Along with Solid Snake and Sam Fisher, Agent 47 is an icon of the stealth action genre, and the only game of his that I've played is the first entry of the franchise's newly rebooted trilogy. I downloaded HITMAN all the way back in February of 2019 because it was one of the free PlayStation Plus games of that month and I wanted to give the series a shot, but after playing it for around a day and then saying to myself "This isn't Metal Gear Solid!", I deleted the game and never went back to it. At some point during my Elden Ring playthrough, though, I had the urge to give HITMAN another shot, so I reinstalled the game and then played through its six missions over the next two days.

Despite how hard IO Interactive tries to convince you otherwise, HITMAN doesn't really feel like the sandbox game it thinks it is. This game is more like a wolf in sheep's clothing, where it has a number of set paths that the player is "supposed" to take in order to assassinate their targets with a bunch of extra weapons, tools, and potential disguises surrounding them. I don't know if it's because I've been spoiled by the Metal Gear Solid series all these years, but whenever I tried a strategy that was even slightly different from what the game wanted me to do, I would eventually find myself camping in a bathroom as I waited for enemies to appear one by one so that I can shoot them with a shotgun until the coast was clear. For a game that claims to be all about players making their own decisions, HITMAN harshly punishes any sort of experimentation while also cluttering each level with items that you'll either never use or never get the chance to use, and that made me wish that the game could just commit to either being a sandbox stealth game or something more linear.

Even with this game's identity crisis issue in mind, I still had a pretty good time with HITMAN. When I was following the game's instructions and assassinating someone by staging a freak accident, I felt like the cold blooded professional killer that the game wanted me to be, and when I alerted every single guard on the map because I threw a screwdriver into my target's head right in front of their bodyguards, I felt like the exact opposite (but in a good way). Going through premeditated scenarios and adapting to new ones was the core of what made HITMAN so fun for me, and while finally killing my targets and making it out of the zone alive did take more than a few tries with each mission, I still felt satisfied by the end, no matter how I got it done. These levels were definitely meant to be played over and over again until all of their options have been executed, but as far as first impressions go, I thought that HITMAN was a pretty good stealth game, although its definition of the word "sandbox" seems to be a bit flawed.

The best Hitman game I've played so far. Every map is an immense stage of intervowen opportunities that just begs to be further explored. The different mission stories are a nice narrative experience, although they can make the missions a bit to easy and hand-holdy. The sheer scale and replayability of the maps more than make up for the smaller selection of different scenarios. Out of all the maps, Sapienza was definitely my favourite. Such a beautiful, dynamic map with such fun and intricate avenues for assassinations. If Hitman 2 and 3 are anything like this one, then I have a lot of exciting assassination missions to explore, plan and execute.

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.

The sheer amount of detail placed into every single level is insane. Each level feels like a miniature sandbox, with countless different ways of approaching and completing each mission and enough hints to ensure that finding new approaches isn’t a chore. Unfortunately however, the thing holding this game back is that the approaches themselves can sometimes be a chore, with long stretches of following the slowest moving npcs ever or waiting around for an event to occur. The other problem is that outside of these approaches, the means of assassination are all the same. Despite these problems, the game is still fun to play, but there are some clear ways it could be improved.

played through the game again on master difficulty, after getting the levels through hitman iii, and I gotta say, this feels like the way the game was meant to be played. gone are the hints on how to complete the mission stories, and instead you have to work out how to complete them yourself. they aren't even that much harder to figure out, and yet it feels completely different without the tutorials and tips helping you along.

the inability to save scum also improves the game a lot, as it adds more tension to your every action and forces you to think quickly when your plan doesn't work, instead of just reloading a save from 10 seconds ago and trying again. I have found save scumming to be a pretty big problem for me in immersive sims and hitman's solution to it feels very appropriate for the kind of game that it is

replaying has also reminded me of how damn good this game is! pretty much all of the levels are great (i even enjoyed colorado this time round) and there are a ton of viable solutions to any given problem that you encounter.

sadly, the online system is still garbage, and the (questionable) requirement for an connection to a server in order to play the game is going to be what kills in in the long run, when it's no longer profitable for the servers to keep running, and this incredible SINGLE PLAYER game becomes impossible to fully experience

This is one of those games that I never thought I would fall in love with. I tend to hate repetition in games, but really liked how Hitman does it. You’re given a giant map and a target and it’s up to you to figure out how to take out that target. I found myself enjoying the discovery of new and better ways to take out my targets. I love how over the top the levels got and despite how many times I played a levels, I’d get new equipment and try more over the top hits. It’s a game that rewards creativity and planning and it’s really what you make of it.

(CAMPAIGN PLAYED WITH HITMAN: WORLD OF ASSASSINATION)

The new generation of consoles gave the Hitman series the perfect evolution. A once pretty creative and unique game, Hitman now has been extended to a point where, more than making stealth missions and doing cool, undercover stuff, now it's a big playground to make the most creative assassinations you can ever think of.

On the top of that, the game gives you a great variety of new options, weapons, gadgets and even missions spread across the big maps to play and interact with, making any approach unique and super fun, and complemented by great setups for the missions, from a fashion parade to an undercover terrorist group hidden in a farm on Colorado.

The downside is the fact that, sadly, the game falls a bit short, but fortunately the number of variants you can do per mission makes the replay value stand out a lot.

Amazing game, a pretty compelling story that builds up to the second game, full of amazing, fun and tense moments that only you can make and experiment by yourself.