Has there ever been a game like Hitman 2, which (if you own the Hitman 2016 GOTY Edition) offers every mission and cut scene dating back to the launch of the rebooted Hitman series three years ago? I’m not just referring to stealth assassination and theft games — those have been around since at least Thief: The Dark Project, Looking Glass Studios’ brilliantly innovative 1998 head basher, which introduced so many new ideas to the first-person shooter genre that it ceased to be about shooting. It became about strategy, patience, and clever new weapons that no longer put holes in victim’s heads but extinguished torches and distracted enemies while the player stalked hallways and hid behind barrels. Thief made darkness and soft carpeting the player’s best friends and the world of intelligent, adult gaming hasn’t been the same since.
But Hitman 2 is so much more. I’m on record ad nauseum as a fan of games that feature open worlds that encourage exploration, but the last two Hitman games have demonstrated that exploration is possible in a world that’s a fraction the size of Skyrim while still filled with discovery, quests, characters, scenery and moments as thrilling as anything since Doom first revolutionized first-person play back in 1993. The worlds of Hitman 2 are small and tightly packed almost to the point of claustrophobia. What makes them wonderful is that IO Interactive has brought these worlds vividly to life, creating mini-universes where your taciturn, unflappable avatar Agent 47 rubs shoulders with characters that seem as real as the shoppers in a crowded department store, but who are much more interesting to be around. All of this is so seamlessly integrated that you don’t even notice how good it is because the new Hitman games don’t feel like they’ve been designed; they feel like worlds that were always there, just waiting for Agent 47 to wander into them.
What’s most impressive about Hitman 2, though, is its nearly infinite replayability. In every mission, you are assigned between one and four targets that you’re required to eliminate — permanently. (Impermanently eliminating a character by knocking them over the head and hiding them in a closet is also allowed and even encouraged for non-targets. The game’s praiseworthy sense of morality docks you a substantial number of Mastery points if you kill anybody who doesn’t deserve it, even in self defense.) There are so many ways to accomplish your missions that you can start making up new ones as you go along — or you can consult the menus of Mission Stories and Challenges for suggestions. If you set the right option, the Mission Stories will guide you from step to step through an assassination, but they won’t hold your hand. They lead you to your targets, but quite often you still have to figure out how to kill them.
The Hitman series has been around since the early 2000s, but it eluded me until I decided to buy the 2016 reboot. Long-time players on Steam sometimes comment negatively on the latest entries because they don’t live up to the ones they played when they were 15 years old. But that’s nostalgia speaking. I’ve gone back and tried the earlier games, but except for Absolution, they have control schemes that make playing on a PC keyboard frustrating at best and so awkward that at worst you tend to get killed before you can find the button that lets you choke an opponent into unconsciousness. Even Absolution is flawed, compared poorly by many players to the barely playable games that preceded it.
But the 2016 reboot brought the series into the modern age. The controls are helpfully displayed on screen when an action is possible, but they aren’t QTEs (Quick Time Events, though you occasionally get those when you make the mistake of fighting a guard with your bare fists). The controls feel natural enough that you barely need to be reminded what key to press to pick up an object or drag an unconscious body into a closet to keep some wandering NPC from discovering it and waking the victim up. Interaction is intuitive enough you feel the distinction between you the player and Agent 47 vanishing into that magic zone where player and game become one. Like only a very few games before it, Hitman 2 isn’t a game; it’s an experience.
Hitman 2 has become a compulsion for me. This has happened before with games, some of which I’ve written about, but I don’t remember it ever being quite this intense. Hitman 2 is a puzzle box that not only invites you to solve its puzzles but often to find them. At times its challenges are deliberately silly: slap a character with a fish to get them silently out of your way or distract them with a squeaky toy shaped like a duck. (There are a lot of ducks in this game, some of which are actually bombs. Clearly somebody on the design team spends a lot of time around lakes.) I’ll stay up half the night just trying to figure how to drop a chandelier on a target’s head.
As you may have figured out by now, Hitman 2 is designed as a series of missions, separated by cut scenes that tie those missions into a continuing story. A briefing at the beginning of each one, narrated by your handler Diana Burnwood, tells you why these people deserve to die. They’re terrorists or murderers or people who finance terrorists and murderers; in other words, they’re all people the world is better off without. Although technically you’re a freelancer, you work primarily for the ICA — International Contract Agency — which sells your assassination services for what one assumes to be a hefty price tag. Once you’re past the opening briefing (or have just skipped over it), you can choose what gear you want to bring and then you’re dropped down into some exotic setting where you can use your sense of intuition (the CTRL key on PCs) to spot the people you’re supposed to kill, as the world turns gray and your targets stand out in bright red, even at considerable distances. Getting to those targets and killing them without being killed yourself before you can escape is what each mission is about.
