pick them up, so if their patrol route causes them to congregate with a bunch of other guards, you can wait for them to all bunch up and take them all out at once.
• Trick Bullet: The ammo system lets you use a variety of different ammo types - mostly regular, subsonic (lower velocity, lower damage, less noise), and match (more accurate) for regular firearms. Shotguns can get a bit wilder, with things like baton rounds. And then there's the multilauncher, an airgun that can only fire trick bullets; baton rounds, sleep gas, and so on.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Not here. Every weapon used by enemies can be picked up and used against them, which is downright essential if you go in prepared for stealth and are suddenly trying to fight using slow-firing stealth weapons, or on larger maps where you have to eliminate a lot of enemies. If you knock an enemy out you can take their gun and unload it, or even hide it somewhere else. This is helpful since unconscious enemies will be woken up by other guards, and one mutator makes it so they'll wake up of their own accord after a while; in either case they'll try to arm themselves as soon as they can. Also important in the final mission(s) in 1, where you have no Black Market access and thus have to rely entirely on what you can take from the enemy or find laying around.
• Variable Mix: The soundtrack switches based on whether you're quietly stealthing through, the guards have been alerted and begun a search, or you've started an open firefight.
• Villains Want Mercy:
  • The Degenerate begs for mercy when Steve finally finds him, profusely apologizing for killing his brother once he realizes who Steve is.
  • Downplayed with the Baker. He would like to have mercy so that he can have an excuse to get out of organized crime, but he understands that Steve isn't likely to let him go, so the Baker makes a polite offer for his life and faces his potential end with dignity.
  • The Accomplice begs in terror once cornered, offering to let Steve have his wealth and the combination to his safe. Even when Steve lets him have some last words, he just goes right back to offering money before Steve silences him in disgust.
• Visibility Meter: You have one for light level and one for sound generation. It's good to keep an eye on your visibility level, as unalerted guards can actually walk straight past you without spotting you if you're stood in a dark corner.
• You Lose at Zero Trust: Not 'lose' per se, but you do get the Bad Ending in 2 if your Trust level is too low and/or you kill too many civilians. Given the premise of 3, it's the noncanon ending as well.