Hitman 2
Man compensates for lack of hair with weaponry
A HITMAN LEVEL isn’t designed to be played just once. There’s the initial explore, when you go in knowing just the intel you’ve been supplied with beforehand, and need to scope everything out. The locations of weapons, targets, and security cameras are still unknown, and it’s quite possible that you’ll need to restart before your target is cold.
Then there are the practice runs, when you know the layout, and are experimenting with murder methodology, graduating from simple suppressed gunshots to poison in drinks to elaborate creations involving gas pipes, overloaded valves, and fireworks. Later, you’re playing it on a timer, trying to shave seconds off to knock your rival from the top of the leaderboard. By this point, you know the level inside out, counting under your breath as you wait around a corner for the exact number of heartbeats it takes for a guard to turn his back.
This is what sets Hitman apart from other games: It’s meant to be repeated, to be perfected. To thrash through a level and escape with a simple kill, and maybe some surveillance video left behind, isn’t good enough. You need to really get inside the level designer’s mind, to see what they intended, and pull it off with a flourish. Hitman isn’t a third-person shooter or even really a stealth game, it’s a Rube Goldberg machine, waiting for you to manipulate it. And it’s for this reason that the previous game’s release as a series of episodes made sense. Without the pull of the next level enticing you to speed up, you could spend a month patiently laying plans, and watching them pay off, then refining them on another run.
Hitman2 gives you all its levels in one go, and you can even play them out of order. The new scenarios feel more ambitious, something that can be said of almost every game in the series, which has always tried to outdo its own past.
KILL JOYS
There’s a vague plot involving international terrorists, but Hitman2’s levels are so full of characters and stories, disguises and machinations, that they feel selfcontained, more like episodes than the constituent levels of a whole. There’s suburbia, full of identical houses, but owned by different people with stories to tell, and these come out as you wander through. Then there’s a motor race, with two targets and huge crowds, but also with a warren of back corridors and staff-only areas populated by people doing their jobs, and sometimes doing nasty things to one another. The crowded streets of Mumbai offer three targets, but also a street gang, barber, tailor, laundry, and diverse mundanity that can be repurposed for killing. Elsewhere, you’ll come across Colombian drug lords and an island paradise for the rich, underlining the series’s preference for killing the wealthy whenever possible. There are even some robots to fiddle with.
This is iteration rather than revolution, something further evidenced by the ability to play 2016 Hitman levels within the game. It’s like a GOTY edition of that game, one that comes with all DLC. It’s a novel approach, and one that will supply anyone who’s not played the previous game with a bonanza of content. A lot of missions feel like riffs on those from previous games, so perhaps the devs are refining their approach to the game, too. One thing that’s more than a riff is the tutorial, which is identical to 2016’s, firming up the view that this is season two, delivered all at once for binge watchers. Or mass murderers.