But enough about the premise. Let me enumerate in detail all of the things that make Hitman 2 worthy of the Game of the Year, and possibly of the Decade, title.
Graphics
- Agent 47 on the beach, God rays and all.
Hitman 2‘s graphics are state of the art, but the game doesn’t rub that fact in your face. Yes, there are God rays descending from the sun on a cloudy afternoon, but you don’t notice them unless you’re looking for them. Specular patches gleam in the moonlight on the shoulders of 47’s wet suit, but they’re just a detail that adds to the scenario’s realism, not a deliberate attempt to dazzle you with the programmer’s cleverness. These subtle touches of photorealism seep into your awareness almost subliminally, which is why the relatively small worlds of Hitman’s missions seem alive without feeling like the designers are showing off. The graphics work in the service of immersing the player into the action, not distracting from it.
Characters
- Getting lost in a crowd — with a dancing flamingo
There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of characters populating the streets and hallways of the Hitman setting and each seems to have a life of his or her own. Walk past two or three people having a conversation and you can overhear what they have to say. Sometimes it’s important information that triggers a Story Mission, but more often its idle chatter. This is one of the reasons the games are so replayable. There must be a hundred such conversations in each mission, but every time you play you’ll only hear a few of them. Play again and you’ll notice different characters chattering and occasionally it’s even different chatter. Not all of the chatter is compelling, but it still sounds like things real people would say. Stand too close to a character and they may even shut up until you move on and eavesdrop from a stealthier position. This is a world you have an effect on — and the characters are aware of that effect.
Disguises
Unless you want to receive Mastery points for completing the entire mission in the suit you arrived in, you won’t be able to explore the entire environment without occasionally changing clothes. Wear the wrong outfit in the wrong place without being sufficiently stealthy and you’ll be spotted by the authorities, who’ll start shooting if you don’t run away fast enough. (They’ll start searching for you if they spot you, but if you hide long enough they’ll get bored and stop looking.) Better to find an appropriate set of work gear lying around (the game leaves a few outfits in unexpected places) or hit someone upside the head with a wrench and steal their clothes. Changing disguises has an almost magical effect. Agent 47’s generically handsome features go unnoticed by most NPCs; they only pay attention to what he’s wearing. Disguising yourself as a guard will get you into backrooms where 47’s standard suit wouldn’t allow him to go and knowing what disguise to wear where is one of the most important elements of stealth play. You’ll need to go through a mission several times just to figure out what disguises are available — and even when you’re wearing the right one, there are characters that the game refers to as Enforcers who will still recognize you for the impostor you are. (You’ll know who they are by the white bubbles floating over their heads, though there are “Blend In” points scattered throughout the world where you can stand unnoticed doing whatever job the outfit’s original owner was supposed to do so that enforcers will ignore you as you pass through their field of vision.) You’ll get extra points if you put on every disguise available in each mission’s world, but that’s not as easy as it sounds. There are dozens of them, from construction worker togs to flamingo suits. (Yes, that’s one of the sillier things about the game. Walking around in a flamingo suit makes you remarkably invisible.)
Replayability
I’ve discussed this above, but I want to talk about it in more detail. As I’ve indicated, there are multiple ways to kill your targets and most of them aren’t obvious. You can discover them on your own by exploring the environment and using your powers of observation. Or you can look at the game’s menus, which contain two types of information about the opportunities that the world offers.
The first of these are Mission Stories (originally called Opportunities in Hitman 2016) and there are usually seven of them per mission. Each is an elaborate scheme for isolating your target and dispatching them from the mortal sphere. Not all players care to use these, but if you turn one on (or are alerted to it by overhearing the right conversation), Diana will purr the basic details into your earpiece in her upper-class British accent. (Diana’s intelligent but sexy vocals, courtesy of voice actress Jane Perry, are one of my favorite things about the game. She’s also one of my favorite characters, with some surprising secrets hidden in her past.) If you have the right options turned on, you’ll then receive a series of instructions in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, telling you what you have to do next to take advantage of the opportunity the story affords, plus a green waypoint guiding you in the direction of the opportunity. Figuring out how to reach the waypoint isn’t as easy as walking from Point A to Point B. You’ll usually need to change disguises along the way.
