These games are pure catnip to me. The intricate clockwork dioramas of the level designs are made tactile and enthralling by allowing the player to wreak havoc within them and see what happens. In a lesser game even this premise could wear thin after a time, but IOI knows exactly how to wring every ounce of value out of the worlds they create, from the stories woven throughout to the escalations that reframe the levels to even just the quality of writing that makes it worth listening to all the little conversations between NPCs.
The level design in 2 is generally excellent: levels exist with different organizing principles, from multiple strongholds connected by a common area like Mumbai and Miami, to layered increases in security like New York and Sgàil, to the spectacularly iconoclastic Whittleton Creek. My biggest complaint is that the DLC special assignments are lackluster, generally smaller in scope than their Hitman 1 equivalents and substantially less transformative of the levels that contain them.
I'll also mention Freelancer mode here since I played it along with Hitman 2. The underlying concept there is genius, forcing players like me who take a save-heavy approach to the game to take a wildly different approach, think on our toes, and learn to use tools that may have just sat in the loadout screen. But at the same time, failure is often more frustrating than it is fun or educational. It's just too easy to take an action that looks safe only to trigger an alarm, get gunned down, and lose your entire campaign out of nowhere.
What Freelancer needs (and the rest of the game could certainly make profitable use of) is a little bit more indication of what is or is not allowed. Show me trespassing boundaries in focus mode. Let me know whether I'm being watched before I chuck an iron at a guard's head. Guessing and checking works well enough when saves are involved, but it's not quite up to the task for a mode with such heavy consequences.
(Played Hitman 2 levels and escalations in World of Assassination)
The level design in 2 is generally excellent: levels exist with different organizing principles, from multiple strongholds connected by a common area like Mumbai and Miami, to layered increases in security like New York and Sgàil, to the spectacularly iconoclastic Whittleton Creek. My biggest complaint is that the DLC special assignments are lackluster, generally smaller in scope than their Hitman 1 equivalents and substantially less transformative of the levels that contain them.
I'll also mention Freelancer mode here since I played it along with Hitman 2. The underlying concept there is genius, forcing players like me who take a save-heavy approach to the game to take a wildly different approach, think on our toes, and learn to use tools that may have just sat in the loadout screen. But at the same time, failure is often more frustrating than it is fun or educational. It's just too easy to take an action that looks safe only to trigger an alarm, get gunned down, and lose your entire campaign out of nowhere.
What Freelancer needs (and the rest of the game could certainly make profitable use of) is a little bit more indication of what is or is not allowed. Show me trespassing boundaries in focus mode. Let me know whether I'm being watched before I chuck an iron at a guard's head. Guessing and checking works well enough when saves are involved, but it's not quite up to the task for a mode with such heavy consequences.
(Played Hitman 2 levels and escalations in World of Assassination)