I don’t think the Hitman series really clicked for me until I played Hitman 2. I really enjoyed Blood Money, and I really enjoyed what I played of the 2016 Hitman, but they were both one-and-done games for me — I gave Hitman’s Paris level a few replays, but otherwise I just completed all of the levels in order and then called it a day.  Which is a bit of an odd thing to say about a game because that’s how they’re usually supposed to be played, but Hitman is a series that rewards replaying individual levels again and again to find alternate routes, assassination methods and background information about the people you’re assassinating. Playing through the levels just once meant that I arguably was doing it wrong, but for whatever reason I never really felt much of an impetus to do it right — until Hitman 2.

What changed in the interim? I think my current obssession with Hitman 2 is at least partly thanks to Arkane; since Hitman 2016 I’ve played both Dishonored 2 and Prey and those games have very much made me appreciate the value of large open levels stuffed with detail that can be tackled in myriad ways, and I’ve acquired a taste for going back afterwards to see what I missed the first time around. Hitman 2 also makes some very minor tweaks to how it guides you through a level that make the whole thing rather more palatable, as the levels are big and open and potentially rather daunting to tackle if you’re not given some sort of map. Mostly, though, I think it’s because the worst of Hitman 2’s levels equal the best of the first Hitman. Hitman 2 doesn’t escape the ructions of developer IO Interactive’s separation from publisher Square Enix¹, but the impact has mostly come in the form of a smaller package than I might otherwise have expected; after having played the five levels present in the game to death (plus the smaller tutorial level and the bonus Sniper Assassin level), I can confidently say that IO have really found their groove when it comes to level design.

Hitman 2 is a direct continuation from the story that was introduced in Hitman 2016, except that story was and is utter bollocks and is mostly present to provide an excuse for Agent 47 to do what he does best: infiltrate a set of heavily guarded locations and dispose of anywhere between one and four targets wandering around the map. The locations range from a drug lord’s mansion in Colombia to a dark, windswept castle on a Scottish island, and every single one of them has at least two dozen ways of killing the marks. Take the very first mission, which is the tutorial and which takes place inside a single large house — not a mansion, just a house — and has a single target for you to kill. Even though it’s “just” a simple level that’s supposed to teach you the basics of the game, IO have not skimped on the freeform ethos that drives the Hitman series: you can sneak into the mansion and push her off a balcony while she’s having a smoke; poison her tea with either outright lethal stuff or an emetic that’ll make her stagger to a toilet which you can then drown her in; garotte her while she’s brushing her teeth and her partner is in the shower; smother her with a pillow when she’s gone to bed; or trigger an alarm and dump poison gas into the ventilation system for her panic room. And that’s just the “undetectable” methods, since if you’re not too bothered about getting a Silent Assassin rating or shooting it out with dozens of guards as you escape you can just wander in and shoot her in the head. Hitman 2 crams more replay value into this single house than most triple-A titles manage in their entire length, and the full levels are an order of magnitude more complex and will each require a dozen hours or more to even come close to seeing all that they have to offer.

This is a good time to talk about an unusual tension that exists within Hitman 2: despite its freeform nature it’s still a very specific kind of game that wants you to play it in a very specific kind of way. Agent 47 is known as the Silent Assassin and he’s said to specialise in making it look like his targets have died in unfortunate accidents — although the nature of these accidents is often so ludicrous he might as well be called the Slapstick Assassin — while leaving no trace that he was ever there. No witnesses, no bodies found, no security camera evidence, and no collateral damage. Canonically he never kills anyone who isn’t the target, including guards, (although mechanically Hitman 2 doesn’t mind if you choke them into unconsciousness as long as nobody sees you and you hide the body). The game heavily encourages this mode of play by attaching large score bonuses to each of the Silent Assassin conditions and by also making many of the kill methods contingent on never being spotted. The moment you take out a gun and shoot it at a person you’ve effectively blown any goal you had for the run outside of killing the targets and escaping the level, and since the levels can be attempted in any order there’s absolutely no benefit to this unless you’re going for some very specific challenge conditions and are willing to abandon the run immediately afterwards.

