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.

Hitman 2: Silent Assassin - Thoughts

Well, I tried.

I tried to be stealthy.

And sometimes, I'd succeed! Every now and then I'd throw on a doctor's coat and slip by some guards, or poison a meal and quietly creep back to the exit. Those were some of my proudest moments. But for most of its missions, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin set up brick walls. Sometimes it was a stubborn guard that refused to turn around. Occasionally I didn't cover my tracks well enough. But what I fell prey to nine times out of ten was Silent Assassin's finicky "threat" mechanic. And once I was discovered, only one method was left to my disposal: reload a save, and shoot that person in the head.

Before I get into the nitty-gritty, I have to clarify that Hitman 2: Silent Assassin is leagues ahead its predecessor in almost every way. There's more levels, more weapons, a greater variety of locations, and—shockingly!—intended methods of assassination that are easily deduced! Wow! No longer are you left running around a vast, empty military base, wondering how to silently subdue a coked-up maniac; now you can see your target playing golf on a balcony whilst spotting a sniper rifle in the garage. Being able to solve missions without a guide not only makes Silent Assassin a lot more playable, but also pretty dang fun... welllll, at times. More on that later.

One of the best additions to Silent Assassin is the inclusion of mid-level saves, rather than checkpoints. And since I was playing on the lowest difficulty this time, I got a whopping seven saves per mission (hey, in my defense it's labeled "Normal"!) What this does is drastically cut down on the repetition and trial and error, as you no longer have to ponder "can I walk with this gun out?" or "am I allowed in this room?" under the fear of jeopardizing your last five minutes of progress. I could've finished Codename 47 in a fraction of the time that I did, if only I could've saved before doodie (inevitably) hit the fan.

Hitman 2: Silent Assassin offsets this boon, however, by being a stricter game. Gone is the unnatural ability to hover behind a guard and effortlessly strangle him when there's no one else around. Instead, you have to stealthy approach your target at a tortoise-like speed, meaning that you can only strangle (or temporarily KO) guards if they're stationary. Running too is a major red flag to others—especially when you're in uniform—meaning that the ability to save is counterbalanced by your painful, glacial crawl past guards. And like with Codename 47, it's hard to tell exactly what guards can and cannot see, although this is a minor problem compared to Silent Assassin's clever—yet confusing—new feature: the threat meter.

I can at least commend Silent Assassin on introducing alerts based off of proximity, since it makes a lot of sense; a bald dude following behind an armed guard a hair's breadth away definitely seems suspicious. But the threat meter is extremely vague, as its throbbing red state can mean someone is merely suspicious of your actions, or they're about to expose you by perforating you with lead. This dilutes Silent Assassin to a bizarre coin flip in every instance where you slowly saunter past a guard, the meter unable to tell you when the switch from curious to violent is going to occur. Most of the time it's not too bad—all you really have to do is just keep walking—but if the guard stops in mid patrol or blocks a doorway you're heading towards, this can result in a bungled operation.

Not only that, but like with Codename 47, what sets people off can be downright unpredictable. Jog for a brief second and a civilian might scamper away to warn a guard, or walk into a back room and men will suddenly open fire, or secretively change costumes after being discovered and the guards will somehow manage to see through your disguise. But if you embrace your inner-psychopath and slaughter all the guards one by one, occasionally they'll run past you and not think twice... even as you're standing on the corpses of their kin. There were so many instances of confusion and befuddlement in my playthrough: being seen despite crouching behind cover, getting spotted by snipers despite my camouflage, not getting caught despite wearing a unique lieutenant's uniform, alarming a civilian because I occupied the bathroom stall they frequent (seriously??? You're going to rat me out for that?!!!) When the game works it works well, but a lot of the time it feels like you're one suspicious glance away from being assassinated yourself.

Early on, I realized that shooting people in the back of the head with a silenced pistol was the path of least resistance (thanks Normal mode). And though I tried my best to ghost my way through facilities and spare my enemies, Silent Assassin was quick to punish me if I made the briefest miscalculation (eg "I'm pretty sure it's safe to run now.") Add to this the fact that not only is anesthesia stringently temporary, but the hardest missions are arguably in the first third of the game, Russia & Japan being a long, demanding, and painful combination. I was thankfully able to finish the game with my stealth meter above my aggression meter, but I was irked by what this game forced me to do at times. Somewhere in Japan there's a castle full of dead ninjas, and I'm not proud of it.

Hitman 2: Silent Assassin finally gave me a glimpse into what the Hitman franchise is supposed to be. There are moments of brilliance sprinkled throughout it—like dropping a smoke bomb down a laundry chute and then disguising yourself as a firefighter to go "investigate" the source—but like its predecessor, the game is hamstrung by its imprecision. It still feels like luck is too influential on your success or failure—or maybe not luck, but unknown variables that you have to puzzle out through saving and restarting (anyone that's played the last mission will know exactly what I mean.) At the end of the day your meticulous plans can easily be quashed by some capricious—and often stupid—variables being rolled behind your back.

At least you can try to be stealthy, I guess.

Hitman: Codename 47 - Thoughts

[contains minor spoilers]

Hitman: Codename 47 is an imprecise and cruel relic of the past. The one good kernel it possesses—namely, killing your targets in stealthy and creative ways—is relegated to the backseat, in favor of its chaotic combat system. While great ideas have sprouted from this wretched soil, the original game seeks only to belabor you with aggravating tasks and singular routes through levels. Hitman: Codename 47 wants one thing and one thing only from you: copious amounts of blood spilt.

