Welcome to the newest game in my favorite genre, thriller/escape! Or as I like to call it, the “kill people, relieve stress, make bank, don’t die” type game – a psychological puzzle where you have to figure out how to escape the people you trained with and the people who trained you, all while completing successful assassinations; the ultimate killer’s escape from his merry band of killers, so to speak.
Hitman: World of Assassination (also commonly referred to as Hitman 3) – the latest in the Hitman franchise, and one that I have frequently availed myself to. Being a huge fan of IO’s previous Hitman games, like Hitman: Blood Money and Hitman: Absolution, in addition to sandboxes like People Playground, the excitement I felt when this game was released simply couldn’t be described in words. Launched right around the time of Windows XP and the start of that realm of technology, the game timeline is Blood Money, Absolution, and now World of Assassination – and seeing that I had loved the previous two, this was a clearly logical progression. Let’s see what the ICA has in store for us agents next!
To start off with, I’ll cover the different game modes. Out of all the different Hitman games, IO released the most interesting ones in this new sequel. Aside from the actual campaign, there are four new game modes: Contracts, Freelancer, Arcade, and Sniper Assassin.
Each mode is unique in their own ways. Although I have a love-hate relationship with it, I suppose I can start off with Arcade. You get a single attempt every 12 hours while the target in question is assigned, and the mission can’t be restarted once progress has been made towards a single objective. As you can imagine, that can become very annoying very quickly. Contracts, the user-managed game mode, allows players across the world create contracts to take out people. As payment, instead of receiving cash money (Mercers), you get XP for the account, allowing you to level up.
Freelancer, on the other hand, is described by the game’s developers as a roguelike game mode, and to me, the most interesting mode in the game. You take on four syndicates of your choosing and take down low-level people to force the leader out of hiding and face them in a showdown, and this is the only mode that gifts you Mercers to spend. Although the rewards are good, the consequences of failure are arguably worse. Losing a low-level mission causes you to lose half of the rewards, plus any consumable items you owned at the time, and lost low-levels alerts different governments to your presence – so your next run-through, they’ll be waiting. Now, if you lose a showdown, it becomes so much worse. You lose all of the progress made in the campaign, forcing you to start completely over, ground up.
Finally, Sniper Assassin – the wave-based mode, where you eliminate as many people as possible. As one could guess from the name, the usual spots for this are rooftops and higher vantage points. and given the name, you’re usually going to be sniping them from a place such as a rooftop. Now with all this established, let’s get into the campaign for now, and explore the other parts later.
When a new player first loads into the game, they are started off relatively easy (tutorials and control scheme explanations aplenty). Naturally, the training gets harder and harder, cumulating in the ICA facility and widely considered to be one of the hardest parts of the games, including the different campaigns. Since we’ve already dug into the game a little bit, let’s start off with Ambrose Island. The first thing you notice is the stunning dialogue, designed to move you from part to part of the campaign. Hitman, in the past (specifically Hitman 1 and Hitman 2), has had some issues with dialogue, between the mouths not moving and problems with the closed captioning. Strangely enough, however, Absolution (the game immediately prior to Hitman 1), had fantastic dialogue – so whether it be an overlooking of a mistake or simply just a change of pace, WoA fixes the issues previously identified. The audio is synched up with the mouth movements, the closed captioning is perfect, and the quality is crisp.
With the start of every new mission, you can customize your loadout. Everything from starting location (which usually can’t be changed, but is always worth checking) to gear (smuggled items snuck in through briefcases, gear choices, outfits, and more). Sniper rifles can be covertly delivered in a secret area, and most levels will have at least one or two options for mission customization. Typically, I don’t touch my gear and outfit choices, with the exception of changing out my fiber wire for a lockpick (a move that has saved me from certain death many, many times).
When you go to click the play button on the left, you’ll see the different difficulty levels: Casual, Professional, and Master (extra descriptions given when you hover over each section). For me, Professional gives a beautiful balance of ease and skill requirements, and I love a good challenge. Now that we’re fully kitted out, the fun can start.
As soon as you’re dropped into the game, the minimalistic HUD appears – not so much that it becomes distracting, but more than enough to determine important information with a glance or two. Naturally, different button combinations will reveal different parts of the HUD (“Esc” to access the save menu and “M” for map, among others), as well as Challenges and Discovered Intel. The mini-map in the corner is simple and yet perfect for this type of game – different color auras depending on the current in-game status (enemies suspicious, being hunted, etc), simple black background, and more than enough information to keep a player alive.
Before you start, I highly recommend the closed captioning. It can allow you to discover story-related intel (clearly identified by the “Mission story unveiling…” that flashes across the screen), which can later be accessed with other hints by pressing F1 on the keyboard. If you aren’t hidden, it may disrupt it and cause different issues throughout the gameplay.