I think it’s fine for Hitman to be a heavily stealth-focused game. Thematically the restrictions around who you can and can’t kill even give 47 a strict moral code and make him into a likeable protagonist, which is helped along by some fantastic writing and line delivery — if you like your humour black, then the dialogue along with the kill methods will make Hitman 2 one of the funniest games you play this year. That’s a significant achievement for a genetically-engineered clone assassin who is supposed to have had all of the emotion scrubbed out of him at an early age. However, the thing I found a little curious about the stealth conditions is that unlike other games in the genre Hitman doesn’t give you many stealth-focused gadgets; I’d say that probably two-thirds of the equipment unlocks in the game are either guns or explosives that are all but useless on 95% of the runs you’ll be wanting to do. The primary function of a gun in Hitman is to get NPCs to look in the direction of the bullet impact, or to destroy items from a distance, and the default silenced pistol the game starts you with does both of these things perfectly well.

So, given the choice that Hitman has made to value stealth over all else, why does it give you so many unlocks that are functionally useless for this playstyle? I have two theories about this, both of which are probably true. First is that freeform stealth-oriented games are a bit of a tricky sell these days and that cramming your game full of guns will at least create a more comfortable environment for an audience that’s used to their primary mode of interaction with a game world being to shoot its inhabitants in the face. Second is that Hitman’s levels might be an absurdly detailed set of puzzle boxes, but the puzzles need to both be solvable regardless of what you take into the level with you, and at the same time remain challenging regardless of what you take into the level with you. Those conditions are almost mutually exclusive, and the only way Hitman 2 can really satisfy both of them is to drastically limit the range of utility equipment that can be used in a stealthy run and make the levels as self-contained as possible. It’s more than a bit of a kludge, but I’m hesitant to say it’s a mistake because I can’t think of an alternative way to reconcile the kind of game Hitman is with a more satisfying equipment system.

Still, this means that your most powerful weapon in Hitman isn’t actually a weapon or a piece of equipment at all, it’s the various disguises you can either find in a level or steal off of unconscious/dead bodies. One of Hitman’s running jokes (and it has a lot of running jokes) is that despite Agent 47 being a tall hulking pale bald man with a barcode tattooed on the back of his head, all it will take for people to accept him as a short Indian barber is to knock the barber out and steal his clothes, and the only adverse comment he’ll draw is NPCs wondering if he looks different because he’s had a shave. He’ll also be a virtuoso at shaving, or drumming, or tattooing, or pretty much any occupation he has the disguise for that lets him blend in. Disguises give you access to restricted parts of the level — so a waiter disguise will allow you in the service areas of a castle, while a security guard disguise will let you go pretty much anywhere, although you need to be careful because all the levels in Hitman 2 have different types of guard who have access to different parts of the map. Disguises aren’t a totally free pass as security cameras will still pick you up (necessitating destruction of the evidence in the level’s security room, which you’ll have to locate first) and while most NPCs will accept you unquestioningly there’s a significant subset that will see through your disguise if you get too close, but they’re key to penetrating the security around a target and maneuvering them into a position where you can get at them unseen.

This can be done in one of two ways. You can do it the truly freeform way, by spending time observing guard locations and patrols and the route the target takes around the level — if Hitman has a flaw, it’s that all the targets do the same set of scripted actions on repeat until the player does something to change them — and looking for a window of opportunity, or perhaps creating your own by throwing down distractions and knocking out guards one at a time until the target can be lured into a room that contains just them, you, and a short length of fiber wire. Or you can take advantage of the level’s Stories; these are a set of subplots running through each level that 47 can participate in to learn more about the characters and incidentally maneuver them into more vulnerable positions. The individual stories are all fairly linear in terms of what the player has to do, but they’ve all got tricky bits where you have to acquire items or steal disguises undetected, and they all end either with the target suffering an ironic accident as part of the story, or having them rather conveniently send away all of their bodyguards and spending a large quantity of time standing next to a very high drop, granting you a free kill.

Ah, but I think I’m underselling the stories here, though; mechanically they might be a bit simple (although still very difficult to pull off undetected on the hardest difficulty setting), but in terms of flavour they’re one of the best things about Hitman 2. The first level has you disguising yourself as a military officer attending a demonstration of a military contractor’s newest combat drone, allowing you to feed his biometrics into the drone’s targeting system so that he can be ED-209ed. In the second you can pose as a hippo doctor and lure the target close to a hippo enclosure, with predictable results. The third lets you follow another assassin around Mumbai and give him a little helping hand in the background so that he can assassinate the targets for you. The fourth has an incredible sequence where 47 gives a tour of a house as a real estate agent. Finding and experiencing all of these stories and kill methods is a huge part of Hitman 2, and a challenging one; the game will provide explicit guidance for many of them (although you can turn this off if you fancy figuring them out yourself), but there’s a significant subset of stories that aren’t hinted at at all aside from a suggestive name in one of Hitman’s many optional challenges. These you have to find on your own, and some of the “hidden” kills are absurdly elaborate, which ensures that even after you’ve worked through the explicit mission stories the levels still feel like they have additional secrets to uncover, and you find yourself returning to them again and again.

