Hitman: Codename 47
You play the title role of the Hitman, a bald badass with a penchant for slick suits and expensive weapons. Dropped into realistic settings, you're given the task of eliminating a target and getting out alive. The jobs take place in posh hotels, Chinatown restaurants, and even an insane asylum, all reproduced with a tremendous eye for detail. The hotels have spiffy restrooms, the restaurants hide dingy kitchens, and the insane asylum looks like a set from a Terry Gilliam movie. And every last detail looks amazing.
The Glacier engine powering Hitman sports some pretty impressive features. The physics model is outstanding. Bullets actually look like they're impacting on their targets, your victims' bodies can be dragged around like rag dolls, and the environment will react to your movements (such as plants swaying as you pass them). But all the good looks come at a price of game speed; the action gets especially choppy when more than five people are on the screen at once.
Before you begin plotting a hit, you're presented with a cool briefing on your objectives. You get maps of the location, plus pictures and surveillance videos of your target(s), and you're given the opportunity to buy special equipment. Weapons range from the mundane (a 9mm pistol) to the downright exotic (the rare and expensive Walther WA2000 semiautomatic sniper rifle). You can also deck yourself out in state-of-the-art body armor, conceal piano wire, and pack the occasional car bomb. The missions themselves start as simple kill-the-target affairs and progress to more complex scenarios, such as instigating a war between rival street gangs.
As you play through the first few missions, you'll truly start to appreciate what IO Interactive was trying to do with Hitman. Initially, the mission structures are incredibly open-ended. For example, your first task is to eliminate a negotiator from a Hong Kong street gang. You have the option to take to the rooftops with your sniper rifle, or just charge in with a Beretta 9mm blazing in each hand. You can also go the sneaky route: silently kill a guard with your piano wire, put on his clothes, hide his body, and then casually walk up to the target, get in close, and slit his throat with a knife. The options are plentiful and the choices are all yours.
Of course, you can't just waltz through the city killing with impunity; there are laws against that sort of thing. All of your targets have bodyguards, and policemen patrol the streets regularly. These guys won't hesitate to put you down if they see you so much as draw a gun on them (requiring you to have keys designated to draw and hide your weapon). But sometimes the biggest threat comes from the least-expected place. The average citizen strolling down the street can easily be in the wrong place at the wrong time (say, turning down an alleyway just as you're dispatching a security guard) and end up alerting the cops. On one mission, I managed to kill one of my targets, but was spotted by a pedestrian. I took him out, but as I was dragging away his body, another pedestrian came by and saw me, so I had to take him out too, and then a cop saw me, so I dispatched him, but not before he managed to call for backup. Let's just say I had to restart that mission. It's this kind of escalation of terror that makes Hitman so impressive. Each person you kill can potentially lead to some dire new consequences. It's best to kill only when you have to, and even then you have to make sure that no one's around and it's done quietly. Make a wrong move and you'll suddenly find yourself knee-deep in the dead.
The problem is, just when you start getting used to the open-ended nature of the missions, the game changes and your options quickly become much more limited as the objectives become more intricate. Suddenly, you have to do everything a certain way or risk failure. Some missions are so difficult that the only possible way to beat them is to play them over and over again until you figure out what you're supposed to do. That means many restarts as you approach and fail each new objective.
The crime of not giving you enough information kicks off even in the training mission - not enough time was spent easing you into your role before you're expected to know that you can take the clothes of one guard you've offed in order to fool another. This happens again with the last guy in the game: make one slight mistake and you have to start the level all over again. Top those problems off with the lack of an in-mission save feature, and you've got one very frustrated gamer on your hands.
Hitman had the potential to be one of the best action games ever, but some serious game-design failures and short-sightedness end up dragging it down. There's some incredible stuff here, but it's chronically frustrating to get at it, and your patience will be stretched to the limit. Let's just hope we see a sequel that will allow Hitman to become the incredible property that it should be.