“I’m so arrogant about the fact I’m top of the table that I tweet about it”
Going from last to first in Hitman 2
Being friends with people who are good at Hitman was my first mistake. I have five friends who have logged scores on the Hitman 2 leaderboards shortly after launch, and my first attempt at the game’s ‘training’ mission, New Zealand’s Hawke’s Bay, yielded an atrocious 7,000 or so points. By comparison, the friend at the top of the leaderboard, Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Matt Castle, has 150,000. Damn it. The mission is almost impossible to get right the first time. Set in a mansion on a beach, you arrive to an empty house, and only after accessing a secret room and activating a computer do the enemies and target arrive. On my first attempt, I messily shoot my target, Alma Reynard, in the head, kill her boyfriend, gun down her bodyguard, then run out of the mansion onto the beach, before making a beeline for Agent 47’s boat. Three guys are stood guarding the thing. I shoot them, too, and make it to the boat. 7,000 measly points.
That was rubbish, and I’m nervous about one of my Steam friends—like Phil—screen-grabbing this terrible result and shaming me. So I have another, much more careful attempt a day later. I know how to break into the mansion quickly now –through the garage at the side—and I know that my target likes sugar in her tea. I find some poison, use it on the sugar, then figure out where she’ll go to vomit it up and wait.
Kill confirmed
The aforementioned secret room in the mansion features shurikens, grenades, guns… and a katana. I took them all to be safe. As the target completes her phone conversation and takes a gulp of tea, I’m ready.
She starts sicking up, and I put the sword through her while the guard waits outside. Silently done! I stash her body in a cupboard in the next room. When her bodyguard comes to investigate, I choke him out and stash him in the same cupboard.
Now it’s just a run across the beach to my boat. I nab a guard’s uniform as I’m exiting the garage. Hitman is all about applying what you’ve learned from previous runs to your next—and in the last run, my handler mentioned that a distraction would get the three guards away from my boat. A pile of petrol canisters in the back of a truck, lit with a silenced pistol bullet, does the trick. I make it to the exit and achieve Silent Assassin status. Get in!
My score? Over 159,000. I’m so arrogant about the fact I’m top of the table that I tweet about it, and go out of my way to make Phil aware of it. Like any worthy Hitman target, though, an ironic fate awaits me: Phil spends his lunchtime perfecting the level and knocks me off the top. 160,000 plus. Bastard.
This has ignited a furious sense of competition in me: I’m going to spend the rest of 2018 trying to knock him off the leaderboards for every level. After making Phil review 2016’s Hitman seven times, it has finally come back to bite me in the ass.
I make it to the exit and achieve Si lent Assassin status. Get in!