I think that this mix of guidance and exploration was part of what had been missing for me in the  first Hitman. There the default setting for the stories was that you had to find the story start point in order to get any guidance, and while there was apparently an option to turn waypoints on from the very beginning of the level I somehow never found it. This made each level a rather daunting prospect; they’re huge and sprawling and crammed full of stuff and just being dropped at an entry point and told to find your own way is something I found rather intimidating. Having explicit guidance on from the start may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for me it meant I could tackle the levels in Hitman 2 in a rather more focused way, learning the levels as I worked my way through each story in turn. When I was done with them I had enough of a decent working knowledge to start playing Hitman the way it’s supposed to be played, by mixing and matching elements of different assassination methods along to manipulate the level into doing what I wanted, and plotting my own path through it in an attempt to uncover the many challenges that were still hidden from me.

As a consequence I’ve become far more familiar with Hitman 2’s levels than either of the Hitman games I’ve played before it, which is why I’m so convinced it has the best level design of the series so far. A criticism I’ve seen of the game is that it doesn’t do much to shake up the formula the series settled on in Hitman 2016 and is “just” more of the same, and to a certain extent this is true; the actual in-game changes to gameplay consist of NPCs being able to see your reflection in bathroom mirrors as you sneak up behind them, a briefcase that you can take into a mission to conceal large illegal items like sniper rifles instead of having to carry them around on your back (which makes going for the Sniper Assassin challenge in each level far more palatable), and nerfing fire extinguishers and breaching charges so that they no longer result in “accident” kills when detonated. These are minor tweaks by any metric, but I don’t know why anyone would actually complain about Hitman 2 containing content that’s the same or better than one of the best games of 2016. Which IO has incidentally ported into Hitman 2’s updated engine as DLC that you get for free if you own the original game, allowing for a straight comparison that confirmed for me that the Hitman 2 levels are better.

Flaws? Well, as covered, Hitman 2 is a very specific kind of game that I suspect may be an acquired taste for a lot of people. In terms of mechanical implementation the object interactions still feel a little flabby — getting an interaction prompt to appear over the correct item before a guard turns around and spots you can sometimes be rather frustrating — and for a game that’s so hell-bent on telling the player to experiment and figure things out it’s slightly baffling that there’s no quicksave option, instead requiring you to go through a conventional save/load process if you screw something up. I also feel like the leaderboards for each level are a good idea that don’t quite land, as the only scoring metric past getting a Silent Assassin rating is how quickly you can do the level, and that’s something that ends up being as much about manipulating loopholes in the Hitman NPC AI behaviour than it is finding a quick and efficient route. And the criticism I made in the Hitman 2016 review about missing the newspaper headlines from Blood Money still stands; that was a very nice bit of flavour that really made it feel like there were more valid ways to complete a level that just Silent Assassining it, and while the individual levels of Hitman 2 are crammed full of character the game feels rather sterile as soon as you leave them.

These are fairly minor nitpicks, however. If you buy into the kind of game that Hitman is — an almost dadaist accident simulator with a dark streak of humour running through it, where the aggressive approach is there more to allow you to blow off steam after an hour of tense stealth runs than because the game actually values it in any way — then it’s got very little wrong with it. It’s a bit pricey, and for that money I would have liked a couple more levels to be included in the package, but it’s difficult to complain when I’ve put forty hours into the ones that are already there, and the quality is doubly impressive considering IO almost didn’t survive to release Hitman 2 at all. It’s not doing spectactularly in the charts, but I do hope it’s doing well enough to keep them going because the world sorely needs more games like Hitman 2.

The post Thoughts: Hitman 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Specifically the Paris level, as Sapienza isn’t out until later this month.

Hitman is receiving a bit of a drubbing in its Steam reviews. It seems people are upset about the fact that its online and offline play modes are segregated, with different saves for each and a game system that will somewhat over-zealously yank you back into the menu whenever you lose connection. And I can definitely see how this would be annoying if you have a poor connection, although it’s not like Hitman takes the infinitely-worse step of forbidding offline play entirely. People also seem to be a little upset about this new Hitman’s episodic structure whereby it’s been split up into chunks of game consisting (essentially) of a single level; this first episode consists of two training levels plus the Paris Showstopper mission, and has no doubt been shoved online in order to fund the development of subsequent episodes. I’m a little less empathetic about this complaint, however; since each Hitman level is entirely standalone an episodic structure could definitely work, and so all it has to do to succeed in my book is to provide enough content per episode to justify the asking price.

