A HOOT DISGUISED AS A SHOOT-’EM-UP
Hitman III (PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, £54.99) Verdict: To die for ★★★★★ Down In Bermuda (PC, Switch, £15.49) Verdict: Pack your bags ★★★★✩
IF YOU lay out the facts like an assassin laying out his weaponry, Hitman III looks rather too familiar. It’s the concluding part of a trilogy that is itself part of a series stretching back two decades and many other games. It involves shadowy networks and globe-spanning adventures. And it has you, or rather the taciturn Agent 47, killing lots of bad guys.
But the game’s developers, IO Interactive, have taken those hoary old tropes, applied some craft and imagination, and made something stunningly inventive. Hitman III should basically be regarded as a series of intricate puzzle boxes.
Each detailed level, from a stately home on Dartmoor to a sunbaked vineyard in Argentina, offers you dozens of ways to pull off your kill.
Do you dress as a security guard to approach the chef to put poison in the soup? Or do you — and this is possible — electrify the wine supply? It helps that Hitman III is hilarious. Darkly, subversively hilarious. It deposits your agent in silly situations and encourages you to dress him up in increasingly outlandish disguises. He is the granite-faced straight man (pictured) in a world of mishap.
Even failing feels good. This is true within each level, when your meticulous plan goes wrong and you have to come up with a new one on the fly (and with bullets flying round you).
But it’s also true outside of each level, when the game reveals what you missed, all the other ways you could have knocked off your target.
They sound like great fun! You duly go back in, again and again.
It’s true, the same could be said of the previous two games in the trilogy. Hitman III is a continuation of them in both form and story. But it’s also a refinement and, at times, a subversion.
One level, set at a Berlin rave, brilliantly switches your role from hunter to hunted — and is a masterpiece of game design.
So it’s mission complete, both for Agent 47 and IO. Hitman III is the crowning moment of a crowning achievement in video games.
DOWN In Bermuda is a more traditional sort of puzzle game: one creative conundrum after another, all in service of helping a crashed pilot escape from a set of colourful desert islands.
My Bermudian contacts tell me that the actual island looks nothing like this, but escapism trumps realism in lockdown. This is an engaging way to fill a spare couple of hours.