Hitman

HITMAN is a return to form for the series' roots, whilst keeping what made Hitman: Absolution fun to play - and adding necessary tweaks to make for the perfect experience in this international contract-killing series. Here is my review on IO Interactive's soft reboot to the long-running series, HITMAN:

HITMAN Review (Xbox One)

Synopsis

HITMAN starts as a prequel to all of the mainline game's events. Starting in 1999, you take control of Agent 47 as he passes several examinations to join the ICA - a worldwide assassination contract organization. This serves as the game's tutorial, giving you enough to know how the world of HITMAN works.

The game then flashes forward to 20 years time in 2019. Around this time, 47 is tasked in assassinating numerous, seemingly unrelated targets around the world for a particular shadow client. Agent 47 is given assistance & friendly advice from his handler, Diana Burnwood, throughout the course of the game.

Although the story is not the strong-point of the Hitman series, the story here is good enough to be a standard action film (making it better than the actual Hitman films storyline).

Gameplay

HITMAN is a sandbox game with stealth gameplay elements, which means you are given an open environment and plenty of tools to do the objective in any way you see fit. In this case, you can assassinate your main targets anyway you want - you can simply shoot them in the head, but this would be boring and more trouble than is worth. Or, alternatively, you can keep track on your target and take them out silently or using the world around you to cause an accident. The amount of options is limitless and the game often rewards you for exploring and assassinating targets in varied, strategic and most often fun ways.

As a result of complaints on Absolution's linear map design, HITMAN now has a more open environment for the player to explore and find opportunities - these opportunities, when found, can help you get closer to the target or even cause the target to come to you. Although this can be seen as hand-holding, you don't have to follow these opportunities when they are given to you.

Other significant improvements include trespassing zones, whereas in other Hitman titles if you are caught trespassing you are shot down by guards, in HITMAN (2016) you are escorted back to a non-restricted area by guards and given enough chances to not be in combat. This gives a sense of realism to the game's maps, which is what HITMAN is good at but not particularly best-known for. Another major, but also minor improvement is the usage of enforcers (people who can see through disguises and know if you are suspicious), this improves over Absolution's mentality of "every gardener knows each other"

Hitman: Absolution's instinct game mechanic returns, but now acts similar to eagle eye from the Assassin's Creed games - giving you the target's location and where people are on-screen as opposed to using a map.

There are six maps provided with the experience of HITMAN. The first map, the ICA Facility is downloaded with the game and serves as a tutorial to the player. The other maps can be bought with real money and were released episodically. Some of these maps include Paris, Italy, Japan and Bangkok just to name a few. All of these maps are much bigger than the maps in previous Hitman titles, and some give you more than one target or may add an extra objective (such as destroy an item or protect a non-target).

Contract mode from Hitman: Absolution returns, which is a mode where you can manually choose a target and kill them with a particular disguise and weapon. This adds a level of replay ability, and can be played for as long as the game servers are active. Unlike elusive targets, which are targets you can only kill once during a certain time limit, and if you mess up you cannot restart. None of these elusive targets from HITMAN can be played again however, so I can't comment much on it.

HITMAN has the most refined gameplay out of all of the other Hitman games, and it comes extremely close in vein to what we previously got with Hitman: Blood Money.

Graphics

HITMAN has very good graphics, especially on Xbox One. And the graphics do not affect the performance of the game either. HITMAN provides a good extensive colour palette, and the cut-scenes look brilliant. The character models look okay, but Agent 47 looks as good as he ever did before.

Audio

HITMAN's soundtrack sounds a lot like the original game - that being Hitman: Codename 47 (which I thought had a good soundtrack performed by Jesper Kyd). However, the soundtrack here is done by someone else. And since I like the soundtrack of the first and second game, I thought that the soundtrack of HITMAN was on-point with what I expect from the series. A classical soundtrack mixed with electronic beats and rhythms here-and-there.

HITMAN has much more voice lines than in any other entry to the series. Agent 47's voice actor, David Bateson, has more spoken dialogue than in any other Hitman game as of that time - which gives him more personality and hearing his subtle nods to death is hilarious. Aside from that, the voice work here is above average and is very clear with little to no hiccups whatsoever.

However, although this game is set in a multitude of locations all across the globe, many of the characters in the game are voiced by the same 4 or 5 American actors. Which sounds very out-of-place to be hearing several American-sounding voices in Italy or Paris.

All in all, voice acting is great across the board - but the lack of actors providing voices unique to the game's locations is strange and kind of puts you out of the experience.

Conclusion

HITMAN is a great game for old-time fans and newcomers alike. Although the episodic nature of the game may be off-putting, the overall game experience of the Hitman franchise is here and should be an enjoyable experience no matter how experienced you are in the art of contract killing. That is why I give HITMAN a full 5/5 stars.