The sole fact that these maps are as big as they are can get overwhelming, but a huge part of what makes them so fun to play in HITMAN comes from how you're always encouraged to experiment to find creative ways to kill your targets. And these games do such a great job at setting up the targets' backstories so that you'll always find something more to learn about them as you keep exploring the levels.

It's also just fun to come back to most of these areas trying to get a Silent Assassin rank (except for Colorado, which is just agonizing in terms of its difficulty), which makes it so fun. The always-online functionality unfortunately seems to be the biggest downside, but there's a lot of fun to be had nonetheless.

At the time it came out there were a lot of emotions tangled up in this. It had been 10 years since we saw a game that lived up to the Hitman name, but it was served to us as an always-online, episodic release. Paris was good, sure, but we had no idea what the upcoming levels would look like and whether IO would ever let us carry over our unlock progress when offline.

It's strange to look at now because it's obvious that everything turned out fine, that the World of Assassination trilogy ended up being even better than Blood Money was, that the QOL features imported from Absolution provided new depth instead of simply making the game easier, and that the entire trilogy when taken as a single, massive game would be one of the best games of the decade (perhaps ever?).

The gameplay core of the trilogy begins here, remaining relatively untouched throughout the three games. There are additions of course - it's strange to go back and play this game without briefcases, without bushes, but you really only notice these now that they've been added in later games. There are other minor changes of course, things that don't really sound big until you've put some time into the levels - enemies won't notice your reflection in mirrors, emetics send them to toilets instead of trash cans likes in later entries, etc.

All in all, there are a number of reasons why I would recommend people get Hitman 3, purchasing the older levels and playing them there. Not only is the entire trilogy in H3 roughly the same file size as H2016 is by itself, but little convenience features and performance optimizations have stacked up over 5 years. If you're getting H2016 for free and have never played a Hitman game before, play it and have a good time. But if you're looking at these games in 2021 and are trying to figure out how to best spend your own money, getting the complete trilogy inside Hitman 3 is by far the safest bet.

"you are elite stock, 47. the best of the best. none of the other agents compare when it comes to your level of skill. truly a precision killer."

gets caught moving an unclothed body that i knocked out with a wrench that's lying on the ground

"fuck"

reload

Tan excelente como me esperaba, se merece su reputación.

Absolution fue un paso en falso tras Blood Money (un juego al que le guardo mucho cariño), pero este reboot recupera la fórmula del de PS2 y la moderniza a la perfección, con un énfasis en la rejugabilidad de cada nivel que era el elemento que faltaba para que esta saga alcanzara nuevas cotas.

Ninguna duda que seguiré repitiendo muchos de estos niveles a pesar de pasar a la secuela, y me muero de ganas de descubrir los de las dos entregas siguientes.

t has been 10 years since Hitman: Blood Money, what many probably still consider the pinnacle of the Hitman franchise. Soon after the release of Hitman: Absolution, many Hitman fans like myself believed the series was as good as dead. It was streamlined to be more of an action/stealth game than a puzzle/stealth game, and the story beats really didn't line up with the rest of the series. Fast forward to January '14, where IO Interactive actually puts out an apology letter for Hitman: Absolution, and ensures the fanbase that next time will be different. The future of Hitman will return to it's roots, and boy, did it ever. HITMAN released in a (for some reason controversial) episodic format featuring heavily varying locations, a plethora of creative ways to take out targets, an unobtrusive story that doesn't rewrite the 47 character, and a host of new modes that add to the freshening up of the franchise. Custom contracts, elusive targets, and escalation contracts really give players reasons to keep coming back to the game. IO has also continued to listen to the community and patched the game to make it better and better. I'm excited the HITMAN franchise is a platform with a second season on the way, and I think that IO has finally surpassed Blood Money.

Just off the plane from my five-day murder vacation. In other words I just played 2016's Hitman for the first time, entirety in VR. After the unintuitive nightmare-headache of importing the levels from this into 2, and then 2 into 3 just to play these levels in VR (which you can't do on the free version of 3, despite the store page stating otherwise) - also meaning you need to install all 130+ gigs of Hitman 1 and 2, even though the entire trilogy is seemingly already in the files of 3.

