General Tips

Every mission that Sam is sent on will pit him against dozens of enemy soldiers. Sometimes you can kill them, sometimes you're restricted to dealing with them in a non-lethal fashion. Some missions also have civilians in them; killing these guys usually results in an instant failure for the mission. This section is just a basic primer on how to deal with guards, whether you intend to kill or disable.

Disabling Soldiers

If you get to this point, you've already screwed up your stealth score for the level.

If you're attempting to get through the game with a minimum of dead bodies left in your wake, then you'll have to either avoid or disable the numerous characters in the game without killing them. The game offers up a bevy of techniques which you can use to do so, however, so you should have a number of options for dealing with any given situation. This isn't meant to be an exhaustive list, mind; there are going to be more situation-specific takedowns based on each level's unique environment.

Note also that the changes in Double Agent’s stealth score ratings generally make the choice between disabling and killing soldiers an aesthetic one at best. The only way to get a perfect stealth score is to avoid the guards without them noticing you and without disabling or killing them. 100% stealth scores were doable in Chaos Theory with disables, but 100% scores in Double Agent are all but impossible for anyone save Splinter Cell experts. That said, on the hardest difficulty level, you’ll probably still have to use disabling moves a fair amount, since you won’t have any ammo for your pistol or rifle.

Melee Takedowns

There are two methods to incapacitate enemies at close range without killing them, both involving the alt-fire attack. The first is simple enough to use; when you get up close to an enemy, just hit your alt-fire and Sam will either punch them in the neck, or knee them in the chest, or send a fist right into their face, depending on the relative positions of he and his target. Of course, if you just attempt to run up to an enemy and hit them, they'll usually either hear you or see you, so you'll need to take care to be stealthy while you make your approach. Shooting out lights and creeping slowly along behind the guards to get into position makes both grabbing them or just punching them a lot easier. Note that the guards in Double Agent appear to be a bit more sensitive to movement and noise, so they’re not going to be as easy to sneak up on as they may have been in the past, at least in our experience.

Also, if you intend to just punch someone's face in without grabbing or interrogating them, you'll probably want to get used to just clicking the button over and over again as you get close to them. You have to be fairly close to actually start the hitting animation; if you click while you're too far away, nothing will happen, but if you don't click until you walk up behind them, you may wind up brushing up against them and alerting them. If you just keep clicking as you approach, you should be able to pull off the move as soon as you get into range. This is easier on the PC than it is on the console versions of the game, though.

Getting behind someone as quietly as possible is the key to disabling them without killing them.

Alternately, you can also attempt to grab and interrogate a soldier before disabling him. Grabbing a character can only be performed when you're immediately behind a soldier, and shows up as an interaction. While a soldier is held, you can perform a disabling action with your alt-fire, perhaps after herding the guard so that his body will fall into a shadowy spot or into a hole in the ground. If you hold down the alt-fire button after disabling the guard, then Sam will automatically pick up his body, allowing you to move it somewhere out-of-the-way.

(Keep in mind that you can injure or kill a guard by accident if you drop their unconscious body from too far of a height. E.g. if you render a foe unconscious, then pick up his body and chuck it off a building, then that'll count as a kill. Less severe heights can count as injuries, which will hurt your post-mission success rating.)

These two maneuvers, and especially the latter, will be your primary form of guard elimination if you intend to play through the game as stealthily as possible. Keep in mind, though, that an unconscious guard can be awoken by another guard if his body happens to be found; you'll always want to move bodies into the deeply shadowed spots, or in obscure spots like bathroom stalls or small rooms to reduce the chances that they'll be stumbled across.

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