So: is episode one of Hitman worth £12?

Well, first I should mention that the two training missions packaged in with the Paris main event are actually surprisingly meaty experiences in and of themselves. While not on the scale of Paris, a lot of work has clearly gone into making them fully fleshed-out mini-scenarios that can be enjoyed with the tutorial hints turned off – which is exactly what the game does after you complete them for the first time, sending you back into the first training mission with no breadcrumbs and a broad mission directive to assassinate the target however you like. Even here, in a level that consists of a single mocked-up yacht, there’s three or four different ways of disposing of the target that aren’t just killing him with a different weapon: you can poison his drink and ambush him in the bathroom; pose as his contact and wait until his back is turned; or just drop a lifeboat on his head. The second training mission expands things a little; now you’re infiltrating a mocked-up Soviet installation to kill a defecting spy – and there’s even more variety here, culminating in tricking the target into doing a “test” of the ejection mechanism in a MiG fighter jet when you’ve secretly turned it live. There’s so much packed into them that these training missions can’t be dismissed as just tutorials, and you can derive several hours of enjoyment just from those if you so choose.

Still, they are ultimately just a bonus. What you’re buying this first episode for is the Showstopper mission, where Agent 47 attends a fashion show in a Parisian mansion with the intention of murdering the owners (who are apparently very bad people). The mansion is huge – each training mission could probably fit inside it a dozen times over — and it is absolutely crawling with both civilian NPCs and security guards. The difficulty levels and Silent Assassin ratings from previous Hitman games are absent from this one; now there is just one default difficulty setting whereby Agent 47 will expire very, very quickly if he fights more than one guard at a time, and given that there’s about 80 of them in the level — and that it is nigh-impossible to take them out quietly without at least a civilian noticing and raising the alarm — the game is dropping some very heavy hints that indiscriminate violence is not a viable solution here. Previous Hitman games dissuaded it but always left it open as a last resort; here it’s pretty much impossible to just shoot your way in unless you’re prepared to spend a couple of hours painstakingly exploiting the guard AI.

No, in Hitman you have to use your noggin to get anywhere. Hitman levels have always been these quite elaborate puzzle boxes where you tried to figure out the best way of killing to your target, and the Paris mansion takes that idea and ups the scale dramatically. You have two targets: Victor Novikov, who tours the ground floor of the mansion hobnobbing with the guests, and Dalia Margolis, who is hosting a clandestine auction on the heavily locked-down second floor. Killing Victor is as easy as walking in the front door and shooting him in the head — but you wouldn’t survive for more than five seconds after that as his security gunned you down. And even if you survived you’d still have to get to Dalia, who is by far the trickiest of the two to eliminate. In order to get both of them and get out alive you have to shamelessly abuse that old Hitman staple of knocking out unsuspecting NPCs and stealing their clothes; this will allow you access to areas of the mansion that would otherwise be off-limits, which in turn lets you either engineer background events so that you end up alone with one of your targets, or else arrange an outstandingly elaborate environmental deaths for them, such as dropping the catwalk lighting rig on their head.

You’re aided in this by Hitman’s Opportunities feature. As you wander around the mansion you’ll occasionally see a little lightbulb marker, usually hovering over a group of NPCs having a conversation. This marks the beginning of a trail of breadcrumbs you can follow to set up a particular mode of expiry for one of your targets. Probably the most obvious one is poisoning Victor’s favourite cocktail with an emetic, following him to the bathroom and then drowning him in the toilet; for this you’ll need to find the cocktail recipe first. For Dalia, the easiest solution is to knock out and impersonate a male supermodel (who has a conveniently uncanny resemblance to 47) so that you can get a private audience with her, and then poisoning her drink with cyanide. Despite the size of the mansion it doesn’t take long to figure out and execute either of these plans, meaning your first run of the level won’t last much longer than 25 minutes. And if Hitman were just about killing the targets that’s where this review would end and I’d say it wasn’t worth the money. Fortunately the series has never been about that, however; it’s always been about replaying levels until you get an outcome that you find satisfactory, and Paris has that replayability factor turned up to 11.

