Unlike most games, which like to send you to outlandish and
exotic places, the Hitman series works best when you’re taking down targets in
the most applicable, everyday environments possible. Everybody remembers
Hitman: Blood Money’s classic clown-at-the-birthday-party mission, for example.
equally, Hitman 2’s mundane suburban Vermont
and dense Mumbai slums missions are the standouts in this new set. The former
has you doing a bit of home invasion in between wandering the quiet
neighborhood, while the latter’s three objectives are so spread out that it
really feels like you’re wandering a packed city with a wealth of ways to
accomplish your mission. It’s still a challenging and complex mission but isn’t
quite as memorable.
Hitman 2 follows the same basic models as 2016’s Hitman. Cloned killer Agent 47 jet-sets to locations around the world on the trail of a shadowy, powerful figure, assassinating other shadowy, powerful figures along the way. Levels are interspersed with cut scenes, here fully-voiced but static, that explore 47’s origin and its consequences in a plot that’s secondary to enjoying the game. In contrast, mission briefings are animated and thrilling, full of high-tech
plot and enormous
conspiracies. It’s all the most basic
framing for the game’s basics: sneaking around in third-person,
playing dress-up and killing people.
Really, though, there are only five of these giant sandbox environments.
The first actual mission, set in New Zealand, has 47 explore a small beach side land. It functions more like an introduction to the game's
concept than a level proper. The other five, which are excellent but suffer due to familiarity. The latter episodes of 2016's Hitman initiate to
play with the structure of what a Hitman level could be, leading to
more experimental spaces like Hokkaido, where access was directly bind
to the disguise 47 was wearing. Hitman 2 feels more controlled. It riffs
on familiar design principles, invoking Sapienza, Paris and even
Hitman: Blood Money's US suburbs.
Similar to its predecessor, the way each mission plays out is largely up to
you. By default, Hitman 2 does a lot of hand holding. You'll walk around
the public place of each mission until you overhear a conversation that
is by any means related to your mission. That points to a prompt for a
'Mission Story'—the new name for Hitman's Opportunity system.
Hitman 2’s sandboxes are as full of gadgets and disguises as ever. And I mean exactly as full – there are only a handful of new weapons, and none of them are game-changers. There’s a dart gun that can be used to knock out targets at mid-range, which does make things a little more useful, but my favorite are coins that can be used to distract or divert a bad guy to where you want them to go so that you can take them out quietly, away from prying eyes. I preferred to use the nice old-fashioned fiber wire for that, because doing so automatically transitions you straight to dragging the body, saving you a step and from a bunch of extra troubles as you look to hide the corpse. As far as Agent 47’s other new tools go, I never felt the desire to use the fragmentation grenades or mines, probably because noisy Hitman is not my personal brand of Hitman. It’s there if explosions are your thing, though. By the way my strategy always worked for myself to deal with the mission that I found in Hitman 2 so I did not wanted to change and experiment with it for smart progress and saving my time.
