Hitman: Contracts - Thoughts

[contains minor spoilers]

From the onset, the Hitman series was severely flawed. Despite showing hints of creativity at times, the first two games were rotten with awful firefights, linear paths, and security guards so vigilant that they could put the secret service to shame. Hitman and Hitman 2 wanted to be sneaky, but by creating a world that was actively on the lookout for an assassin, it was hard to have fun. I'm not claiming that it's impossible to enjoy these games—Hitman 2 certainly has its moments—but it is impossible to play them and not feel hamstrung by either the narrow design or finicky alert mechanic.

With the release of Hitman: Contracts, IO Interactive has hit its stride, finally bringing the premise of playing as a dapper assassin to life.

The game's not perfect of course, but IOI has continued their upward trend of making better games. Just as Hitman 2 was leagues above the original, Contracts strides ahead of its older sibling... despite looking and playing exactly the same. The only noticeable aesthetic difference between the two is that Contracts is considerably darker, in both tone and style. Most of the stages take place at night and are drenched in bad weather, and rather than infiltrating mob estates and middle-eastern bunkers you're sent into a meat-fetish party and a biker bar with a naked man being tortured in its basement. Contracts is still in line with the franchise's playfully dark sense of humor, but most of the humor has been wrung out, the playfulness draped in blood.

What puts Hitman: Contracts easily above the other two games for me is that its alert system is finally manageable. No longer will guards burst into a murderous frenzy upon seeing you sprinting to your next location, providing some much-needed freedom that was denied in Hitman 2. Likewise, the threat meter will flash red only when you're dangerously close to being uncovered (likely from being dangerously close to a guard), giving a better indication for when you're about to blow your cover. It's a bit easier to tell where you can and can't go thanks to guards flashing the "stop" sign, and stealth mode is finally faster than enemy walk speeds—albeit fractionally. Add a lot of clever assassination opportunities on top of this system and at last you have a Hitman game you can ghost through!... or... at least achieve a Silent Assassin ranking on most of the missions without a guide.

There are, however, still plenty of kinks left in Hitman's stealth system. The most obnoxious is that as soon as enemies are alerted via a discovered dead body or panicked civilian, they'll be impossible to shake. Your disguises thereafter become suspicious over time, and then it only takes a momentary glance for a curious guard to deduce your identity. This stands in stark contrast to the guards' neutral behavior where they'll think nothing of you stalking them for half the level, nor will they care if you conga line their boss into the bathroom. I found that it was easy to achieve the Silent Assassin ranking on Normal because getting anything less would devolve the stage into one big firefight, and I've definitely had my fill of shooting dumbass AIs in this series.

The design of the levels can be pretty hit or miss, with the first half of the game being much stronger than the second half. This is due to two factors, the first being that the back end of Hitman: Contracts strangely consists of Hitman: Codename 47 missions remade in the Contracts engine. For the most part, it is kind of neat—the stages look and play much better, with some of the worst offenders scaled down (Lee Hong) or left out entirely (all of Colombia, thank god.) The issue with this is that the levels aren't all that fresh or exciting, as all of the old tactics (snipe the triad member, bomb the car, poison the soup) still work and are also the optimal ways to beat the levels quickly. For those that haven't played 47's origin story, this is undoubtedly the better way to go through these levels, but for me it was kind of a... been-there, done-that experience.

The other factor bringing down the latter half of the game is that your options are significantly limited, thanks in part to the constrictive design of the Codename 47 missions. "The Meat King's Party" and "Beldingford Manor" are two brilliant stages thanks to their quirky themes, nonlinear maps, and unique approaches to dispatching your targets. Contrast something like dropping a gas can down a fireplace for an explosive assassination with the majority of the Hong Kong missions, where head-shotting your target is the only "silent" way to subdue them. Lee Hong gets a special kudos for being an absolute pain in the ass to eliminate, as he's surrounded by guards all the time and will also randomly attack you with a supernatural premonition. Hitman: Contracts may not reach the sewer-stinkin' lows of its siblings, but it's still disappointing to have its first few hours be its unquestionable best.

The only thing Hitman: Contracts gets wrong with respect to the rest of the series is that it has a filler-story. The cutscenes are extremely well-done and moody, but Contracts tells of a paper-thin payoff that closes out with a cliffhanger. Plot-wise, Contracts is somewhere between a nothing-game and a teaser, but in every other respect it blows the other titles out of the water. It's logical, concise, creative, and best of all, an actual stealth game that let me complete my job with only one or two guards to add to the obituary pages. I had such a good time that I never once resorted to my starting silenced pistol, which is about the biggest stamp of approval I can hand the game. I'm curious to see how Blood Money will hold up, because thus far IO Interactive has been getting better and better.

Doom 3: BFG Edition - Thoughts

Doom 3 has always been saddled with an unsolvable riddle: would it have been more liked had it not been called Doom?

The franchise had been in hibernation for nearly a decade when Doom 3 came out, and as a fan of the series I was hyped beyond belief for the third official entry. It didn't let me down—I absolutely loved it—but even I could recognize that it was the black sheep of the series. It was a horror-shooter, with more of an emphasis on shooter than horror, taking cues from Doom 64's brooding notebook rather than the middle-school metal-mentality of the first two games. Gone were the goofy textures, non-sequitur level themes, and blazing-fast combat. Instead you had flashlight juggling, endless jump scares, and dull techbase after dull techbase. Back in 2004, I liked the tense flashlight-swapping combat and was giddy at seeing old foes return like the hell knight and archvile. But my enjoyment came with a caveat: I had to like Doom 3, because it was Doom!

Sixteen years later, having shuffled off most of the nostalgia that comes with branding, Doom 3 feels nothing like Doom, but rather a glorified tech demo trapped in an arcade shooter's body.

