When you think of realistic and tactical shooters, you might think of fidelity, high-detail visuals, and big, plausible environments. The grounded, slow-paced military games of today are Arma, Ghost Recon, and, to a greater or lesser extent, Escape From Tarkov and Hell Let Loose. But although it’s low-budget, pixelated, and played entirely from the top down, Intravenous manages to be tougher and more intense than these triple-A spiritual peers. An homage to classic Splinter Cell and Deus Ex games, and also inspired by the epochal Hotline Miami, while Intravenous 2 continues to rake in rave reviews on Steam, developer Explosive Squat has just sneaked out a remaster of the 2021 original.
Visually, Intravenous might appear simple, but this is a tactical shooter and stealth game with as much complexity and replayability as the genre’s most esteemed paragons. Use the shadows to stay out of sight. Find vents, windows, and low-hanging walls to circumvent enemy patrols. Customize your gear, from weapon modifications to different body armor types and gadgets like signal jammers and gas grenades, to best suit the circumstances of your next mission. You can take a few hits, but the guns-blazing approach isn’t always the best. You need to go slow, take out sentries with choke holds, silenced guns, and knife attacks, and only throw down if you get spotted.
Everything in Intravenous feels weighty and rugged. Though Hotline Miami springs immediately to mind when you first load it up, Dennaton’s game is faster, more feverish – you tear through Hotline Miami fuelled by its peerless soundtrack and indifferent to the amount of times you have to restart. Intravenous is much slower. Mechanically and rhythmically, it’s closer to the original Deus Ex, Commandos, or Hitman. To borrow a term from pro wrestling, you need to be elusive, but abusive.
And now Intravenous has been remastered and relaunched. Available as DLC for Intravenous 2, the somewhat confusingly named Intravenous IV 1 Remaster takes the original game and improves it, adding a variety of mechanics that were previously exclusive to the sequel, and redesigning levels to make them more fluid and varied. The soundtrack has been updated, the narrative and cutscenes have been partially rewritten, and essentially everything that Explosive Squat wanted to include in the original Intravenous, but couldn’t, has been retroactively implemented.
“Experience the game where it all began, the way the developer intended the game to be,” Explosive Squat says. “Various new features present in Intravenous 2 were meant to be included in the first game, but were ultimately cut due to time and budget constraints. This campaign port is as much a port as it is ‘Intravenous 1: 2.0,’ keeping the feel of the original, while adapting the game levels to the new gameplay mechanics of the sequel, and bringing a level of polish to the overall package to make it a much better experience all around.”
So, if you liked the first game but maybe struggled with some of its mechanical quirks, or you’re coming to the series for the first time, Intravenous IV 1 Remaster is ideal. You need a copy of Intravenous 2 in order to play it, but after that, it’s available right now for $8.99 / £7.65. Just head right here.
Otherwise, you might like some of the best FPS games, or maybe the best old games, if you long for classic Splinter Cell and Deus Ex.
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