Intruder Beginner’s Guide and Tips

Tips, tricks, basics, and advanced tactics for new Intruder players. Welcome, this is a wonderful stealth sandbox.

Part One

CONTROLS

This is more complicated in appearance than it is in reality — but that’s tactical shooters in a nutshell, isn’t it? Anyway, this is a helpful guide to reference before and during your early matches!

Someone made this image and published it on Steam — whoever it is, I love you, it’s amazing, please message me and I’ll update this with your proper credit.

  • BLUE: Player movement
  • GREEN: Communications and actions
  • YELLOW: Menus
  • RED: Violent delights

IDENTIFYING GUARDS & INTRUDERS

This image is from the tutorial, which is extremely good/short, and you should play it! But this will help remind you of the visual distinctions between both factions — remember the look, so you don’t kill your teammates!

COMMUNICATIONS

Intruder uses proximity chat — be mindful of eavesdropping enemies when chatting! Learn the voices of your teammates so you can identify enemy chatter in the field as well!

Hold C to just speak out loud to people around you.

Press F to hold your radio, left click to use it. Speaking into the radio broadcasts to your team. Enemies can hear you speaking when you use a radio, if they are nearby. Enemies can never hear broadcasts/audio coming through your radio.

You can press the radio to send “buzz” noises to your team. Useful for non-verbal confirmations. Example, someone calls your radio asking for a “life check.” If you don’t want to risk exposing yourself with a verbal confirmation, you can just click your radio to tell your teammate you’re alive out there.

Press TAB to snap your fingers — this brings up a menu of hand actions that you can use with teammates to coordinate. Countdown, listen, point, etc. are all handy if you need to say something but don’t want to speak. Press tab to close it.

(Press tab twice rapidly to snap without stressing about follow up commands)

SNAPPING MAKES A SOUND ONLY YOUR TEAMMATES CAN HEAR. ENEMIES CANNOT HEAR YOU SNAP. You can use this to your advantage — if you hear footsteps outside your room, for example, you can snap as a call/response with allies. If nobody snaps in return, it’s possible the footsteps belong to an enemy!

PLAYING DEAD

Press K to ragdoll. You will fall down, limp. You can use this to play dead, and unsuspecting enemies may walk right by you, allowing you to stand up and go get ‘em. Careful, though — this is a common tactic, so checking bodies (use hands to confirm death/arrest a living opponent; shoot bodies you suspect to be alive if it won’t give you away too much) is extremely common!

USING YOUR HANDS

Press ` (tilde) to use your hands. This will put your weapons away, and allow you to PUSH ENEMIES or BREAK WINDOWS with left click. Clicking on bodies with your hands out tells you who the corpse is if they’re dead. If they are alive…

ARRESTING ENEMIES

Enemies who’ve been knocked over — because they were shot, impact grenaded, c4 explosion’d, pushed — can be ARRESTED. Use your hands on a KO’d enemy to arrest them before they get back on their feet. Arrested enemies cannot be un-arrested; they’re out of the game.

Arrested enemies can still use C to communicate and speak out loud, whether to trash talk you or call for help. There’s no real advantage to leaving an enemy alive, but it’s satisfying to make them suffer. : )

If you get arrested, you’re out of the game. Press Spacebar five times to die if you don’t want to remain arrested.

Using your hands on a corpse will tell you in the game chat window whose body it is/confirming dead status

USEFUL FUN FACTS

  • Doors can be opened in minor increments using your mouse wheel. Use this to peek, especially with your stick camera. Sometimes it’s better to take a good angle really slowly than to go flinging a door open and getting popped instantly.
  • You can climb a lot of the vines in the game to get up to interesting places.
  • Anyone jumping into water will make a splash sound effect. Anyone easing into water will go underwater silently. Press SHIFT to “sprint” underwater — you’ll swim faster.
  • Play the tutorial! It’s bare bones, and therefore SUPER CLEAR and helpful. 10 minutes and you’ll learn basically everything you need to kick ass.
  • If you do special actions — sprint, crawl, jump, etc. — you will deplete your energy. If your energy is low, you will briefly BREATHE HEAVILY, which enemies can hear. Also your aim will be AWFUL as your weapon sprays. Recover your energy by STANDING — crouching/lying down works, but is slower.

USE YOUR STICK CAMERA. It’s an incredible tool to peek corners/gain intel on enemy positions, or camp an area.