Of course, this crass assumption comes with the foreknowledge that 2016's Doom would return the franchise to its roots, injecting it with some much-needed adrenaline. Because of that, it's hard to play Doom 3 and not be disappointed by it in one way or another. Doomguy is sluggish, his weapons anemic, and I can count the number of nonlinear sections throughout the campaign on one hand. That's not to say the game lacks any strengths—the lighting remains impressive and Hell is appropriately unnerving—but it's a product defined by the era it was made in. The mid-2000s were littered with mediocre first person shooters, and Doom 3 stands shamelessly atop that pile, king of the drek.

The central problem with Doom 3 is that it is an adventure of few surprises. While there are a lot of jump scares (of which an embarrassing amount "got" me), I'd hardly call it an "inspired design choice" to hide a crouching imp behind a closed door, especially when it's used several times over. But these jump scares (and monster closets) are all Doom 3 really has; remove the need for a flashlight and you're left with a repetitive shooter that's practically on rails. Most of the time you're traversing narrow hallways with enemies spawning either directly ahead or behind you, and your only recourse is to just shoot it for a few seconds until it dies. There's no cool arenas to parkour around, nor fights with an engaging ebb and flow, nor any risk-reward analysis required when selecting a weapon. Just... choose whatever gun you like, hold down the fire button, and check behind yourself for a sneak attack—because there will always be one.

In a way, it's impressive how Doom 3's blandness is spread so evenly across every one of the game's aspects. Levels are overly constrictive and blend together since they're filled with non-descript gray machinery that may or may not be shooting green beams. The plot is paper thin despite having dozens of audio logs and emails to comb through. NPCs that talk to you bark orders most of the time, making you feel less like Earth's last defense and more like an interstellar whipping boy. A bunch of enemies not only fulfill the same role (there's like six melee-only dudes) but also have roughly the same health and lumbering movement speed, making them feel interchangeable. Several of your weapons are rapid-firing rifles that do similar damage and share equivalent reload times, meaning your arsenal feels interchangeable as well. Secrets are mostly relegated to triple-digit armory lockers that never require more than a peek through your PDA or glance to a nearby console. Armor is useless since you never fall below max armor, and the BFG Edition bafflingly throws more ammo at the player than it does fireballs. All of these facets merge together to form an experience that's dark, hazy, and unmemorable. id Software doubtlessly cared more about how Doom 3 looked than how it played.

My thoughts thus far have been pretty damning, but I'll concede something important: I don't think Doom 3 is "bad." It's not great, or exciting, or worthwhile, but there is a dry charm once you get into it. Sound effects are satisfyingly chunky even when the weapons aren't, and watching corpses disintegrate is always mildly amusing. Towards the end of the game the combat picks up due to more enemies being thrown at the player, though occasionally it'll forget whom is on the roster and just throws the same two types at you over and over. The BFG feels adequately dangerous and the Soul Cube is an excellent addition to your arsenal, as it provides the player with modicum of strategy (ie choose a single foe to kill to recovery your health). I liked the grenades too, though the fact that they're tossed underhanded makes them aggravating to use against enemies at a higher elevation. Lastly the encounter design does pick up in the last fourth of the campaign, but the instances where the enemy placement feels "smart" still remain few and far between. For the most part, Doom 3 only knows one trick: to stick the player in a never-ending hallway and loudly shout "boo!" over and over until randomly deciding to give up.

The expansions on the other hand, are a marked improvement. Similar to Doom 2, Resurrection of Evil doesn't radically change things up, but rather provides a much-needed improvement to the enemy roster. Namely, the vulgar and bruiser, which are more aggressive versions of the imp and mancubus. They demand more dexterity from the player beyond simply strafing left and right, which already makes them harder than the final boss of the base campaign. Meanwhile the double barrel shotgun is a decent (albeit marginal) improvement over the regular shotty, and the Artifact is a nifty slow-mo ability that quickly becomes overpowered, allowing you to melt the toughest enemies into a fine crimson mist. I think the overall design in Resurrection of Evil is better than Doom 3—there's significantly less enemies biting at your ass after all—but it's not such a far cry from the base game that I'd recommend playing Resurrection over it.

Finally, Lost Mission is a strong send-off to Doom 3, as it removes both the Soul Cube and Artifact from your arsenal in order to make fights tense again. Don't get me wrong; I like the variety both abilities bring to the table, but it's nice to have hell knights feel intimidating again (even if they can be easily kited.) Lost Mission's greatest strength has to be its design, as it pivots away from corridor-based combat and leans more into arenas, making fights longer and meaner—a pale foretelling of 2016's Doom. Some of the arenas are great (like the elevator room at the end of Underground 2) but others simply showcase how feeble and slow your enemies are, especially since the nimble vulgar is bizarrely missing from the enemy line-up. Like Resurrection of Evil, it's definitely better than Doom 3's base campaign, but that fact doesn't absolve it from the sins written into its code.

Back in 2004, I doubt anyone could picture what a "modern" Doom would look like. I knew I couldn't, which is why I was more than happy that Doom 3 brought a pulse back to the franchise... even if it was more dour and serious than I would've liked. And even now I kind of appreciate its dedication to trapping you in a dark, mechanical labyrinth overrun with ambling abominations. But that's about as far as my gratitude can extend. The initial rush of nostalgia had worn off three hours into my playthrough, replaced by a sinking feeling that what I was playing wasn't really that fun. Levels were boring, the weapons weren't stimulating, and Hell must've been overrun with imps because that's all I was fighting. Doom 3 relied on using darkness so much not because it loved the gimmick, but because that's all it had going for it.

So would Doom 3 have been more liked if had it not been called Doom? I thought I was unsure, but if you swap "more" with "less", the answer becomes clear for me.