Hitman: Intro Pack (Video Game)
Developed by IO Interactive
Published by Square Enix
Available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One
Rated M for Mature
When I first booted up Hitman: Codename 47 in the early 2000s, I felt like I had glimpsed into the secret world of “real” gaming. I was around 13 at the time, and had gotten the game off of a bootleg disk that contained a number of titles. It was a practice common in the days before DRM, as friends would pass each other disks loaded with poorly copied installers that would break more often than work. We’d trade our most recent concoctions, go home for the weekend, and come back to discuss what new wonders we’d uncovered. Good games would slowly spread through the circle, a free market of ideas and exploration that you just don’t get in the modern internet age.
I didn’t have “cool parents,” so outside of witnessing the occasional Unreal Tournament round at the houses of my less supervised friends, the bloodiest thing I had convinced my parents to let me play was Counter-Strike (something about blowing away terrorists struck a chord with post 9-11 sentiments). Even so, I always found these twitch reflex games to be kind of boring, preferring the more cerebral challenge of strategy games like Red Alert 2 and Starcraft. I wasn’t really a “gamer” yet, so the more hardcore games like Morrowind that some friends played were too hard to get into.
Shooting, stabbing, and strangling my way through Hitman: Codename 47 felt unlike any game had to me before. It was tight, fluid, complex, and darkly hilarious. It was the perfect game to experience in the schoolyard setting, where new methods of execution and unlockable secrets could be shared, discussed, and replicated dozens of times before a single level would lose its excitement. I’m definitely a victim of the nostalgia fairy on this one, but I still maintain that the game holds up if you were to play it today. There’s just nothing quite like donning the signature suit, garrote wire, and double Hard/Silverballers, and getting to work on some high class assassination.
This man has single-handedly made an entire generation of boys interested in formal attire, piano lessons, and early-onset male pattern baldness.
Realizing this, I have to take a step back for a bit while looking at the newest Hitman. With the release of the recent “Intro Pack,” IO Interactive has been making basically the same game for 16 years (sometimes more literally than others). It’s a practice that theoretically should draw some scorn, but in the modern age of annual rehash releases it’s actually kind of refreshing to see a company release only a few of the same game per decade.
With this perspective in mind, I tried my best to approach Hitman as neutrally as possible. It’s an almost impossible task given my deep history with the franchise, but I need to temper my urges to both love and hate this game. Of all the imperfect Hitman titles, this most recent Hitman might be the most imperfect.
Players familiar with the series should feel immediately at home with Hitman. It’s still the same game that fans love, replete with unique open locations and stylized kills. Sure, you can always just go for a quick clean headshot and walk away, but isn’t it much more fun to drop a boat on someone? Players reprise the role of series icon Agent 47, but will spend more time in the outfits of various guards, staff, and sometimes supermodels in an attempt to infiltrate deeper into their target’s lair. They have reverted back to the original Hitman heavy stealth focus, so if you do find yourself in a firefight expect to go down pretty quickly. It’s not impossible to go through guns blazing, but you’ll actually have to arm yourself with some serious firepower to stand a chance.
You know it’s a Hitman game when you have a perfectly good headshot lined up and you go for shooting the chandelier down instead.
Only the first map “Showstopper” is out, but if it’s an indication of things to come, fans should be pleased. The sprawling location dwarfs what we saw in Absolution. You’ll experience each map for the first time as a main story mission, each with dozens of methods of completion. On top of that are a number of challenges, ranging from discovering a special item to killing every target in only your suit and the fiber wire. Completing challenges unlocks new weapons, starting locations, costumes, and agency supply caches, broadening how you can tackle each mission and rewarding varied playthroughs.
It’s honestly a bit overwhelming at first. Going in for the first time, it’s hard to get your bearings. There are a number of mechanics that will ease you into this, the first of which is the returning “instinct mode.” In line with the return to stealth focus, it no longer serves to mark targets or provide instant concealment. It’s now the Hitman equivalent of “detective vision,” highlighting your target and enemies through walls. I know some people will complain about it, but it’s almost a necessity given the size of the maps.
