Hitman 2

PC, PS4, Xbox One

Orson Mills heads straight for the bottle of vodka on the counter when he enters the house, as you know he always does. In a parallel universe locked away in a different save slot there’s rat poison waiting in his glass. In another universe still you’re waiting on the roof, ready to poison the air supply to the panic room or shoot a single silenced bullet through the bedroom skylight into your target’s skull. But not this time. This time the poison’s been administered on the sugar cube Alma Reynard drops into her tea, and when it dissolves in her cup it sets forth a chain of events that ends with a kitchen knife through her neck, and a hasty exit across a moonlit New Zealand beach.

If IO’s Hitman series has taught us nothing else since its maligned 2000 debut, it’s taught us this: an assassin’s two greatest weapons aren’t silenced pistols and fibre wire, but eavesdropping and time travel. Now more than ever Agent 47 relies on the loose lips of passing strangers and his singular ability to attempt a hit over and over again until every target, bodyguard and civilian’s movements appear to him like clockwork, ingrained into his memory by endless repetition. He is Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, but with murders.

Hitman 2 even presents a slice of picture-perfect American suburbia among its six locations, and although Whittleton Creek bears little resemblance to Punxsutawney upon the first playthrough, by the tenth you’ll swear there’s a hint of Sonny and Cher’s I Got You, Babe playing in among the chatter of political canvassers, realtors, gardeners and fumigators. It’s the broad design approach of its episodic predecessor taken to a further extreme. Whereas the mission stories in 2016’s Hitman felt like an optional means to permeate its daunting locales, now they feel all but mandatory. Good luck navigating the sprawling Mumbai slums or the multiple neighbourhoods within Santa Fortuna without a mission marker lighting your path. And where repeated playthroughs revealed initially hidden levels of detail before, in Hitman 2 there’s no such coyness. Its levels are unashamedly overwhelming on the first visit, its menus telling you explicitly that this is a game designed to be played and replayed.

This isn’t a major failing, but it is a shift in design that you might not expect from what’s ostensibly a mission pack for the 2016 game. Little has changed mechanically between releases, but by honing in on the community’s positive reception to Sapienza and similarly vast levels, IO has redefined the Hitman experience. It’s a series of impressive venues for player-directed setpieces that bears replaying, but it’s no longer a stealth sandbox in the Blood Money or Contracts mould.

That much is evident when you’re spotted in the cocaine fields of Santa Fortuna by Jorge Franco’s heavily armed guards and you’re left to watch Agent 47, a trained killer, stand impassively with a machete in his hand while four gunmen within slashing range shoot him to death. Interactions have become so contextual that there’s very little opportunity to bungle an escape or Heath Robinson a hit gone awry, and the fact that melee weapons can’t be used for melee combat is the flag-bearer for that shift. Fortunately, the delights that reveal themselves when Hitman 2 is played as intended – in one of several prescribed paths per level – are ample. Sniper missions return and all-new Ghost Mode multiplayer challenges more experienced assassins to eliminate five targets before an opponent, but it’s the solo campaign where the substance is found. Its opener on Hawke’s Bay is a surprise highlight: a beachside house in Dear Estheresque twilight, no initial targets, and an ocean’s worth of grim atmosphere lapping against the shore. That you enter the house without any targets to eliminate shows that IO’s still capable of invention even this deep into the franchise, and the way Hawke’s Bay turns your role on a dime from burglar to assassin presents delicious opportunities for forward planning. It’s in these more contained, more readable environments that Hitman 2 shines (Whittleton Creek is another fine example, likewise the finale on the Isle of Sgaig). You’re able to hone in on the details, without the need to lean on Focus Mode every ten seconds or chase a mission marker, and before long every facet becomes familiar; manipulable. By your third visit to these locales you’re ducking out of guards’ sights and syncing up with NPC routines without thinking.

Of Hitman 2’ s larger maps, Miami is the most exciting. It takes 47 to a race track, a novel setting for the series, presents a convincing sense of scale, and manages a few knowing jokes without breaking character entirely: coming across a man who knocked out a mascot in the underground car park in order to steal his disguise will prove a highlight to all but the most curmudgeonly killer. It’s also a venue that makes the game’s problems with reactivity starkly clear, given that the on-track fatality of your target’s met with nary a mention on the podium and doesn’t even summon a black flag from the race organisers. A level-wide dynamic shift might have sold the simulation more, but that’s nitpicking in the face of cartoonish enjoyment.

There are moments to savour throughout Hitman 2, and they all have a corpse lying somewhere. The barber’s chair in Mumbai and the platform beneath a statue of a cartel thug in Santa Fortuna. The Miami pit lane and the glass penthouse on Sgail. They no longer exist in an anything-goes stealth sandbox, instead forming part of a long checklist of linear objectives. But those objectives are of sufficient number and satisfaction to hold your attention, and reward repeated ventures into Hitman 2’ s dark, detailed microcosms.

An assassin’s two greatest weapons aren’t silenced pistols and fibre wire, but eavesdropping and time travel