Using a shotgun will almost certainly kill both the captor and hostage, so it's a good idea to choose a more precise weapon before playing the stage.
For example, some missions require you to free hostages who are held at gunpoint by killing their captor. The weapons and classes are an important part of the game and directly affect the difficulty of each level. There's plenty of weapons to choose from and you also have a squad which features four different classes: assault, recon, heavy, and sniper. To save space, chapters are downloaded as you progress. Each chapter has your standard run-and-gun stages, objective-based stages that involve tasks such as defusing bombs, and a multiplayer stage.
Each stage of MC5 is divided into different chapters.