nah, you can play totally ghost. no kills, no alarms, completely quiet. i haven’t played it any other way. p-p-p-plus, grimm’s side missions (side missions!?!) are all about that life. one of them is one of my favourite sc levels in the entire series (sea fort).
honestly, i went in wanting to hate-play it but it was actually rather splendid. handily in my top 3 after chaos theory.
the story was guff though, but i don’t play tom clancy games for their story.