The second are Challenges, which are broken down into three categories: Assassinations, Discoveries and Feats. Assassinations, obviously, are various ways that a Target can be killed, from dropping a chandelier on their head to poisoning their favorite cocktail. I’m not entirely clear what the difference is between Discoveries and Feats, but the first seem to involve things that you have to find in the labyrinthine maze of the game world and the second are merely cool things you can do that often don’t involve using your murderous skills, like collecting frogs in the local swamp. (Actually, that might be more of a Discovery.)
To collect Mastery points, you merely have to accomplish one of these challenges; you get the points for them immediately, whether you finish the mission or not. A lot of the challenges are mutually exclusive, like the various ways that you can kill the targets or the escape routes you can take after the lethal part of the mission is complete, but that doesn’t mean you can’t accomplish them on one playthrough. Just be sure to keep your game saved at key moments, restore to those saves, then take on a different challenge. You’ll still get your Mastery points. Which brings us to….
Mastery Points
Giving the player a score for accomplishments is a holdover from the early days of arcade games, when game designers needed to motivate players to keep dropping quarters into machines so that they could get their names onto the leaderboard. Hitman 2 has a leaderboard, but it’s not likely that you’ll ever get your name so high on it that anyone but your friends will notice. Hitman 2’s Mastery points actually gain you something tangible, virtually speaking. As your Mastery level goes up, you’ll get perks in return — new weapons, new disguises, new places that you can start the mission, giving you the chance to bypass a lot of the complicated costume changes required to get you into, say, the kitchen area (great for poisoning your victim) or the guard house (so that you don’t have to worry about some other guard pulling a gun on you before you can get inside). Mastery Points aren’t essential to completing a mission, but neither are they meaningless collectibles. There’s a certain thrill to being told that the game loves you so much it’s going to make your next session a little easier. And there are a few weapons, like the deadly statue of Napoleon Blownaparte, that you can’t get any other way, at least not that I’ve been able to find.
Each mission has a total mastery level that you can reach, usually 20, and you’ll reach it long before you’ve completed all the Challenges. To encourage you to keep on going, the missions also come with a completion percentage. And to reach it, you’ll have to complete some of the Classic Challenges at each of the game’s difficulty levels: Casual, Professional and Master. Some even have to be completed across multiple missions before you get any percentage points for them at all. I’ve yet to reach 100 percent on a mission and seriously doubt that I ever will.
There’s also a global Player Level, which goes up as you complete challenges in every part of the game. This is the closest thing Hitman 2 offers to the scores you used to run up on PacMan, but unlike PacMan, there’s probably a maximum that you can attain, though the game doesn’t tell you what it is (and it will no doubt go up as new missions are added in the DLC). It’s just another incentive to keep playing long after you’ve mastered every mission on the board.
Missions
- Agent 47 goes to a fashion show.
The missions are, of course, the heart of Hitman 2 and each one has clearly been thought out with an eye toward making your stealth killing spree as spectacular as possible. The quintessential Hitman 2 mission is the Paris-based “Showstopper,” a legacy mission from Hitman 2016. “Showstopper” was what sold me on the series and it has everything: a wealth of different environments and fascinating characters packed into a single large mansion and its grounds. Walking from one area in “Showstopper” into another is like jumping between alternate universes. The action is centered around a fashion show taking place in the central room of the house. Guests stand around a long runway as models parade from one end to the other wearing the latest designer fashions. (In one of the Mission Stories, Agent 47 can even become one of the models.) In the next room, fashion models and makeup artists buzz around preparing for the runway romp while in another the guests hover around cocktail tables and sip drinks from the bar. Outside, more guests mill around or wander through hedge mazes. You can stand on the banks of the Seine and stare out at the sunset — or push a target into the river while nobody else is watching. (If they are watching, be prepared to run fast and find another disguise in a hurry.)
It’s not easy for 47 to get from one room to another and the trickiest place to reach in this particular scenario is the attic . In the James Bond-like world of Hitman, the attic holds a dark secret — an auction for terrorists where they can bid to finance the heinous acts of others. Almost every Hitman mission holds a secret like this: A submarine base under a mob compound, a torture room in the basement of a farmhouse, a biolab in caverns below a family estate. You can’t turn a corner in the tight Hitman universe without discovering something you never expected to be there.
