When this new instalment in the
Hitman series was first announced back in June 2015, the overwhelming reaction
was one of confusion.
Following 2012’s poorly received
Hitman: Absolution, the franchise was to re-emerge as something unprecedented
in the action adventure genre: a six-part digital episodic release, spread
across a whole year, each part constituting one level of the final game. Nobody
was quite sure what this experiment would look like, or what the point was.
And then, in March 2016, the
first episode was released. Like a magic trick, the pieces came together. To
say that IO Interactive’s Hitman is an episodic stealth game containing six
levels is at once wholly descriptive and wildly inaccurate. The complete game,
released on disc this week, takes Agent 47, the series’ bald, barcoded
assassin, through six individual locations. No more, no less. That much is
true. What becomes clear almost immediately, however, is that the nature of the
game transforms those six levels into something expansive and remarkable, with
a degree of replayability rarely seen before. This is not an easy game to
explain, so let’s start here: Hitman is very, very good.
On the face of it, this is a game
about the interaction between two things: 47’s mechanical toolset, and the
environment he finds himself in. The former appears to be very simple. 47 can
crouch, take cover, vault over low objects. He can see a short distance through
walls to identify the movements of his targets. He can throw small and large
objects. He barely moves above a jog. It is a beautiful juxtaposition to his
gliding menace, then, that the game’s most distinctive mechanic is a fundamentally
silly one. Across the series, 47 has always been a master of disguise, capable
of switching outfits on the fly to access off-limits areas. In Hitman, though,
this is taken to a spectacular extreme as the bald assassin daisy-chains
disguise after disguise as he moves through each of the vast environments.
If the mechanical toolset is
simple and restrained, the six environments are the exact opposite. Each is a
cross between an open-world and a Rube Goldberg machine, containing thousands
of NPCs and nearly unlimited potential for inventive assassination.
The first mission, a fashion show
in a repurposed Parisian museum, is a perfect demonstration of the game’s core
design thesis: everything you would expect to be in such a location invariably
is, and it’s all happening at once. On the ground floor, hundreds of guests in
tuxedos and cocktail dresses mingle around the bar and the catwalk. Behind the
scenes, stylists work industriously, stage crews guide models through darkened
corridors. Downstairs, the kitchen hums as chefs and waiters work to keep the
upstairs functioning. A security team have set up an outpost in the wine
cellar.
Through this all, 47 moves like a
shape-shifting ghost. At a slow walk, he acquires a waiter’s outfit from a side
room, and slips down some side stairs into the kitchen. Nobody bats an eye. He
corners a chef in a blind-spot and takes his outfit, doubling back into the
kitchen and, safe in the plausibility of his disguise, poisons some soup. The
disguise mechanic is brilliantly complicated by the presence of some NPCs that
can see through them, presumably recognising that you’re not Karl the Stylist,
and you’ll occasionally have to duck into cover or wait for one of these
brighter specimens to pass ahead of you so as not to be spotted.
Paris is followed by Sapienza,the game’s standout level, which takes in an entire Italian town. Then come the
bustling streets and souks of turbulent Marrakesh, then an immaculate Thai
hotel. The game’s final two levels, a terrorist compound and a high-tech
Japanese hospital, push the players to perform increasingly demanding
assassinations. The action of these missions move constantly around 47, and he
shifts slightly to use their momentum for his purposes.
The reason for the scale of each
of these environments becomes clear as the wider metagame emerges. Each level
has main story targets, sure, but is also filled with an infinite number of
player-made contracts, which ask 47 to assassinate a particular NPC, often
while wearing a specific disguise or with a certain weapon. The crown jewels,
though, are the developer’s own “Escalation” missions, in which the player is
required to perform a hit five consecutive times, with new complications being
added with each repetition. Kill the chef. Kill the chef and the waiter. Kill
the chef and the waiter with a cavalry sabre. Kill the chef and the waiter with
a cavalry sabre, but watch out for the deadly landmines placed around the
museum. Now do it in 45 seconds. As IO added more escalations monthly, they
became increasingly confident and absurd; they are beautiful practical jokes on
the player, tense and funny and rewarding.
As 47 completes contracts and
explores each level, he unlocks new tools and weapons to be used in any
environment. Complete a hit effectively and you’ll be able to start with a
disguise, or smuggle a large weapon into a box in the level. These spaces
transform, both in actuality as you unlock things, and mentally as you build an
increasingly coherent map of the spaces.
The game still changes and shifts
monthly. New escalations are added, new contracts are featured. On four
occasions, IO released “bonus missions” that radically transformed existing
environments, filling the square in Sapienza with a film shoot or turning Marrakesh
into a night-market. The game’s “Elusive Targets” showed up, too – unique
contracts tied to an ever-descending real world clock that can only ever be
attempted once, in situations that become almost unbearably tense. Fail them,
and the opportunity is lost, never to return. While around 20 Elusive Targets
have been and gone, IO plan to continue introducing them into the future.
Throughout the course of this
collected works, you will disguise yourself as a cyclist, a clown, as a
po-faced doctor and a catwalk model. You will kill targets with a fire
extinguisher, with a letter opener, with an exploding golf ball. At times you
will flee from what feels like the entire level only to end up on the roof of
an observatory looking over an Italian town. Sometimes, you will exit levels
silently and beautifully and never be seen.
The beauty of the game is, you
can play for many hours, but then see a friend try a mission and they’ll do
something totally different. It might be a route you had never considered, or an
interaction with a guard you didn’t know was possible. In this way the game
unfolds like a puzzle box and, just when you think it has finished unfolding,
it reveals something new.
Hitman is unquestionably the
finest game in the series. It might be one of the best stealth games ever made.
Sweet game
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