Genre: Stealth; Sub-Genre: Point and Click Adventure
ESRB: M (Blood from shooting and stabbing, lots of partial nudity)
Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 20/12
Developer: IO Interactive
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| Yep, you get to dress like a clown in this one! |
To clarify, this is the predecessor to the game Hitman: Absolution that I recently reviewed. This is the fourth game in the series, and Absolution is the fifth. But this game didn't come out 2 or 3 years before Absolution. It actually came out SIX years before. That means it was almost a launch title for XBox 360, and it also came out on PS2 and the original XBox. So I knew I had to take some things with leniency. The graphics are the first thing on that list. There's a sharp contrast when looking at this game compared to Absolution. But that actually didn't bother me at all. The lower resolution textures were still clean enough to fully flesh out the world, and the lack of over-used gritty lighting motifs meant I got a nice break for my eyes. I daresay this game is more pleasant on the eyes overall because of that, but it's too noticeable to fully redeem it. Then again, the bright colors feel appropriate with the tone of the game. So after a while I actually liked it.
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| The premise of this game just can't help but be humorous. |
Going into Absolution, it was the developers' goal to make the game more story-driven. That ended up being both terribly done and taking away from the game. After all, he wasn't actually a damn Hitman for any of that game. In this one, though, each mission is a contract. Agent 47 is given details for his objectives in a briefing and receives payment for completion. The thing is, though, that there IS a backing story to the game. Just a little something to give the game stakes and to lead into the final level. As meager as it is, it works much much better than the "story-driven" sequel. I do still wish the game worked more like the tutorial level, though. That one starts with a pre-rendered cutscene vignette about the target you are taking out. This gives you both insight into why someone wants him dead and gives him a rather flushed out story of who he is and his troubles. The rest of the time you are simply told who the target is. That's not as involved. Maybe they can figure this out for Hitman 6 to make it "story-driven" in a more appropriate fashion.
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| And I love these newspapers that give you a direct sense of how your choices affect the world. |
Gameplay is something of a mixed bag here, and is ultimately why I ended up going with a two instead of a three. For all the good this game does, it ONLY functions as a stealth game and is remarkably clunky in unforgivable ways. If this game wasn't 6 (almost 7) years old, it would be laughable. Unfortunately I can't travel back in time to 2006 to tell you how I feel about its clunkiness then, but it feels like it came out in 2000 or earlier to me. Maybe I could be lenient knowing this started out as a PC game and is likely treated as a port for consoles, but this is not the first console game they've churned out. IO should have figured this crap out already! First and most obvious is the button layout. I can sum up this crap with one example: clicking down the left stick (and holding it down) is how you throw an object. What sense does that make! Then design choices like the funeral level were a great concept, but it didn't make sense for either a stealth player or shooter player to have a level with the enemy layout like that (trying to avoid spoilers) with zero upgrades and zero chance of sneaking (I don't count dual wield as an upgrade because it is a disadvantage). The "last boss" plays out in an extremely frustrating manner, offering no sense of an encounter or epic fight but rather just messing up your progress in the level. The melee and fiberwire are the worst offenders in clunkiness. The latter in particular since it's a pretty damn important tool for an assassin. Agent 47's death animation has some kind of "second wind" mechanic, but 9 out of 10 times it just makes you 30 seconds and locks out the main menu before you can retry. One last note: for some reason each difficulty is locked to a parallel path in your career. This means if you played on Expert, as I did, you can't replay a later level on Rookie just for fun as you would need to unlock it on Rookie mode first. Oh, and the achievements in this game are similarly wonky. I'm not going to ding a game for having terrible achievement design, but that's worth noting for achievement hunters (especially since older games are generally considered to be easy points). In the end, though, the game is really great. I know it doesn't sound that way as I describe all this, but if you really love stealth and/or can be forgiving of these missteps then this is a much more enjoyable game than Absolution. The level layouts are staggering in their openness. And the sheer number of different paths and answers to solving a level come out as testing the player's creativeness and ability to solve them like a puzzle. I did say it only works as a stealth game back there, but there is a lot in place to let you go guns blazing. There is a way to enter first person view to help with fighting in tight spaces and before each level Agent 47 is allowed to pick his load out. More importantly, there are upgrades that can beef up his offensive capabilities. But the bottom line is that the AI and level design is so tuned to being a stealth game that it doesn't play as a shooter. It just makes it funny to be the world's sloppiest assassin.
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| I swear some cops/guards are telepathic. |
Before I leave off on a conclusion, I did find through playing this game that the controversial sexy nuns from Absolution to be completely in line with the tone of Hitman (at least in this section of the franchise). The tutorial level has bikini clad women working in a drug factory and most levels have an overly shapely woman here and there with an average bust size of "permanent back pain." I'll put a picture at the bottom of this to give an example of the silly clothing they wear, too. At the same time, most men in this universe are extremely buff and about 6'2". You can tell because that's what Agent 47 looks like, too, and ALL CLOTHES FIT HIM. So if you're offended by how the women are portrayed, then I'm offended by how the men are portrayed. So there!
Conclusion:
If you have a love of stealth games, this may be required playing for you as this apparently is the best in the series. Even if you are not, just take a healthy dose of patience with you and you will enjoy a thoroughly entertaining game.
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| Not realism. Fantasy. Don't worry about it. It's fine. |
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