DEDSEC is an underground hacker group working to free the United Kingdom from the clutches of an authoritarian regime who know all and see all thanks to their comprehensive and ubiquitous surveillance and monitoring system which is called ctOS.
The open world alternate London is largely recognisable thanks to the landmarks and distinctive buildings that have been transposed from life, and is policed by a private company known as Albion, who has control of ctOS and who are, therefore, the holders of power in the by-now police state United Kingdom.
Players can travel by foot, by vehicle or by using the speedy services of the underground train, fast travelling thanks to the Tube.

Play as Any NPC: But Beware

You can befriend and ‘recruit’ any NPC (non-playing character). Once you have invested the time to befriend and train them, you can set them loose on whatever mission you like, and hopefully they will complete it successfully and return to tell you all about it and hand over any mission loot that you needed them to acquire for you.
However – and it is a big one – be wary about sending them off on missions that they are not qualified for or trained sufficiently that they can hold their own. You can spend hours befriending and training your character, only for them to die because the mission is harder than one or both of you thought.
As if that was not bad enough, when the carefully trained and painstakingly befriended NPC dies: they stay dead. They will not respawn during the game at all, as permadeath is a feature of this game, designed to make you just a little more protective of your characters!
There is a small chance of survival in some cases: the player can choose to surrender if they are very badly wounded. This puts them into the hands of Albion, but they can then recover and wait for rescue by the new protagonist and his or her buddies.

Classy Ways to Play

Once an NPC is recruited to the group, they are allocated one of three classes, as follows:

• Combat – gun focused, these players become enforcers, ready to win hearts and minds with explosive rounds and sticky mines
• Stealth – infiltrating the enemy to see what they are up is a must in any war, and these guys are vital to the cause being able to keep an eye on what the opposition is up to. You get some cool fighting effects, plus an invisibility shield powered by AR – who doesn’t want one of those?
• Hacking – fighting the good fight through a small screen (inception, anyone?) and sending small spider bots off to do actual mischief and data gathering, this class keeps everyone in the know as best they can, while avoiding actual face-to-face combat at all costs

In each case NPC’s back stories affect the readiness and skill with which they train, forcing the player to account for ‘human error’ in some missions