I kept wondering why this game starts you with an item, but then had the other items scattered across the maps. I thought perhaps I was playing in the wrong game mode or something had been removed or never implemented to begin with. But no! You have the ability to drop not only your normal and unique weapons, but your gear as well.

If you feel like you want to be more defensive at first and chose the vest, but then mid game want to switch to having more ammo capacity, you can. No need to change your basic lay out and die to respawn with it. You just drop what you are currently carrying and pick up the new equipment.

You can tell what you are currently carrying by the icon on the bottom left next to your health. You are forced to start with something, but if you drop it or chose the grenade, it will not show. Everything else however will. This is useful if you have the silencer or laser sight for instance, but what ever current weapon you are holding can not take advantage of it, that icon will remind you if you forgot.

(A long leap over a railing to the vending machine area which would otherwise be impossible to get to from the position I am taking the picture from. Also you hurdle over the railing, so there is no slow down. You just launch yourself up and over it to the top of the platform.)

A long jump lets you go twice as far as a normal jump. You can technically do it from a stand still, but the faster you are running, the further you will go. If you run, then crouch and immediately jump, you will perform it. You can do this to get to hard to reach places, that otherwise you would need to traverse down and then over or simply be forced to take another route. Jumping the subway lanes is one example. A large gap on the roof tops, is another. And you can perform this in any direction and continuously do it if you have the momentum. You can even catch up to enemies fleeing faster this way. You can not however perform this while reloading and you can not fire your weapon as it goes off screen briefly. In fact you know you have done the move correctly, if you can not judge distance, by your weapon going off screen momentarily and you hear a "whooshing" sound.

Another little known technique is what I like to call, parkour. It is a bit hard to describe and I have not mastered it myself. But lets say you did a long jump to the nearest ledge. What looks like a sure fall back down, you actually have an opportunity of grabbing onto it and hoisting yourself up. Or possibly even lowering yourself down, which lessens the fall damage if at all, depending on the height. You can also do this by facing a ledge above you while on the stairs and attempt to jump up while pressing forward and you will pull yourself up. It is slow, so you leave yourself open, but if you can do it in a tricky situation and avoid fall damage, or very hard to reach places, I recommend it.

Topping off is a technique that will allow you to carry another round chambered, that you ordinarily would not have. The Beretta for instance is loaded with 15 rounds from the start. The magazines themselves max capacity is 15 rounds.

So how do you carry the 16th round? By reloading while you still have rounds in the current magazine. You lose all the new rounds, but add to the current stock in the weapon. Not very helpful when you lose all 15 rounds from a new magazine. But very helpful if you only had a few left and reloaded slightly early. So the next confrontation you come to, you will have that one precious or two extra rounds if dual wielding. Could be the difference between life and death.

All "slide" pistols and rifles do this. The shotguns and revolvers do not, as there is no way to chamber an extra round in those.

Each enemy felled by you directly starting out provides one point. After you get over the initial hurdle of staying alive long enough to have a kill streak of four, you begin to start doubling your points to two per enemy death by your hands. When you get six consecutive kills, you begin to earn three points per dispatch and at eight enemy slays, four points. I assume every two consecutive kills will grant you another point, although I am not sure if it is infinite or not. The highest I've had so far is 24 straight kills and 12 points per kill. You will surely die at some point and restart it back to the normal one point per kill, until you can get into a groove again and get that kill streak going.

It is easy to confuse the two, a stunt move in the prone and a death. Especially if the opponent is not moving or spinning on the ground after being shot, playing dead. You could easily over look it in the heat of the moment and then be shot in the back. You can however still see if they are alive, by simply placing your cross hair over them and seeing if their name pops up. But if that seems like too much trouble and when in doubt, shoot again. We call that double tapping in the military. Unfortunately you can also waste ammo that way, but better safe than sorry.

You can generally run around the maps and just pick up everything and do just fine. But if you prefer a certain weapon, it is good to know where that ammo is located on any given map. Or if you want to change to a specific weapon or special item, where they are located, as they can be in a very specific location. You can create a server and run through it without fear of being attacked by other players. If bots are an issue you can remove them all by typing in console (bring up the console by the tilde key "~") "