Hitman

I can see it now, thousands of ‘em surrounding me, screaming and scratching at the pile of cars, on top of which I stand, alone in my truth. Their noises join to form a homogeneous hum that praises the newest Hitman game but I will continue to stand here, bravely screaming that they are all WRONG. Someone has to be the voice of reason and that burden is on me.

Firstly, this game is still filled with game-breaking bugs, months after its release. The last target in a mission was a woman who got alarmed by an unattended weapon on the floor, but her AI was unable to react to it. Normally, she is supposed to call someone to take it away, but instead she just stood there in that small space. I was unable to kill her silently because her bodyguards were right next to her so there goes my perfect score. Another time, there was an unconscious body of a guard on the floor. As I approached him, I heard a voice. I thought it must have been one of the other bodyguards. As I continued walking up the stairs, I heard someone turning suspicious and calling to me. I turned around and there was the unconscious body of the guard floating up the stairs towards me. Someone must have woken him up after I knocked him out, but the game glitched and the character was never returned to his original state. In another mission, I discovered that I could not drop the proximity mine without arming it and certain parts of the game require you to drop all weapons before entering a location because they are illegal items. So if you drop the proximity mine, you lose it for the rest of the mission and potentially compromise the mission if someone else comes near it. In this manner, I was fighting the bugs and the poor design choices much more than any enemies.

Secondly, the rating system. The game rates your performance after each mission, and the 5 star Silent Assassin rating can only be reached if no bodies are found, no one but the main target is killed and you are not compromised in any way. Playing the game this way, however, forces you to follow a very linear scripted order of actions to get your target into a secluded location where you can finish the job cleanly. This defeats the whole purpose of the open-world sandbox that the developers created because doing any of the fun stuff will detract from your score. And of course, you cannot accept any rating lesser than Silent Assassin, because then you would have to stab your eye repeatedly with a pair scissors as you yell out uncontrollably until the world explodes.

Thirdly, and related to the rating system, is the way this game handles replayability. There are many optional challenges for each mission that cannot all be completed on the first try because some of them contradict one another. As you complete these challenges, you level up for that specific map, unlocking new disguises and items only for that specific map. In short, the game wants you to keep replaying the same maps. This design choice almost short-circuits my brain.

Clearly other people do not have this problem, but there are few things more unpleasant for me than having to go back and replay parts of the main story that I already experienced. It's like trying to have sex during the refractory period. Also, all the other game modes rely on placing new targets on the maps from the main campaign. So wait a second, you just happen to receive a contract for a target in the exact same location as before...several times over? How can you sell that to your own brain? How does that not completely destroy immersion for you?

Fourthly, there are all the external negative factors. You have to be always online to play this single-player game (I thought we agreed to roast alive any developers that would do this). The main menu is chaotic and the main campaign feels hidden away as just one of the many modes and options. Once you complete one of the main missions, instead of continuing, you can only go back to the main menu. This flow-breaking thing is not a surprise, considering that the developers have been releasing this game one mission at a time. However, they are still asking you to pay for the game. And people let them get away with it! Hitman was going to be a failed product, a buggy unfinished mess that the developers decided to shove onto the market anyway, and instead of punishing this behavior, people are buying themselves a promise. This is probably what makes me the most mad, because it encourages developers to release these "game as a service" products, which is often just another way of saying, "Please pay us money now and we will see what we decide to give you for it, if anything at all". Don't get me wrong, the Illusive Target mode, in which you only get one try at an exclusive target, is interesting and would be great except...it is still set in the Hitman game, where some guard detected my actions despite the fact that he was clearly not facing me and the whole mission went to sh*t.

In short, this game is infuriating. I haven’t played such a buggy piece of junk in a long time. This would not be as big of a problem if all you had to do was to kill someone but there are all these challenges and, if you do not execute your kill cleanly and stealthily, the game gives you a poor rating that stares you in the eyes after the completion of the mission like a thorn in your side. Trying to be precise and accurate in Hitman is like an intoxicated plumber trying to perform brain surgery. You have been fooled people! Wake the f*ck up!