Also top marks to the soundtrack – particularly liked the ominous note of dread inside the Colombian mansion, and the misty-eyed civic pride Sim City-esque strings in Whittleton Creek.

Hitman clockwork is great. I’m consuming it slowly, with pleasure. I learn the level completely till I move to the next. Levelup system helps with it; this game levels you up slowly so by the time you get to max level you really appreciate everything that was put into the level. Then it’s spiced up by addition of Elusive Targets and then I expect them to add a lot of Escalations – puzzles where you have to kill a specific character in a very specific way.

Always online system is bullshit though. Elusive targets are already clever marketing tool and made me buy it before any kind of sale. Always online system made me wait for maintenance so that some suit could get a report that torrent downloads are lower and therefore they didn’t lose number of torrent downloads * $60 money to piracy. The game is good so they can still get away with it.

I also have a small ideological problem with the game. I want it to have some loud shooting challenges. I understand we already have a lot of shooters and old games leaned too much on making you a soldier but here it feels like you’re forced into stealth by achievement and XP system – the game is all about challenges and outside of odd headshot or sniper achievement there’s no use for all those exclusive weapons you get. It’s similar to Dishonored 1 where the game really wanted me to not use all those cool toys, but even Dishonored 1 didn’t tell me “you have objectively bad score and no achievements because you achieved your goal in a wrong way”, it only gave a moral evaluation, and Dishonored 2 did it even better.