If you stand too close to a wall, you’ll lower your weapon. Be mindful of this when approaching/aiming out windows, especially!

Sniper Rifles can be found in certain armory stashes — it almost always requires an unlock code to open the case/room. Explore maps, interact with pieces of paper in the world, and you’ll find lots of little details like this. Sniper codes, alternate escape routes, access to the enemy armory, etc.

Enemies affected by your CS GAS (tear gas) will have their controls completely inverted and their vision extremely blurred. Useful to disorient enemies if you’re making an aggressive play, or discourage them from entering an area.

There is currently no way to mitigate the effect of a CS gas grenade — endure it or leave

Your own tear gas does not affect you.

Holographic sights can be equipped on your Manta SMG as well as the Shotgun.

Part Two

The Intruder’s silenced pistol is extremely quiet. Guards can hear it in an immediate area, but the farther you are the harder it is to tell where the hell you’re getting shot from. That said, getting long-range shots with the pistol is super hard!

  • Press X to change the rate of fire on the Manta SMG.
  • Press X to turn the laser on/off on the Shrike (Guard pistol)

Intruders can see the Guards’ pistol lasers.

Double-clicking any item in your inventory will equip it.

Use the radial wheel

Click on an item in your inventory, then press a number, and it will re-bind that item to that hotkey — but only for the match.

You can re-bind any key, and if you have mouse buttons I strongly recommend using them as secondary inputs for your favorite items or actions (I use it for lockpick and ragdolling lmao)

Grenades and C4 deal damage, but are not murder weapons. They’re used primarily to knock enemies over for easy kills/arrests or to delay/discourage them.

Use your Motion Sensors (7) in combination with remote charges (6) to rig explosive traps. Anyone — including teammates! — who crosses in front of the motion sensor will cause it to audibly blip, alerting the owner that their motion sensor has gone off…then they detonate their C4 to blow up the trespasser (or unlucky teammate)

You can use your stick camera (5) to detonate remote charges using right-click.

Some doors are randomly locked each round — so sometimes they’re unlocked, and sometimes they’re not.

Lockpicks can open locked doors, as well as locked vents.

You can see through vent grates if you’re inside them, but you cannot look into them from outside.

Falling is not always fatal — sometimes you’ll hear a bone crunch, and fall over, but take no damage. That said, be careful. Fall damage can absolutely kill you from certain heights, and I think your energy/balance affects this??)

You can slip and fall down if you run on banana peels or most railings. Careful when going through doors where nobody placed a banana. Be careful when leaping off a mezzanine so that you don’t slip/break your neck!

USE YOUR DECOYS! They’re on the = key, and they look really similar to characters because of the art style. They can be really deceiving! SERIOUSLY YOU’RE GONNA SHOOT DECOYS ALL THE TIME THINKING THEY’RE REAL GUYS.

Decoys can fall over if placed on uneven terrain or are impacted by explosives.

There’s always another way in or out.

Intruders can snatch the briefcase of their allies’ backs. Useful for tricky plays to keep Guards confused. Also useful because you can “hand it over” to allies above you — on ledges, in vents, whatever. Just show them your back, jump, and have them grab it. You’ll hear an SFX when you take/lose the briefcase.

If FRIENDLY FIRE is ON, you can be killed/kill your team. If Friendly Fire is OFF, you will receive REFLECTIVE DAMAGE. i.e. if you deal 25 damage to an ally, you’ll take that damage.

People with lower than 50 HP will bleed, leaving blood decals on the floor behind them. Use this to track weakened enemies.

Riverside, Oceanside, Cliffside, and Mountainside are the only official maps as of this writing

Community maps we play and absolutely love: Zeroside, Phil’s Gas/House/Saloon, Dockpoint, Professional, Japanese Resort, and many more. The community maps are hit-and-miss, but IMO the hits are equal or better to official maps, and people play them a ton

Shotgun shots will ALWAYS knock enemies down.

If you’re knocked down, press Spacebar to stand up again. You need to recover energy to stand, so it might take a sec. Smash that spacebar!!!

I’ve been editing clips of me and my friends being idiots during this game if you want to see it at its most chaotic and hysterical. The playlist is here.

This guide about Intruder was written by MitchyD. You can visit the original publication from this link. If you have any concerns about this guide, please don't hesitate to reach us here.

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