Intravenous

Play this game on the 'True' difficulty.
The game makes one thing really clear; all your tacticool, RS6 Siege super edgy 'skills' mean nothing.
It is an unflinchingly vicious, no holds-barred stealth strategy shooter.
Violent only in the way that Hotline Miami is.
As stealth focused as the old Splinter Cell games.
If you think you can burst through doors with an AK and one tap your enemies you won't do well in this game...
Noise is a real REAL thing, suppressors don't make guns silent in real life, and they don't do that here either.
If you leave a door open, enemies will remember it being shut and investigate, if you leave a blood trail, enemies will follow it with guns ready.
Every single enemy is a tough fight unless you're careful, prepared or just straight lucky.
The loadout system is way more in-depth than I expected offering arsenals, armours and gadgets to match all play styles, but there's no 4 weapon carrying, heavy armour wearing, grenade packing stealth game-play. Guns and gear are loud and heavy and alter your interaction with the game world drastically. I prefer the stealth approach and not wanting to make any excess noise I run a knife and a suppressed pistol without armour, this means that my character is a ghost, but one single .45 wound and I'm dead.
Also the story is awesome, there's nothing quite like slaughtering a warehouse full of degenerates in the name of bloody vengeance.
The game will beat you down and make you a better gamer just get it.
It also has a lovely rage purging mechanic, hold down F to activate your mic and scream obscenities to lure your foes to you, or just to add to the rage of battle.
A solid 9/10 so far, will update going forward, well played Roman Glebenkov!

Who says stealth is even necessary? Just play on the hardest mode, blast them with a shotgun, and pray you survive

It's not a simple "huh who's there" and "must've been the wind" crap.
Game gets real aggressive once the enemy gets alerted, and it never leaves.
Also punishes players who try to camp.
Different to hotline maimi but you can feel it when going loud. (And changing the difficulty)
After finishing it. Would buy Intravenous 2.

Very fun stealth game that may seem challenging at first, but you feel like a trained assassin after learning the game mechanics. On the downside, it doesn't have a good soundtrack. It's a shame that if it had something similar to Hotline Miami, it would have been much better.

Hotline Miami like although more about stealth and with less surrealness. Worth every penny if on sale, can't wait to try the second game!

Got this game for free and completed it in a week after realizing it's way better than the expected.
A top down Stealth shooter where you take control of a man driven by revenge after a personal tragedy. A cliche and basic setup for an action game but this one delivers, playing in "true" difficulty mode in which it is the original game vision , the game give you that old school splinter cell style gameplay minus the physical acrobatic, you can tranquilize or taste enemies to prevent lethality if you want to, you can turn off lights (can't shoot them though), shoot at cameras or throwing small objects to distract enemies and move through the levels in shadows.
The main objective on each levels are almost all about killing an npc though, and you can actually just go Rambo style and kills everyone on sight, however it's not that easy to do so because the guns are really lethal and you're outnumbered like 30:1 in the minimum on each level although the AI is not that good but they're aggressive once a gunshot is heard, also that depending on how you position yourself before letting the whole army knows you're there, you could find yourself being rushed from every directions.
There are several guns and tools to use although I reckon there's not much incentive to pick others beyond the 2-4 specific guns/weapons/tools that you need to complete the missions...
Overall as an indie top down Stealth shooter game, I like it that I decided to get the sequel.
On a note as usual for most of my reviews, I'm happy to report that the game has been patched to support 21:9 display aspect ratio despite that it uses pixel arts graphics and that it being a top down game means having ultrawide display mean you could see things farther than what people with normal display could and that it presented distinct advantage to the players (for example I could snipe an enemy from one corner to the other across my monitor where I wouldn't even be able to see that far if I had a normal monitor).
Get the intravenous bundle, you would save money buying both games (and even more so if both games for discounted in a sale) at the same time.

Intravenous is callback to old school stealth game, despite being made by small team the game mechanics are well crafted and surprisingly impressive from sound design, lighting and AI everything in this game is peak quality.
A good example is the lighting system. If you destroy lights, it will start flickering. When I first did this, I thought, "The game is probably too basic to make enemies react to flickering lights." However, it turns out the enemy spotted me under the flickering light, and I got shot.
not just that , the path finding in this game is so good and enemy AI can flank you in multiple position which is rare to see in AAA games.
The game play can be approached purely through stealth (either lethally or non-lethally) or by going in guns blazing both approaches are difficult and challenging and what i love about this game is that you can go panic mode when your stealth run failed.
story wise is meh not the worst nor the best.
however i have something i would like to address if the dev is planning to make Intravenous 3 or something similar :
1-More ambient music
2-better writing and voice acting
3-Mini map
4-diverse environments
5- better title because the word "Intravenous" dose not say anything about the game
finally, i have my messages to the dev , keep the good work i cannot wait to play your next game.