Hitman - The 47th Rugbrød Rye

For years, I’ve found myself returning again and again to the Hitman franchise. I can’t get enough of Agent 47. He is a clone with no external motivation, goals or interests aside from the will of The Agency that employs him. But by nature, he is unfeeling and callous, so what’s the appeal? For starters, it helps that 47 is an absolute badass with an ever-expanding wardrobe I would adopt in a second. But the answer lies within the mechanics. The game just feels smooth - the controls are tight and responsive. Arguably, HITMAN isn’t a shooter, nor a stealth game, but a puzzle game. Yet these puzzles have multiple solutions, and this is what I cling to.

The game is a sandbox, my own private den of clockwork perfection. The creators at IO Interactive have always sought the freedom of approach, so whether you like guns, bombs, poison or fiber wire, the choice is yours. Take the first level, a Parisian haute couture fashion show, for example. The targets are Dalia Margolis and Viktor Novikov. You don’t have Master Chief levels of endurance so if you run in guns a’ blazing, you’ll be taken down easily. That said, there are still plenty of ways to be sloppy and escape unscathed if you know what you’re doing. The real joy is in the disguises. Taking the outfit of a renown model for a private meeting with Dalia, or dressing as a bodyguard to oversee a rendezvous hosted by Viktor invite clean, unnoticed kills that allow you to walk away nonchalantly. Tied for first, and by far the most challenging, is attempting the level suit-only.


That said, not everyone in this community shares my fandom and I’ve never seen such constant fan controversy than on the IOI HITMAN Facebook page. Comments range from the praise of brilliance, to the moans of malcontent and some people are seriously pissed off that IOI is releasing their content episodically. One person I spoke with said they prefer to go into a level, beat it, and leave. But… that isn’t HITMAN - at all. I could probably beat all six of the game’s levels in two hours or less if I wanted. But that would be a flat and boring experience indeed. On top of this, they told me they guarantee the whole game was complete by the time IOI released episode one.

I doubt that.

People forget that game developers are human beings who have to get paid and pay for rent and eat food, just like we do. If you follow IOI, you’d know that they had to lay off ~50% of their staff in 2013 and abandon all other projects to focus on HITMAN. So a lot was riding on this. Episode 1 released in March with the latest Episode 6 releasing in October. Waiting 7 months with no real income isn’t feasible. This and the fact that so much goes into creating games, especially with level design as complex as HITMAN’s, goes over people’s heads. So yeah. Episodic content is quite reasonable. Frustration stems from fans narrowly envisioning a singular goal that ends on the first successful kill of their target. IOI keeps it optional but people act like they don’t know what type of game they’ve created, or that they’re out to trick them. It‘s like they’re blamed for not being Call of Duty. Apart from that, old fans want HITMAN to be Hitman: Blood Money (released in 2006). My message to them would be to go play Hitman: Blood Money. Imagine that.

Why the fuck do you even follow this page?

Of course, there’s the other side of the coin.

The game isn’t without its flaws. At HITMAN’s release, Paris didn’t have any real spoken French (feel free to roll your eyes at me). The only time I heard any was when a policeman with a vest reading “SÉCURITÉ” on the back sarcastically called me garçon with an American accent while I passed by wearing the waiter disguise. And speaking of accents, there’s rarely a sense of region in this game.  Listen closely and you can hear a fucking american police siren in France. By episode 4, after having been to Paris, Sapienza and Marrakesh, we hear our first British NPC… in Bangkok. This being after nearly nothing but American. I caught the scent of nostalgia, however, in  the final level of Hokkaido. They have stationary hospital workers who bow and ask お元気ですか? It’s definitely appreciated, and I’d love to see more of it.

Language seems like a big obstacle for IOI, and I completely get it. Hitman: Absolution (2012) had fully supported voice acting in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Polish and Russian. I imagine this added a few dollars to the budget. For HITMAN, many reactionary voice lines are both heavily recycled and copied over from Absolution. I wouldn’t normally have a problem with that. I could listen to Steve Blum’s guttural, silky voice all day, but I might hear him in a conversation every 5 minutes, inhabiting a new body. With only a handful of voice actors, many making a return pass, I will add the caveat that most grouped NPCs have conversations unique to their environment, and it’s all new content exclusive to HITMAN. In Blood Money, there were levels in Chile and France. Guards native to the country spoke only the national language, which would actually cause problems because they’d use hand gestures to warn me not to enter an area, but would sometimes open fire on me without a clue to why. It helps the immersion and authenticity, but there’s a fine line between immersion and the frustration of being punished with no clue why.

Despite some sentiments, HITMAN is in no way strapped for content. The missions are as long as players need them to be. So far, I’ve put 190 hours through the main campaign and the challenges that encourage a diverse approach. On top of this, not only are there nearly endless amounts of community-created contacts, but the IOI devs continually add escalation contracts on non-story targets. These require various specific tools, disguises and include alterations to AI behavior. These give me a fresh spin to a familiar map. Notably, I loved using the ejector seat of a fighter jet to propel a target hundreds of feet in the air with no parachute in one level.

On top of challenges, escalations and unlockable suits, the final piece of continual developer content are the fabulous only-once-ever Elusive Targets. If you die, you aren’t allowed to retry (ever) and once you start an objective, you’re locked in. It’s anxiety provoking at times, and it’s the rush that makes those 103 challenges feel like practice for the real thing. I’ve had elated and soul-crushing moments alike. Today, I took out the Chameleon, which was great! I needed to assassinate the target in an “accident,” so I laced his water bottle with an emetic poison and drowned him in the toilet while he.. erm, went to handle it. The gratifying exhilaration is what brings me back for more.

It’s an atypical game structure and I’d need more feedback from lay people on how compelling this game is to discover new techniques and learn. The game is about learning a location and executing flawless social engineering to find various ways to assassinate your targets. Overall, HITMAN is beautiful and DAMN complex, as I expected. The maps are huge, there’s a ton to discover and there’s high replay value. My love was born in Absolution, which by narrative necessity is the end of the tale of the Silent Assassin. But I anticipate spending a great many more hours in HITMAN as later seasons, escalations and Elusive Targets release. This game succeeds at exactly what it’s setting out to accomplish.

Keep up the great work, fuck the haters.