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
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