Because Hitman 2 also contains the missions from Hitman 2016 (if you own the GOTY Edition), those scenarios have been retrofitted to contain some of the updated features, like scores for discovering locations or simply referring to Opportunities as Mission Stories. Unfortunately, your accomplishments from the first game aren’t carried over to the new game (though for some reason your perks seem to be; I’d be lost without that lockpick) and you’ll need to work your way through them again to add their points to your Player Level. But I could play each of these missions a hundred times without getting tired of them, so I’m happily giving the missions in Paris, Sapienza and Morocco another go, though I’m not sure I want to play those tedious tutorial missions again. (I’m also surprised at how many of the Mission Stories I never completed back when they were called Opportunities.) The graphics have also been improved, though the changes are subtle. You get God rays now where you didn’t in 2016. I’m sure there are other improvements that I haven’t even spotted, but that I’m unconsciously aware of. I’ve even bought copies of the games for my XBox One so I can see the glorious colors in all their upconverted glory on my 4K television and I’m really starting from scratch on that one. I don’t even have a lockpick yet.
Weapons
The slogan for Hitman 2 is “Make the World Your Weapon” and it almost literally describes the gameplay. Although you can take a very few weapons with you into each scenario, most of what you’ll use to disable enemies and eliminate targets will be found just lying around. Need a deadly ranged weapon? Pick up a screwdriver from an abandoned workshop. (Like most found weapons in Hitman 2, screwdrivers can either be thrown or used for melee fighting.) Just want to knock out two or three people in quick succession? Pick up some soda cans from the litter and throw them rapidly at a row of guards before they can report the attack or shoot back. (Unfortunately there are a few weapons, like soda cans and cocaine bricks, that disintegrate on use, so you’d better save them for the ideal moment.) Want to kill someone from a safe distance without even using a weapon? Just flip the switch on a crane that causes it to drop that heavy crate it’s carrying and anybody standing underneath it will be pancaked into the concrete beneath them.
Unlike older games where weapons and healing potions would turn up on every street corner, Hitman 2 puts its weapons in logical places. You won’t find a handgun sitting in the bathroom, but you might find a deadly pair of scissors. And emetic rat poison is usually sitting in storage rooms or kitchens where you’d find rats. Why would you need emetic rat poison? Mostly to get people to run for the nearest bathroom to throw up, giving you the opportunity to drown them in the toilet. A few objects, like cans of expired spaghetti sauce, seem to exist primarily as callbacks to earlier scenarios, where they had more specific uses, though they can also serve as a lethal poison. (Remember that the next time you check the pull date on a can of Chef Boyardee.)
Sound Design
There are places in Hitman 2 where you can almost find your way around blindfolded. In “Showstopper,” the fashion show is filled with throbbing music and that same throbbing beat is audible but muffled in the makeup room, while it’s completely drowned out by piped-in music at the bar. Waves crash in along a beach front while televisions blare newscasts in private homes, often describing murders that you yourself committed. Bands play music and somebody wrote an entire song with accompanying rock video for the fictional band The Class, the lead singer of which you have to kill in the Morocco mission “Club 27.” (The video is only glimpsed in the game, but you can see the entire thing on YouTube.)
Humor
The James Bond movies have a lot to answer for. Ever since Sean Connery quipped “Shocking!” when he fried Oddjob on an electrified fence, action heroes from Dirty Harry to anybody played by Arnold Schwarzenegger have been throwing off dry one-liners whenever the subject of death comes up. Voice actor David Bateson doesn’t actually get a lot of dialog as Agent 47, but when he does it usually contains at least one and usually several double entendres. He can’t serve a poisoned meal to a target without suggesting that it’s “to die for.” And in a less punny vein, the first word out of his mouth when he’s disguised as a San Fortuna “hippie” tricking a guard into letting him deliver a poisoned cocaine brick to the mob’s resident Walter White is a gravelly cynical, “Groovy.” Yeah, that’s how hippies talk. (The real hippie, before Agent 47 choked him out and stuffed him in a closet, sounded more like he was on a cosmic acid trip.)
And then there are those fish and ducks. Blowing up your target with a multicolored remotely triggered squeaky toy and watching them fly through the air like a figure skater missing the landing on a triple lutz is inherently funny, not that Agent 47 would ever crack a smile. And that’s what so funny about him.
The Story
Hitman 2 isn’t really about story so much as it’s about missions, but there’s a story running through it in the form of cut scenes placed between the missions. The cut scenes and missions aren’t entirely unrelated; Agent 47 occasionally stumbles across scraps of information that suggest something’s not quite right behind the clients that ICA is working for and the cut scenes address that information. The story in the 2016 missions is mostly about discovering what’s really happening behind the curtain, but the cut scenes in the latest missions go further. They aren’t fully animated, the way the cut scenes in the earlier section are, but the story they tell is more interesting and toward the end becomes both startling and moving. If the story in the 2016 game is about ICA’s clients, the story in the new game is about the ICA team itself and who these people, including Agent 47 and Diana Burnwood, really are. I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that the questions raised here are not fully answered, but that’s why I’m holding my breath (breathing intermittently to keep from turning blue) for a third game in the rebooted series. I want to see where these characters are headed. More importantly, I want to learn where they’ve been. It’s a subject that brings a tear even to the stoic 47’s eye.