I was feeling ripped off and ready to hate it before I even started. Yet despite the garbage level import system, the particularly low-res graphics even for PSVR, the gimped motion controls and the weird always-online thing that will render the game unplayable some day... this is definitely one of the best experiences on PSVR (and soon to be PC VR) and impossible not to recommend for fans of strapping your games to your face.

The 'world of assassination' conceit is utterly perfect for a VR game even if it wasn't initially conceived as one. Getting fully immersed in these ultra-detailed exotic locations is exactly the kind of thing VRheads dream of, and the Hitman mechanics lend themselves well to the format. Stealth in general adapts very well to VR, where you physically look over your shoulder or peek around corners, yet it's potential that's remained largely untapped until this release.

As for the aforementioned controls, ioi made the somewhat bold choice to forego move support on PSVR, instead using the dualshock but with the gyro function controlling Agent 47's right hand. Thus aiming, melee attacks, picking up items etc. are still handled via motion control. It's certainly a compromise, and I'd happily play it all again with full motion controller support on PC VR, but it's not as bad as I first feared and after getting used to it I think the right choice was made. There's virtually zero frustration in this control scheme. It gets pushed to its limit when using a sniper rifle - the DS4 tracking isn't precise enough for long range targeting, coupled with less than ideal scope implementation, but it works quite well on the whole.

VR implementation aside, Hitman 2016 is a satisfying and polished stealth game. The levels are impressively large and dense (especially after the tutorial segment, which isn't even a bad level but much smaller), pulling off a kill feels great and the whole thing brims with dark comedy. Between sessions I found myself almost giddy with excitement to visit a new level or find whole new paths and areas in the previous ones. What I really wasn't expecting was a fairly gripping story too. It's quite minimalist, with only one short cutscene between each level, yet they're done well enough that I went from simply being grateful that they're unintrusive to actually looking forward to the next one and it feeling like a reward after each level. There's just enough to leave you wanting more, and I'm definitely invested for the sequel.

All that said, while I've enjoyed replaying the levels I feel like it's doomed to be by far the most enjoyable on the first run. When you already know the layout of the level and the routines of its inhabitants, to me that's half the fun gone. It gives you a full list of assassination methods and challenges, but if you pay any heed to these then replaying a level can feel like robotically going through a checklist with no organic discovery.

Hitman's biggest problem to me is that it's not an immersive sim, and I say this both as someone thoroughly tired of the bickering around classifying this genre, and someone who subscribes to a fairly broad definition of it. There are no intersecting mechanics that make the environment feel tactile and allow players to come up with solutions the devs never thought of. Instead almost everything you can do has been pre-planned and your task is merely to find the triggers for a finite number of scripted events. This is still enjoyable, and fumbling through a level on the initial blind run is an excellent experience, but when a game encourages replays as much as this one it can quickly begin to feel entirely artificial and contrived.

One thing that particularly irked me were the 'mission stories' - little quests that the game automatically tracks with objective markers and generally culminate in an assassination opportunity. Thus it's possible to play the game on auto-pilot, just walking from one objective to another, and walk out with a good score without ever using the noodle. This is a travesty. It robs so much of the satisfaction of figuring out one of these levels, and undermines how much effort has been put into crafting each one. I would so much prefer having to piece clues together myself and listen out for information of my own accord, instead the game announces to you when you're overhearing a mission story (as distinct from the myriad of useless but amusing dialogue you can overhear).

What's worse, once you've beaten a level the mission stories will usually make it obvious what the other fancy assassinations would have been, thus a replay not only has you doing a pre-planned checklist but you'll even know in advance what the payoff will be. At that rate I have to wonder: what's the point? There's a satisfying XP system that rewards you with more weapons and alternate starting points for each level. A great idea, but when it's the same set of payoffs as the first round - again, what's the point? And don't get me started on the amount of waiting around for targets to be in the right place for a specific task.

