Why I love... Climbing the leaderboards in Hitman 2
Improving my time gave me a greater appreciation for IO’s stealth sandbox.
When our former editorin-chief Samuel Roberts tweeted that he’d claimed the top spot on the leaderboards for the Hawke’s Bay level of Hitman 2, I felt like I had something to prove. I’d reviewed Hitman 2. I’d reviewed every episode of 2016’s Hitman. While I’m open to the possibility that other people are better at the series than me, I wasn’t about to let someone who worked for the same magazine hold the top spot.
I returned to the New Zealand beach house and started optimising. Maybe if I hid over here? Perhaps if I tossed a coin over there? An hour of experimentation later, and I’d beaten Samuel’s score. I’d also realised there’s much more I could do. My current time was fine, but I was pretty sure it could be beaten.
Hitman is an interesting leaderboard game because speed isn’t everything; you also need style. The conditions required for a Silent Assassin run – never spotted, no noticed kills, no bodies found, no recordings – each award a flat 20,000 points, for an 80,000 score bonus. Without that, it doesn’t matter how fast you finish, you’ll struggle to earn enough points to reach the top. Isolating the mission’s target, Alma Reynard, takes time. As more people joined our ad-hoc competition for score supremacy, and as our completion times reached down to the three minute mark, it was clear that further gains would require inventive solutions.
For me, Hitman isn’t really a game about killing. That’s just set decoration for an intricate puzzle box of interlocking systems and behaviours. Chasing a good score often means exploiting the consequences of Hitman’s consistent ruleset in a way that further strips the already flimsy
Played at this speed, it’s less about waiting as it is sprinting with precision.
sense of immersion. You don’t lose your Silent Assassin rank, for instance, if a body looks like it died a natural death. You can lace a drink with poison, and, when the body’s found, it’ll be written off as a heart attack. That rings true even in the most absurd extreme. Which means if I toss a coin to distract Alma’s guards and then inject Alma with a poison syringe in the brief moment they look the other way, I still get a Silent Assassin rating. I also get a time of 1:46, thoroughly beating the rest of the group.
TRIGGER HAPPY
Sapienza is Hitman’s best level, and also the leaderboard time I’m most proud of. After trading backand-forth with Samuel, I held the lead with an 11:22 run.
Beginning in the mansion grounds disguised as a gardener, I run to a water bottle on a nearby table and spike it with emetic. Then I make a bee-line for the observatory. There’s a VHS tape on the top floor that, when open-palm slammed into the video player below, causes my first target, Silvio Caruso, to encounter a projected screen of childhood memories. He dismisses his guards to reminisce and I kill him and hide his body.