The first Intravenous is an overlooked masterpiece, I only wish I had found it sooner. Once I did, it wasn’t long before I bought and had to pick-up my jaw off the floor with how intricate and detailed it was in and around its stealth. Playing the first game just blew my mind, it was everything I wanted a stealth game to be, and more. Developer Explosive Squat Games admittedly draws inspiration from “Splinter Cell, Dishonored, Deus Ex, Insurgency, and ArmA“. That’s a wide swath of games from stealth to immersive sims to military sims, and you know what? It absolutely works, every part of it. The sequel is the first game, cranked up to eleven, and offers everything a sequel should be. Intravenous 2 is deep and rewarding, and in order to satiate yourself you’ll wish you could inject it straight into your veins it’s so good.
While the story of now both games have never been very strong, the motivating factor Intravenous 2 is far more interesting. The first game’s story was one of convenience (for the developer), whereas now this is a story of desperation (for the main character). You play as Sean, a hitman for hire who gets caught up in with the wrong people, and they take his dad. The ransom is him killing everyone they demand, and his dad goes free – that’s immediately more immersive. Along the way you’ll come across Steve, the protagonist from the first game. How they interact and join forces holds its own mysteries. The game seems to have branching paths, so there are multiple endings to attain.
The first thing I noticed in the sequel, is that the easiest difficulty no longer disables achievements. I think one of the barriers to enjoy Intravenous has been fixed. I did find it weird that you don’t get a tutorial on things until nearly halfway through the game. There are pop-ups up until this point that teach you things, but the game really stops you to teach you basic mechanics a couple of hours in. By and large, this is more Intravenous, but with many improvements made around its level design, though there are still invisible walls keeping you from sidestepping large chunks of a level. This time around, it really feels like you have much more agency in how you go about a mission. With there being two protagonists, you now have more flexibility in experimenting with different playstyles. Instead of just night, you can optionally enter missions in daylight, and have to rely on “social stealth” to navigate through a level. There’s iterations all-around that cement its existence.
Sean has the “hitman” trait, which allows him to slow down everything around you. Similarly Steve, who has the “commando” trait is able to react faster, but only when surrounded by multiple enemies. This is a game where you’ll be more successful utilizing stealth, but going loud and pure action is viable. If you choose stealthy approaches, this will significantly increase the amount of time you’ll spend on any given level. There’s no map, though you get a minimal HUD that tells you how much sound you’re making, and how illuminated you are. Everything else requires your eyes and ears to determine. The game takes the Thief approach, where different surfaces result in different sounds. So you will be quiet on carpets and rugs, but make noise when walking over concrete. Five states of movement will determine your noisiness: crouch, slow walk, fast walk, jog, and sprint. With five difficulty modes to choose from, you can scale the experience to your liking. The “True” difficulty (second hardest) makes it so enemies will detect if someone’s missing from their patrol, and begin to investigate it. This can often have a domino effect of suspicion and people continually going missing. If you want to mix ‘n’ match, you can setup a custom difficulty to make the game more to your preference.
The enemy AI is really smart, and it’s great to mess or manipulate them. Like the above difficulty, if lights that were on, are off they will go turn them back on. Did you leave a door open? Well that will get them to look around, I just love how sensitive an enemy’s ears are. I flushed a toilet and was able to get a guard’s attention, and take him out as a result. This is a stealth game, but there’s some realism applied here. Guns can be equipped with suppressors, but that doesn’t mean everything is silent. The shot will still be heard, and will prompt an investigation of the area where it was heard. Additionally, suppressed weapons don’t hit as hard, so you’ll have to be close to your target to ensure a one-hit kill. You can shoot out lights, but that too carries a sound that won’t go unnoticed. You can mess with enemies by using the circuit breaker to cut off lights, and either use this to take enemies out one-by-one, or you can use it to shroud yourself and walk around with your night vision goggles equipped. To evade or otherwise bypass areas without having to walk through hallways constantly, you can crawl through vents. You can set off fire alarms that kick on sprinklers or give you noise cover to shoot out lights or break locks. Fire propagation is new to the sequel, and it can be devastating. If you lay prone, enemies are less likely to see you. But if you climb a chain link fence, they’re more likely to hear you. There’s a logic and reason for everything, and it’s so intuitive.
There’s a really nice sense of progression this time. You earn “learning capacity”, a type of experience that you can use to invest into Sean to either make him a silent stalker or a loud liquidator. There are three categories with their own sub-levels. Combat lets you invest in long guns, short guns, and hand-to-hand combat. Reload offers improvements to reloading of long guns, short guns, and miscellaneous guns. Lastly, Physical is for increasing your resilience, load bearing, and covert operations. You’ll see what points are available, and how much it takes to invest in any given area. Based on how you want to play, it’s easy to know what you should be investing in.
You’ll get access to the hideout, a return location from the first game. It’s here where Steve and Sean can talk, and advance Sean’s skills. It’s also a place where Sean can talk to Steve and develop trust, which reduces costs of improving Sean’s abilities. This is a place to take a break between missions, but you can also use cash earned to upgrade your weapons with suppressors, new stocks, quick triggers, optics, grips, and more. Gun upgrades are essential in making them more effective and useful, and you feel the power increase as a result.
You’ll now have more opportunity to explore levels. Doing so is very much worth it, you’ll pickup intel that will help the story (and its endings). There’s also cash that can be taken, and this will help fund your desire to upgrade your guns. You’ll have to be careful on levels, depending on time of day, there will be lives at stake. Sometimes innocents will be roaming a level, and you’ll have to be careful, or risk being punished for killing non-targets. The music is also great at telling you what the state of awareness of enemies is, and will smoothly transition to communicate it.
Explosive Squat Games is updating the game regularly. Since the game’s release, it has received twenty updates, ranging in size and scope of what it did. These updates are almost always bug fixes, but it’s in a constant state of responding to reports from the community. Regardless of that, it’s always in a new state of polish, and boy is it shiny.
With all of the new mechanics that Intravenous 2 has, it certainly makes going back to the first game hard to do. If this game interests you, I’d recommend playing the first game first. Once you play the second game, it’s nigh impossible to go back. The first game could be completed in around five hours. The sequel offers a campaign that takes twice as long to complete. There are fourteen main missions, and side missions to partake in. Once you’ve completed the campaign, New Game+ is where you can go back to prior levels to experience them again, experiment with new things, or go for missed achievements. This is a game with high replayability and brutality.
Intravenous 2 is a top-down pixel game, so it isn’t demanding, but it looks incredible the whole way through. It’ll also run on just about everything, so there should be nothing to worry about here. Nothing gets lost except between light and shadow, and it’s a gorgeous stealth sandbox.
My PC Specs:
– Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
– Intel Core i9 13900K @ 5.8GHz
– ASUS ROG RYUJIN II 360 ARGB AIO Liquid CPU Cooler
– G.SKILL TRIDENT Z5 6000MHZ 64GB (32×2) DDR5 RAM
– ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4080 16GB GDDR6X
– WD_BLACK SN850X M.2 (4 TB)
– LG UltraGear 34GP950B-G (21:9 Ultrawide @ 3440×1440)
Intravenous 2 is what sequel dreams are made of. If the first game didn’t click with you, the sequel won’t do anything to persuade you otherwise. It’s exquisite top-down stealth, and regardless of the difficulty chose, won’t be an easy game. It requires planning and improvisation in order to get through every level. The developer really cares about the player experience, and has been updated regularly. Intravenous was an evolution of the stealth genre, and Intravenous 2 is a stealth revolution sequel that can’t be overlooked.
A Steam code was provided by the publisher for review purposes