Paris and both of the training missions have a series of challenges associated with them. Some of these are based around exploration and discovery, but the most interesting ones state that you must kill you targets in a certain way, which serves to advertise the vast array of solutions to the Paris puzzle that are available. I’ve killed Victor by drowning him in a toilet, pushing him into the Seine and dropping the catwalk lights on top of him, but there’s also an opportunity to lure him outside with fireworks before sniping him from a nearby piledriver boat-thing, as well as one for assassinating him with explosives planted inside a camera while he gives an interview. I know this because there are challenges for them. For Dalia there appears to be a ridiculously comprehensive range of options for infiltrating the auction she’s running and arranging her death that way – my method of just poisoning her drink while her back was turned starts to seem positively gauche by comparison. The interesting thing here is that while many of these challenges are also advertised in the level by the Opportunities breadcrumbs some of them are more difficult to access than others, or require a certain amount of preparation and forethought to execute. This is where the Mastery metagame comes in; each main level in Hitman has a Mastery level associated with it, which is raised by completing challenges inside that level. A higher mastery means more options are available to you when starting a mission – you can choose to start undercover in a different spawn point, or have items smuggled into the mansion that’ll make accessing subsequent challenges easier.

By tying the assassination challenges and the Mastery metagame together in this way Hitman hopes to ensure that you’ll keep replaying the level until you’ve seen everything it has to offer, as completing challenges to raise that Mastery to its max level demands that you come up with a ludicrously varied range of assassination methods. If you bought into it I can easily see the Paris level occupying a dozen or more hours of your time; it is huge compared to previous Hitman games and has the breadth of options to match, if perhaps not the depth. I didn’t, unfortunately, but that’s okay; I still very much enjoyed going after the challenges for their own sake even if I’m not going to obsessively clean up all of them, and there’s still a couple of interesting-sounding ones I intend to go back and do. The simple act of sneaking around is still as fun as ever, and you could easily take up an hour or two just exploring the mansion and scoping out all of the opportunities available; if you get spotted it’ll often end in a dead Agent 47 and a reloaded save, but the panicked chase sequences that ensue beforehand are a thing of pure joy, especially since 47 now has an amazing over-the-head throwing animation for whatever he’s carrying — kitchen knives, busts, fire extinguishers, it doesn’t matter what it is, he’ll happily hoof it at the enemy in such a way that it’s guaranteed to make contact with their head. I haven’t enjoyed throwing fire axes at people this much since Dead Island.

Before I finish I should mention Hitman’s voice acting. Hitman’s voice acting is verrrry interesting. Technically speaking it is perhaps not of the highest quality, but I think that in some respects that is absolutely intentional; you can hear the self-aware, self-deprecating tone of Blood Money in every other line that comes out of an NPC’s mouth. And bloody hell there are a lot of lines. Like everything else about it, there is a massive quantity and variety of background dialogue to be found in Hitman, from scene-setting to exposition to simple conversations between otherwise incidental characters that fill out the world. All of the reaction lines to whatever disguise Agent 47 is wearing at the moment are comedy gold, as well as the guard dialogue when they spot you doing something you shouldn’t (such as strangling somebody) or when you’re being hunted and they send out a description of whatever the last disguise you were wearing was. What particularly impressed me was how reactive it was — if, like me, you become addicted to throwing the fire extinguisher at people (it connects with an incredibly satisfying, frying pan-like *CLONG* noise) then it’s likely the next time you see a guard what comes out of his mouth will be something along the lines of “DON’T YOU THROW THAT–” before being suddenly cut off by another *CLONG*. NPCs will also react to however you carry out the mission; there was a nice bit where, just after disposing of Dalia, I was lining up a shot on Victor as he strode out onto the catwalk – but before he did he got a phone call informing him of Dalia’s death by cyanide poisoning, which I thought was a great touch.

I’m sure there’s a hefty amount of scripting underlying all of these experiences, but Hitman does a good job of keeping the bulk of it invisible and making itself seem as much of a sandbox environment as possible, albeit one that’s perhaps a little too concerned with what the the player character is doing at any given time. It only breaks when you actively go out of your way to break it; otherwise it provides an experience that’s more or less on par with the best of Blood Money. It doesn’t have the strength of Blood Money’s metagame, with its verbal rating of your actions and a cunning newspaper report of the killing that would contain more or less detail depending on how noisy you were, and so aside from the sheer scope of the Paris mansion there’s little to keep you playing long-term — but then at £12 this was never supposed to be a long-term investment.  As a bite-size chunk of Hitman goodness this first episode of Hitman works wonderfully. It’s episodic content done right — I think it benefits particularly because you have time to savour an individual level before moving on to the next — and a great advert for the series to come. I can’t wait for the next one.

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