Non-Melee Stunning Takedowns

Door Bashing: Although difficult to pull off, door bashes are among the most entertaining methods of taking opponents down. To perform one, you have to wait until an enemy is immediately on the other side of a door from you, then select the Bash Door interaction from the Interact menu. When done while your enemy is properly placed, you'll knock them out instantly. The key things to remember here is that bashing doors makes a lot of noise, and that you'll rarely just happen to stumble across an enemy standing right next to a door; you'll probably have to lure them back to you with noise or whistling, which can be difficult to do with some of the more solid doors.

Now, watch this hit here...watch this hit...BAM!

The best place to do a door bash is in lockers, of which there are usually plenty scattered around the levels. When you spot one, hop inside, and the camera will automatically move to give you a good view on the surrounding area. If you whistle while you’re in the locker, you’ll bring over the nearest guard(s). When they stand directly outside your locker, bash it open to instantly knock them out.

Note that there is a flipside to this coin, and that's that Sam can be the victim of a doorbash himself. If you're on the other side of a door from a guard, and the guard has reason to believe that you're there (either because you attempted to open it and it banged into him or because of overt noise), he'll often choose to bash it open. You can tell when one of these is coming due to the fact that all of the interactions in the door menu will be greyed out, so get out of the way! Getting hit by a doorbash is an instant kill.

Falling: Although awkward and usually impractical, you can also knock out an enemy by falling down onto him from above. This involves either waiting for a soldier to run a route underneath a raised walkway and jumping or falling over the railing onto him, or doing one of the goofy-looking walljumps to get Sam suspended above a hallway and waiting for someone to come along to fall onto. (Walljumps can be automatically performed in a hallway of the correct width by pressing against one of the walls and hitting the jump key.) When you're above an enemy, you can hit the crouch key to drop from your position and cause some severe cranial injuries.

The Hang-And-Grab: If you hang from a pipe and get above an enemy soldier, you will eventually get the Grab Character interaction to pop up. Using it will cause Sam to drop down and suffocate the foe temporarily, causing him to lose consciousness.

(Note that doing this while winching performs a similar action, but it appears that a winching hang-and-grab actually performs a kill, not a stun.)

Ranged Takedowns

When you want to pop a soldier from range without killing him, then you have a few options, most of them revolving around your SC-20k. The sticky shocker, sticky camera, airfoil round, and gas grenade are all great at taking down opponents without invoking Sam's fifth freedom, but you'll need to be cautious when using them, as improper use of these weapons can lead to trouble. All of them are detailed in our weapons section below, but the common thread between them is that you want to be careful to use them only in circumstances where other soldiers won't be able to directly witness the incapacitation of your target.

If, for instance, two soldiers are engaged in a conversation, and you happen to zap one with a sticky shocker, then the other soldier will immediately be alerted to your presence in most instances. He may not know precisely where you are, but he'll come gunning for you if he happened to see a muzzle flash. Likewise, if you zap a soldier that's near a light source, and another soldier happens to have had a line-of-sight to him, then he'll go on alert and possibly sound an alarm. (Non-lethal takedowns are less likely to cause alarms than real kills, though, if it's any consolation.)