IO Interactive (studio)
(certificate)
12 February 2016 (released)
19 February 2016
Welcome back, Agent 47.
The newest entry in the Hitman series, simply titled Hitman (borrowing from the modern tradition of not numbering your titles thus confusing everyone) is certainly one that, in the run up to the beta, I wasn’t too sure on. The game certainly seems to sport gameplay more akin to Blood Money, rather than the heavy emphasis on action that Absolution offered. But many fans are offset by the games transition to an episodic structure rather than being a full game at launch.
Still, if this early glimpse of gameplay is anything to go by, we needn’t worry about the core of how Agent 47 operates. The beta offered up two prologue ‘training’ missions, which give you carte blanche to eliminate your targets how you please, while offering a load of challenges unique to each mission (including the return of the ‘Silent Assassin’ challenge) and a new ‘Opportunity’ system to give you cues as to how to best kill your target. This feels much more open already in its design, and the potential ways you can commit your act of murder are already shaping up to be quite creative.
However, while I certainly appreciate the many ways these two missions offered to assassinate my targets, I felt worried at how the game hand-held me through the ones in the second mission via the afore-mentioned ‘Opportunity’ system, which tells you exactly how to perform each unique ‘accident’, basically handing you the ‘Silent Assassin’ challenge on a silver platter. (Only kill the target, no alerts or bodies found) I can only hope that this system is either seriously reigned in, or requires you to actually complete each opportunity yourself without telling you exactly HOW to do it. Still, the idea of you gaining clues by listening to the other people in the area or picking up intel is a great one in my opinion, and that should definitely stay.
Also, some of the Challenges should probably be hidden, as they give away some of the hidden methods that you can use to kill your target. If it weren’t for the list, I wouldn’t have known that I could rig the lifeboat in the first mission, taking away the joy of discovering such things myself through intel, or the experimentation that Blood Money offered.
Level design so far also seems to be better than what Absolution offered. The early previews that we’ve seen seem to strongly indicate that the railroad-style levels of the last entry are gone, and in their place are levels that feel more complete and open in their style, rather than just having you follow a set path to your enemy. The beta did however leave me wanting in terms of level size, but again these missions are prologue missions, and I doubt the game would just drop you into the big stuff right off the bat. We shall see what this game offers in the future.
Overall, the gameplay is solid, and level design is on point, although time will tell if we get anything on the size of what the older entries offered. What I wouldn’t give for a level the size of the old St. Petersburg missions in Hitman 2…
A Beta key was provided by Square Enix for the purpose of this review