I expect that the more controversial mechanic will be the new “opportunities.” Opportunities serve as a kind of “choose your own adventure” system, where players can pick from a list how they wish to go about assassinating their target. It’s a novel concept, mixing the hand-holding objectives of more linear games with the open world creative style of Hitman. It tells you all the steps you have to take, but not specifically how to go about taking them, so there still is a degree of freedom. A lot of people will consider this mode to be too simple and ruining the spirit of the franchise, but I found it to be a nice way to explore a new map the first few times. Not every unique kill is listed as an opportunity, so there’s plenty of room for experimentation.
How did I get here? Somewhere along the way, it stopped being about the assassination, and became about killing this pose. Fierce.
And experiment you will. The Hitman franchise at its core has always been about finding new ways to have fun murdering people. This is where things get a little dicey. While the new unique kills are all fun and complex, a few major hiccups get in the way. First, I encountered a disconcerting amount of bugs for a game that as of now is basically just a single level. Several times I would try to fulfil a unique objective only for a scripting error to force me to restart the whole level. If it bugs out, you can certainly try to complete the mission a different way, but there’s no telling what kind of conflicts this will create. At one point, I hacked a target’s computer to shut down an auction, but her assistant wouldn’t properly trigger the event that leaves the target unguarded. “No big deal,” I thought, “I’ll just get her during one of her many other scripted alone times.” Well, for some reason, her bodyguard was now glued to her like novelty googly eyes, bouncing around her comically no matter how inconvenient. She’d sit down, and he’d just stand on the couch, doggedly watching over his ward no matter the circumstance. It broke my immersion just a bit.
People criticized Absolution for being too linear, but realistically every Hitman game has this to a certain degree. Every specialized kill or Silent Assassin condition required some pretty strict sequencing to pull off, so while you theoretically could lure the target into a woodchipper by throwing bricks for an hour, you generally didn’t. For these specific interactions, Hitman nails it. Overhearing a bartender complain about having to mix a drink he doesn’t know how to, knocking him out, and serving that drink to the target with a cyanide spritzer is a distinctly Hitman pleasure. Unfortunately, interacting with the rest of the world is far less rewarding.
This becomes apparent when you try to tackle some of the game’s new “escalation” missions. Serving as increasingly difficult “hard mode” variants of the main missions, they task you with hunting down a specific random schmuck other than the main target. Casting aside all of the fun poisonings and chandelier droppings, you have to rely on the basic distracting, disguising, shooting, and strangling to get the job done. It’s during these missions that the world feels hollow. While the map was meticulously crafted to allow multiple avenues to the main targets, getting to Jimmy in the bedroom on level 2 while dressed as a waiter wasn’t as well thought out. Here’s where you’ll find yourself flipping coins for an hour to distract guards far enough away to get in.
I spent a good twenty minutes shimmying before I discovered that A) there wasn’t a window entrance and B) instead of asking you what you are doing, the guards just compliment you on your excellent parkour skills.
What’s worse is that these escalation missions serve as the drip feed between major content packs. I will admit to a certain joy I get out of having to assassinate three people with a sword while dressed as a vampire magician, but I wish the mechanics of the game backed it up. You might be saying to yourself, “Bah, Ted! That’s the stuff I did in the original Hitman: Codename 47! All that is just fine with me!” I’m not saying that those games are now bad, just that the fundamental mechanics haven’t evolved in 15 years. The game can become as pretty and varied as it wants, but as long as the fundamentals say the same, these freer form objectives will always be inferior to the more constructed ones. And after all, isn’t a more open Hitman what everyone wanted?
There’s nothing that really matches up to the stylized world of covert conspiracies and brutal assassinations that Hitman has created. Often imitated, it seems to be only in a race with itself to evolve. It’s still the same macabre dream-fuel that it was in my youth, and even as I write this my mind wanders with new and exquisite ways to take a life. We all wish that this was the real world, where assassins had code names and class instead of drug addictions and an Uzi. And yet, I am underwhelmed. There’s still plenty of time for the game to impress me, and I hope it does. There’s theoretically a ton of content here. As it stands, it’s just not content I’m compelled to master.
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Categorized:Horror Gaming Reviews
