Hitman 3
PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Developer/publisher IO Interactive Format PC, PS4 (tested), PS5, Stadia, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series (tested) Release Out now
There’s this feeling that settles in quickly, playing Hitman 3. Perhaps it hits immediately, as you look out from the world’s tallest building, sunlight bouncing off its exterior, a hot-air balloon bobbing along at eye level. Or maybe while you’re elbowing your way through another of the densest crowds we’ve ever seen in a videogame. It might even take until the second or third time the game upends the rules of how a Hitman mission can operate. Once it does, though, it’s hard to ignore the sense that IO Interactive is showing off.
It’s earned the right to. Starting with 2016’s reboot, the studio took a series with as much life in it as one of Agent 47’s victims and made it viable once more. The ensuing trilogy has won a new audience for these games, survived two changes of publisher and the studio being sold by its parent company – and now Hitman 3 is IO’s first self-published title. But if that’s led to a tightening of belts, you wouldn’t know it from these maps.
The game opens with the opulence of Dubai’s aforementioned Burj Khalifa knockoff, which proves no less impressive once you make it inside, all gilded architecture and glossy surfaces. The art installation at its heart is a particular treat, especially once you figure out how to wield it as an oversized murder weapon. Later on, the neon-lit streets of Chongqing provide another visual showcase, with drones and mind-control experiments dialling up the science-fiction elements to match the city’s cyberpunk gleam.
Dartmoor might be a little less spectacular, but it’s home to the first big twist on the formula: a whodunnit where 47 gets to leverage his vast hands-on experience to solve a murder (and then, naturally, commit another). Berlin goes the opposite way, paring things down to the barest essentials of a Hitman level – and in the process, making one of the series’ very best.
And then there’s Mendoza, home to a climactic mission fittingly titled ‘The Farewell’. It takes place in an Argentinian vineyard, currently hosting an exclusive party that takes us back where this entire trilogy began: a fashion show in Paris. Infiltrate past the velvet rope, and you’ll find plenty of opportunities to blend into the crowd and encourage the kind of accidents you’d hope 47 would be able to orchestrate out of grape pressers and fermentation tanks. Overlooking it all is a villa, home to the guest of honour – who, naturally, is one of your targets. You can lure him down to the party, or find a way past the guards to hit him where he lives. And, this being Hitman, the two halves are linked by all manner of passages and secret tunnels, including one of the few mechanical tweaks this game makes to its predecessors’ level design: ladders and doors which can be jimmied open to create permanent shortcuts, persisting across the multiple runs you’ll doubtless be taking at each map.
Mendoza has everything that has made this trilogy’s locations sing. There’s the sweep of Hitman 2’s largest maps, along with the kind of bisected, asymmetrical layout IO has been perfecting since Sapienza. And, most important of all, it makes for one hell of a virtual travel destination, cast along sloping hills that give way to a lake, with a quantity of sunlight that’s very welcome from the depths of a locked-down British winter.
Anyone keeping count may have noticed that this is only five locations, compared to the series’ traditional six. There is one final mission, the details of which we won’t spoil here, since its opening reveal is one of the game’s finest moments. But what follows is a rather slim coda, closer in scope to the tutorials and prologues of previous games than any of the other locations on offer here. It’d make for a slightly uneasy value proposition if the rest weren’t so gloriously overstuffed.
Besides, this is only one way of looking at Hitman 3 – as, essentially, a glorified map pack. It’s a role the game fills beautifully, with each of those five main locations pushing the levels of spectacle and intricacy to new heights. But it’s certainly not the only way. IO seems keen to position Hitman 3 as the conclusion of a three-part story. But it’s here that the game impresses least. It’s not the content or presentation that’s an issue, so much as a simple matter of structure. The trilogy may have jettisoned its episodic release strategy long ago, but that shape remains. Each location invites you to dabble after completion, continuing to sample its opportunities for creative murder, before jetting to the next and repeating the process over. Wedging cutscenes in between leaves them feeling like in-flight movies to pass the time en route to your next destination.
There’s also the question of what’s new here. With one notable exception – the PlayStation-only VR mode, more on which in the Post Script overleaf – the honest answer is: not much. Where previous instalments experimented with new modes of play, Hitman 3 is winnowed down to the necessities: the campaign, usergenerated Contracts, and a smattering of Escalation missions. We can probably expect to see more of the latter down the line, along with the time-limited Elusive Targets, but the selection at launch feels a little miserly, especially if you don’t invest in the Deluxe Edition of the game. Time will tell on this front.
Mechanically, it’s mostly a case of nips and tucks – we’re especially fond of the decision to make nonassassination story objectives optional after your first go-around. The closest the game comes to a big new feature is the addition of a camera to 47’s arsenal. This doesn’t, alas, unlock a photo mode but instead can be used to scan the environment for clues or unlock doors and windows, provided you have the right clearance. It proves a handy, though far from revolutionary, tool.
This might sound rather damning, but the truth is that IO has simply focused its energy where it matters
most: the locations. And here there’s plenty of invention on show. Let’s turn to the most obvious example, Dartmoor, home of the much-heralded murder mystery. It’s a classic of the form: you’ve got the big old house in the middle of nowhere, the locked room, the family of suspects all competing for the title of most detestable, and the master sleuth (with the added twist, of course, that the real one got choked out and stuffed in a cupboard on his way to the crime scene).
The detective work is mostly a case of hoovering up clues, with the majority of deduction handled for you. Hardly Obra Dinn, then, but it’s nonetheless a notable repurposing of the essential language of Hitman, taking 47’s chameleonic lead and slipping into the clothes of an entirely different game. (Or perhaps not so different. It’s a reminder that the vast majority of your playtime is spent not in action but observing, absorbing, gradually eliminating the impossible.)
What’s truly startling, though, is that this is simply one way of approaching the task at hand. On repeat visits, you’re unlikely to don the detective outfit again, instead tapping into all the knowledge gathered while sleuthing to appreciate the manor and its grounds as another masterfully designed playground of murder. Dartmoor is a victory lap of a level, a prime example of IO showing off what it’s capable of. Sitting back-toback in the campaign with Berlin, it feels like the studio blowing raspberries at the competition. (If such a thing even exists – who else is making sandboxes like this?)
Berlin exudes confidence of an entirely different kind. It’s a demonstration that the studio is still entirely capable of making old-school Hitman levels, cutting away the trilogy’s Mission Stories – which mark carefully waypointed paths to the most outrageous set-piece kills. You’re on your own, and 47 is not the hunter but the quarry. Ten agents of his previous employer are prowling the level’s twin warehouses, in disguises that mean you’ll need to find a way of identifying each target on the ground.
It’s a perfect counterpoint to the rest of the game, nudging you out of familiar habits and encouraging you to play a more pure version of the game. Almost every location comes with a gimmick like this, something that makes it unique in the trilogy – a claim you can easily put to the test thanks to the option to transplant earlier instalments’ maps into this game, complete with a visual upgrade and, on PS4, the ability to revisit them in VR.
Which brings us, finally, to the way of considering Hitman 3 that we find most compelling: as a work of preservation as much as progression. So long as you own its predecessors on the same platform – or are willing to invest in buying all three at once – this becomes a practically bottomless game. Just rifling through the menus is intoxicating: 20 of the most intricate pieces of level-design clockwork ever created, each with dozens of ways to play, all linked by a single progression system that opens up even more options.
It’s this version of the game that earns the score below. A monument to the entire trilogy, it allows IO to move on (the studio has another numerically monikered agent in its sights) in the confidence that these masterful feats of in-game architecture will last in the lone and level sands of a new console generation. Look on its works, ye mighty, and so on.