In addition my few moments of frustration were in trying to hit some of these objectives on a replay. It may be down to the VR implementation, but these can sometimes feel finicky and 'fragile' - like if you move slightly wrong it'll freak out the target and fail the mission story. Something you can roll with if you're freestyling but will require a reload when you're trying to trigger a specific sequence. After several reloads to check off one task in a list leading to a payoff I already knew about, I asked myself what the hell I was doing and moved on.

Thankfully (at least in VR) the quest markers are visible only when you hold up on the D-pad, meaning you can ignore them altogether or only resort to using it when you're truly lost. I improvised though the game failing or half-finishing the majority of mission stories and had a blast doing it, but I can only assume this wasn't the intended way to play, or else the game would be designed with more emphasis on organic discovery than following objectives. Leaving more time between replays would probably alleviate this feeling of just following a task list, but the episodic level rollout implies you're expected to thoroughly replay and master a level before moving on.

Last critique: every level has at least two targets, which is brilliant, but one of the big immersion-breakers is how little anyone seems to care when one target dies, even when the victim is found with a knife in their face. There ought to be significantly more consequence for a sloppy kill or botching one target, it would massively incentivise going for accidental kills or disposing of the body. The order you kill them in should have some effect, too: target #2 should feel like a higher difficulty unless the first kill went completely unnoticed.

Hitman is an excellent experience for what it's trying to be and I can't wait to play both sequels, but I feel like even just a slightly different set of priorities in the design could have given us a real all-timer masterpiece of a game. Those inklings of what could have been make it a little disappointing, which is doubly a shame when what it actually is is really good in its own right.

Hitman games always had this great sense of place, heck I still remember all of the codename 47 levels and one might argue that they just got better and better as the series went on, not counting that absolute™ stinker later on. But in this one I just wanna live in, sipping coffee in Sapienza with the biggest assholes of the planet under Sun's golden rays, as they relay to me just how much they dislike colored people, support all ongoing wars and how baldness is not a genetic trait but merely a sign of excessive masturbation; how they just had a neck surgery so it's a lot less resistant to fiber wire, how they really need to relieve themselves but they're concerned since there's some pesky loud construction work going on near the bathrooms which might snuff out potential cries for help, and how most worryingly their bodyguard is busy elsewhere playing Honkai Star Rail because a certain smooth-headed gentleman told them the Fu Xuan banner ends in only a couple of hours (IO doesn't think you would have the heart to kill these people if you saw them petting a small deer).

Hitman is a good stealth game and can be good at making you feel like a bad ass assassin but the real strength lies in the level design and absurdist dark humor. It's a game where you can choose exactly what equipment you know you are going to need, hide a high powered sniper rifle somewhere in the map in the planning menu, poison a target while learning your next target to an open spot to be taken out with your nearby hidden rifle. It's a game where you can steal the tape of a targets past murder, lure him to his room where you sit quietly in a chair confronting him with what he's done before being promoted to shoot him in the head. It's also a game where you can make a man believe that the cost of his dead mother has come back to haunt him, one where you can start a dance party in makeshift a military base, disguise yourself as a therapist and go through with a quick session, disguise yourself as drummer and go through with an audition.

The best missions of the first season have extremely well designed levels that feel like real places, targets that you can learn about as you replay missions by listening to conversations and attempting to kill them in different ways, or mission that fully embrace the comedic potential of the game such as side mission that has you dressed as Santa going up against the burglars from Home Alone. Each mission gives you a variety of challenges, some easy, some hard, and some based on just finding things or events on the map, completing each challenge unlocks points that will raise your mastery level up to 20 for each mission. Raising your master level unlocks new equipment you can use on any level and new starting locations and supply drop locations for that map. There might only be six missions and two tutorial levels but the challenges give you a lot to do, three missions have also been added onto two of the maps that change things up on the map and give you new goals, player made contracts with different targets can be searched for and played, and one time only timed elusive contracts by the developer give you new amusing characters to try to kill on levels you have mastered.

The only negatives is that the Colorado map doesn't have very interesting targets and the Marrakesh map has some interesting features but mostly wastes it's location.

Hitman was one of the best games of 2016, which is saying a lot for it in such a great year, excellent level design and an embrace of absurdist dark humor make this the best Hitman yet