- Agent 47 and a childhood friend. Getting teary-eyed yet?
And Yet…
None of what I’ve said above fully conveys what it is that makes Hitman 2 so good, because the game is more than the sum of its parts. All of the elements I’ve discussed work together in such perfectly integrated synchrony that you can’t really separate them while you’re playing. Gliding through a Hitman mission is like listening to a symphony so beautifully composed that you don’t bother to distinguish the string section from the percussion; you just let yourself ride on the crest of the music. You could spend your entire mission just staring at the scenery and enjoying the ambient conversation without even meeting your targets and still have more fun than you would in a less perfectly executed game.
Also…
It’s difficult to nominate Hitman 2 as Game of the Year, Decade or any other roughly concurrent span of time without addressing the big, ultra-hyped elephant (or horse) in the room: Red Dead Redemption 2. Though it hasn’t made its way to PC yet (and nobody’s entirely sure if it will), I’ve spent several hours with it on my XBox One. I’m not quite able to assess it property because my console controller is defective — the replacement just arrived in the mailbox — and I’ve spent those hours fighting an annoying tendency for my main character to keep looking up at the sky, but I’ve seen enough to get a sense of what the game is about. RDR2 seems to alternate between two modes: gorgeous open spaces heavy on grandeur and light on characters and scripted sequences like a graphically gorgeous train robbery where you constantly find yourself kicked back to the last checkpoint if you don’t move fast enough to keep yourself and your companions alive. This is probably unfair to Rockstar, a company that’s reportedly willing to work its employees nearly to death in order to achieve perfection, but when the scripted sequences kick in I can’t help feeling like I’m playing Call of Duty: Frontier Warfare. Yes, Colonel, I’ll blow up the caboose now.
- Red Dead Redemption 2: Burning down the house
There are scripted sequences in Hitman 2, generally in the Story Missions, but even when a script is active you can cleverly subvert it in a Stanley Parable-like way, flying in the face of the designer’s intentions just to see if the game can handle it. And the remarkable thing is that it can. Spoilerish case in point: In the San Fortuna scenario, “Three-Headed Serpent,” there’s a Story Mission in which you have to drop a statue on the head of one of the three designated targets. Following the script, you disguise yourself as a mariachi musician, get the heavily hungover band back together, and start playing a lively accompaniment to the statue’s unveiling. When the script is executed as written, there’s a prompt for you to start playing a drum roll that’s the cue for the target to pull the tarp off the statue, which you’ve previously loosened with a wrench, bringing it tumbling down unexpectedly on his head. Target eliminated and you can walk away with no one the wiser. But if you ignore the prompt and don’t play the drum roll, the target gets angry and pulls the tarp off anyway, just a little more viciously. And if you walk away while the band is still playing and slip up on the cliff above the unveiling, you can push the statue off its pedestal yourself. Time it exactly right and you can take out two targets for the price of one. All of these are viable ways of accomplishing the mission and only one of them follows the script.
Once you get into the Challenges, which are much more numerous than Story Missions, there are no scripts at all, at least not ones the player is consciously aware of. You’re free to improvise whatever you can get to work. Sometimes this involves following characters through their own scripts, but how you intercept them with the killing blow is up to you. And there’s often even less script than that, like a challenge at a Miami race track where you have to take five fish from an aquarium and throw them back in the ocean. I suppose the fish are scripted to flop a bit when they’re out of water, but that’s it. (As with ducks, there’s a definite fish theme running through the game. Whenever you see an aquarium, you can blast it apart with your gun and watch the fish spill all over the carpeting. I hate doing this, because I don’t like to see fish suffer — but it’s kinda fun.)
- Never invite Agent 47 to an aquarium.
If that’s not enough to convince you that Hitman 2 is the best game anybody’s published in the last decade (or, like, ever), you can try playing it yourself. Maybe it won’t be to your taste. But you can’t say that IO Interactive hasn’t put a hell of a lot of work into making the game world feel real. If it isn’t as sprawling and grandiose as the one in Red Dead Redemption 2, it certainly feels a great deal more alive.
Sublime Confusion 