When you come close to an interactable item, like a door or an actual item, you’ll get a quick button prompt that flashes across the screen, explaining what you can do with it. Additionally, when you’re holding an item in hand, it can be clearly seen in the bottom right corner, and can be interacted with individual controls (“H” to holster and unholster, “I” to access the inventory, dropping different items, etc). Also, random little game glitch for you – If you’re in the process of subduing someone, and they don’t press Q to break out, the subdoing animation will continue on forever, or until you break it. Strange, huh?
Another interesting feature, first released in Absolution, is the sighting feature. If you press and hold the “Ctrl” button, you can see the people around you – and if they have white circles? It explains that they’re naturally more suspicious, and will likely recognize you if you stand near them/in their line of sight for too long. This is most common if you change outfits – specifically to something like a guard or another “Restricted” figure, so to speak.
I subdue ONE metal worker, and I get immediately spotted by a person I didn’t see…*sigh*. Welp, since I died, we can talk about saving/loading. It autosaves frequently and you do get a decent number of saves to yourself (8 autosaves and 8 manual saves, cumulating 16 in total, which is nice); however, there’s a cap on saves per level, instead of per session or game. Unless you choose to opt-out of them, all saves are held in the Steam cloud. Another nice feature is the ability to save-quit-load, and thereby skip past the “unskippable” cutscenes. It’s not limited to a type of save, so any one of the 16 should work. This is a brand new features, and wasn’t seen before in Absolution or Blood Money.
Contract time! Let’s do a quick playthrough of a contract (the global, player-set missions that can be customized to choice – requirements, targets, briefings, and more).
Contract time! Let’s do a quick rundown of a contract (the global, player-set missions that can be customized to choice – requirements, targets, briefings, and more). Good news is, contracts don’t have cutscenes, so you don’t have to be forced through the torture on your first run (yay!). This game mode always has the potential to be very interesting, just because of the versatile nature. All aspects of the mission can be edited and changed, including outfits, mission name, etc. One thing I would personally like to make it even better is have changeable difficulty levels. As it currently stands, only the contract creator can change the difficulty level, which makes some sense, but also leaves players up to the mercy of others. The second problem is that you can’t really change the world itself with a contract (new maps?), and you can’t copy-paste contracts over as a template, meaning you have to start from scratch every time.
Now I already mentioned items briefly, but I want to talk a bit more about them. You have such a huge variety of items, and maps are EXPANSIVE. They’re huge compared to what you got in Absolution, and even better, the entire map is loadable – no more of the loading-and-lost-progress sequences when advancing through a mission (something which happened frequently in Blood Money). The map shown below, as you can see, has over 8 floor levels, and I like how they made the map loading functionality better to get gigantic maps like this. As for items, you have such gems such as ICA grenades, EMP’s, emetic poisons and syringes (including sleepy ones that don’t kill you, the killer one is the lethal syringe) and so much more! Some items are not findable on levels, but many of them are on the majority, you just have to dig, dig, dig! (or in this case, walk, walk, walk!)
You are told when items are illegal to hold (insomuch that you could get in trouble/flagged if they were ever seen) by looking in your inventory, or just pulling it out and seeing the red danger indicator. If you happen to have illegal items, then frisking (often needed to progress) becomes impossible; this is where hiding them becomes necessary until you get the proper outfit. Illegal items change as your outfit changes, because at a rally, for example, a guard can hold a gun where a civilian cannot. Security cameras can occasionally be a problem as well: their range is clearly denoted by the green section, and will turn red if you’re noticed without the proper outfit for that area. Naturally, however, if you destroy the security system, the camera outline won’t even show up.
Outside of the actual gameplay, the game gets even better. Starting off with the graphics, they are impeccable. I will say you can turn on and off HDR, you can manage the level of detail, texture quality, variable rate shading, and so much more. The one issue I had is that blood cannot be disabled – not necessarily surprising, seeing as the entire game is based around assassination, but many other games akin to this like Assassin’s Creed or Call of Duty have options to disable or limit the amount of blood shown. In terms of sounds, even better. The game has a wonderful soundtrack, great voiceovers, (especially with Diana and Agent 47) – not much difference from Absolution, from what I could tell. Guns, sirens, etc. were also beautifully created, so sounds from me get an A+.
In conclusion, this game is a great addition to the franchise, simply due to its versatility. You get to commit your heinous crimes without any worry of repercussions, and visit so many cities and see all the beautiful sites, such as Miami, Florida’s race track and a ways-out training camp for a militia out in Colorado. You can unlock suits, earn XP, and top the leaderboards and claim the title of ultimate hitman (I came up with this one *wink*). Finally, there’s endless fun to be had with their multiple options for gaming, such as Contracts, where YOU can put the hits out, instead of the official-unofficial agency you work for. All in all? This definitely ranks as my new favorite Hitman game, and I would highly recommend it… although not too much. After all, the ICA might be coming for m-
…….smoke issues from the clean hole slammed into the screen……
We are watching. We are waiting. We are coming. We? We are the I.C.A. Good luck, Agent. You’ll need it.