IO Interactive’s Hitman series has always been their bread and butter. After pioneering the game’s classic format with the somewhat shaky Hitman: Codename 47, they really hit their stride with the sequel, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. It’s notable that the original Codename 47 is the only one of the first four Hitman games to not get a high definition rerelease during the PS3/XBox 360 era – the third game, Hitman: Contracts, offered a mix of new missions and updated do-overs of the original game’s best levels, allowing them to benefit from the better controls and other improvements that IO had made, and it is this version which enjoyed more rereleases and repackages whilst Codename 47 sat fallow. Hitman: Blood Money further refined the basic format.
All the classic Hitman games follow the same general premise. You control Agent 47. Cloned by the unscrupulous Dr. Ort-Meyer as part of a nefarious project to create the ultimate killer, Agent 47 escaped his creator’s clutches and eventually found his way to joining the ICA – the International Contract Agency, the favoured assassination bureau of the global elite. 47 (often using the alias of “Tobias Rieper” where a conventional name is necessary) works under the direction of Diana Burnwood, the ICA handler who provides him with his mission briefings and occasionally pipes in with useful intel during his missions. As you might tell from this basic format, we are basically in espionage techno-thriller territory here, with just a whiff of cyberpunk to spice things up.
When it comes to the gameplay, like many great videogames, it’s based around a simple goal that is challenging to achieve, but can be accomplished in a great variety of ways. Each level is one of Agent 47’s missions, during which he must locate and kill his designated target (or targets) and then escape the area, occasionally also carrying out secondary objectives like obtaining valuable information.
Typically, the mission area will have numerous people wandering around, ranging from innocent bystanders to bodyguards to the targets themselves. Whilst many level designs work in cunning ways of accessing and eliminating your target, the best-received levels have always been amenable to you finding your own way and figuring out your own approach, essentially offering you a sandbox in which to devise and enact a murder.
This means that if you want to go in guns blazing, you absolutely can, though it will likely end badly for you; an emphasis is put on stealth and the player is encouraged to go for the “Silent Assassin” accolade, awarded if you complete a level by killing only your intended target (subduing others non-lethally is fine), leaving no evidence behind, and without being observed doing anything seriously dodgy. Often, the process of completing a level will entail obtaining some form of disguise, usually by knocking out someone appropriately dressed and quickly dressing in their clothes, thereby allowing 47 to, say, pretend he’s one of the troops who’s supposed to be on this army base or whatever.
The challenge of attaining Silent Assassin is often the source of much replayability of the levels, but the fact that you don’t need to get it to progress is a big help: it means you can progress in the game and enjoy more of the story without having to do things perfectly. And often things will go awry. Some of my most hilarious memories of playing the games involve operations where everything was going smoothly until the wrong guard saw me tossing his unconscious buddy into a meat locker, and then things kind of snowballed from there and it became a hideous massacre.
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 