Rushing headlong into a mission without a plan is a surefire way to wind up dead. Our strategies combine the tactics covered previously to ensure you enter every battle prepared.
Reveal and Retreat
There’s nothing worse than charging forward only to find yourself surrounded. Avoid this scenario with a strategy called “reveal and retreat.” Most missions aren’t timed, so there’s no cause to hurry. Take your time. Advance until you see the enemy. If you’re spotted and attacked, pull back to an area you’ve already cleared. Find cover or a defensive position and engage the enemy as they come to you. As you advance, keep an eye out for good spots where you can fall back. Check the Map View screen along the way, and take care not to back yourself into a corner. If you’ve got nowhere to go, and especially if the enemy has grenades, you’re in trouble.
Stealth Tactics
While you have ample firepower at your disposal, you’d be wise to take advantage of opportunities to practice stealth tactics, for several reasons. First, as soon as the shooting starts, all the enemies in the area are going to come after you. Going in guns blazing means you have to deal with all of them at once. But if you can quietly take out even a few beforehand one at a time, you have fewer problems to tackle by the time the alarm gets raised.
Stealth tactics are also ideal for recon. The more you can learn about what you’re going up against, the better your chances. Look for ducts you can use to move around an area. Find good firing positions from which you can engage the enemy without exposing yourself to unnecessary risks. Once you know what you’re facing, plan ahead. Go after the biggest threats first, before you lose the element of surprise.
The reasoning behind stealth tactics is all perfectly solid, but enacting these tactics effectively can be tricky. For starters, crouch and stay low. The longer you can avoid detection, the more opportunity you have to scout out an area and eliminate enemies. While moving in a crouched stance, use a hatchet for stealth takedowns. This saves ammo and efficiently neutralizes threats. Throw hatchets at needed; just make sure you hit. If you miss, the enemy will be alerted to your presence. Eventually you can upgrade some of your weapons with Silencers, enabling you to shoot enemies while remaining quiet and unnoticed.
Kill the Kommandants
When you enter a new area, check for white Alert icons at the top of your screen. This is your indication that Kommandants are nearby. Each Kommandant gets an icon, and the number inside the icon represents the distance between you and the corresponding Kommandant. If a Kommandant becomes alerted to your presence, he calls for reinforcements. That means more enemies to deal with. Therefore, whenever possible, kill the Kommandants first. Kommandants are rarely the closest enemies to you, so use stealth tactics to get in near enough for a stealth takedown, a hatchet throw, or a silenced shot to the head. When you’re up against multiple Kommandants, your job gets doubly complicated—you need to kill each Kommandant without alerting those remaining. Once all Kommandants are eliminated, you don’t need to worry about reinforcements arriving if other enemies notice you.
Ammo Conservation
Use the ammo you find on the corpses of your enemies. Your weapon options in any given situation are determined less by your personal preference and more by what ammunition you can find. Grab ammunition off any dead bodies you encounter, and search areas for ammo pickups. Don’t waste ammo. Fire in short, controlled bursts and stop when your targets fall to the ground and drop their weapons. Always go for headshots. If this isn’t possible, aim for the chest area. Keep your weapon loaded to its maximum clip capacity. When you switch weapons, remember that putting the weapon away does not automatically reload the clip. Avoid reloading mid-battle or while exploring an unknown area. Make it a habit to reload whenever you have free time in a safe area, or while behind cover.
Explore
When you get stuck, consider: Have you explored the level thoroughly? Have you neutralized all enemies? Maybe you missed a switch or button. Check the Map View screen. Exploring an area removes the fog of war, so study the map for spots you may have missed. Remember also to check your objectives—they usually appear on the map to help guide you where you need to go.
Save Early and Often
Saving is crucial. After so much work, it would be a shame to lose your progress: items found, upgrades achieved, enemies defeated. Save and Quick Save are invaluable when going up against powerful enemies and bosses. A well-placed save can be the difference between picking up close to where you died, and having to play through a giant chunk of the game all over again to reach that same point. Heading into battle? Save first. Worried an enemy might spot you during your stealth maneuvers and catch you off guard? Save. Entering a tricky part of a level that could take several attempts to figure out? Save. Been a while since you last saved? Better do it now. Remember, there’s no such thing as saving too often.
Conversely, if you’re looking to up the stakes with a bigger challenge, try saving only at the start of a level—or not at all—and powering through the game with no additional saves.
Experiment
Don’t be afraid to experiment. Save at the start of an area, then try out different tactics and weapons. Test how many hatchet blows or shots from various firearms it takes to kill a certain enemy type. Throw grenades into rooms full of enemies and see what happens. Search for Kommandants. Eliminate enemies in various sequences to discover what works best for you—different tactics complement different playstyles. As you experiment, develop your own tactics into strategies best suited to your strengths and preferences.