I'm going to immediately cast a shadow over my entire opinion by confessing that impatience is a significant vice of mine. The only stealth games I had growing up were Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes and Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, and I found the latter to be such a chore that I could only make it a few missions in. It's a flaw that I try to stay cognizant of when playing a franchise like Deus Ex, where I know ghosting my way through an area often provides a more rewarding play experience. And I'm tempted to say that Hitman: Codename 47 showcases the worst the stealth genre has to offer, except that statement isn't true—Codename 47 barely resembles a stealth game at all.

Sure, there's a couple of sneaky instances sprinkled throughout the game. There's a mission where you can bomb a car full of triad and another where you can give a man a heart attack in the sauna, but that's about where your guile ends. Every other mission you're going to be strangling a dozen men to death or just blasting your way to the end, hoping that the game's capricious damage system does 2% of your health instead of the full 100% (which will happen a lot). Codename 47 is not merciful with its restarts either; on the missions where you can continue after death, it'll sometimes drop you next to a pissed-off guard, and you'll be dead again before you can tell where the bullets are coming from.

The wild damage probability coupled with scant pathways through a level already makes for a vexing combination, but what really pushes the game over the edge is how opaque and utterly confusing its detection system is. In isolation the system works: if you kill a man, hide his body, and steal his clothes, you effectively become him. But if a civilian catches you in the act or combat breaks out, good luck trying to figure out how to get the goons off your trail! Some guards remain stoic while others open fire immediately, and if an enemy is alerted they will instinctively home in on your position. No matter how often I switched clothes after a scuffle I'd still get discovered, and it's better to have a weapon in your hands for retaliation, rather than trusting that a snooping guard won't fill your unarmed ass with lead. Speaking of weapons, having certain firearms equipped work for some disguises, but good look figuring that out on your own!

While Codename 47's level design is largely nothing to write home about, there's two really egregious missions that solidified my revulsion for this game: the boat level and the entire Colombia section.

The boat level perfectly exemplifies the contradictory nature of Codename 47. In it, there's 3 gates you have to pass through in order to get to said boat to assassinate your target. Any suspicion by the guards raises the alarm, and soon your target begins his Olympian sprint to his escape vehicle (I never found a way not to trigger this, and always had to kill him as he was running). Getting found out before stepping onto the boat spells certain doom, so what you have to do is steal a guard's outfit and then go past each of the gate's checkpoints. Sounds easy, right?

The problem is that the guards don't let you through the checkpoint, even when you're disguised in an outfit that covers your face! This means your only solution is to snipe every single enemy... but guess what?—if one enemy witnesses this they'll run and tell the boss and you run out of sniper rifle ammo halfway through the level! So after an hour of trying, struggling, and failing, I found out what you're supposed to do is latch yourself onto the back of a patrolling guard and just follow him until he passes through a checkpoint. But make sure you don't get too close and trigger the "you don't belong here!" warning followed by guards immediately turning you into swiss cheese.

If that sounds bad, the entire Colombia section is the hideous nadir of this game. On paper, it sounds interesting: go assassinate a drug lord in the jungle, with the catch that you can't restock your ammo or buy weapons between sections of the mission.  However, when you sit down to play it you quickly realize the jungle is massive and empty, taking a handful of boring minutes to run to your objectives. Plus well-armed foes can spot you off in the distance before they're even visible in the far-off fog! This is a nightmare combination where as soon as you're discovered, you're likely to get killed before spotting your assailant and a restart will teleport you back to the beginning of your 1 mile jog. And you have to kill enemies in these missions, so snooping your way through this is a no-go (three men that don't move guard a prisoner on a bridge).

The Colombia saga climaxes in a military base infiltration, where you'll face off against a Scarface-wannabe and blow up a drug lab. It sounds like there's a lot of opportunities for cool things to happen, right?—except there's not. The entire compound is gated, and the only way in is via the front entrance (and you always start at the back, which is great). Not only that, but the boss faces the doorway into the office, meaning you have to fight him (and the guards outside of his room) every time. And later when you have to stealthily blow up a drug lab, you'll be barred from using the two ramps that lead down into it, leaving your only recourse to be stirring up a violent bloodbath. There's ways to mitigate both of these sections, like assassinating the drug lord with a sniper rifle obtained from the first mission and using an officer's uniform to bypass the drug lab guards, but the game does a poor job at telegraphing this. The drug lab in particular strikes me as really rude, as even with the right uniform the guards will still tell you're not authorized to enter, but they won't shoot at you if you disobey them. Having not known that, I did it the hard way, having to run to the airport hanger under the dangerous gaze of a dozen watchtowers. This mission was an unrelenting nightmare to complete.

To grasp at the depths of my despair, know that I had already written a paragraph about how clumsy a particular mission was and had to delete it to make room for all the hogwash above. And I've already covered like, a third of the entire game! Rarely do I not find something to like—or at least appreciate—about the first entry in a series. Most long-running franchises have at least something worthwhile that planted the seeds of its future success, or a case to be made as to why it deserves a sequel. Hitman: Codename 47 buries that beneath so much mindless gunfire, so many forced routes (I didn't even talk about how rigid the first half of the Lee Hong mission was), and so much bullshit detection that at the end of the day, the only case Hitman makes is that it deserves not to be played.