The Top Video Game Hit Men of All-Time

The job of a hit man makes for a good video game character. With a special set of skills and what typically amounts to high-pressure situations, the job of a trained killer provides gamers with endless hours of intense entertainment. So who are some of the best hit men and assassins in the video game world? When picking the top ones, one must consider things like overall skill, video game longevity and how much fun was it to control the characters when playing a video game.



There are plenty to pick from over the last 30 years of gaming, but here are some of the ones that jump to the top.

Ezio Auditore: This is perhaps the first name we thought of, because Ezio is the prime character in the Assassin’s Creed series. What makes him particularly lethal is his ability to hide both in large crowds and in small spaces to attack a target without anyone knowing, making him the true definition of an assassin. He’s done just about everything to from testing out contraptions created by Leonardo da Vinci to fighting the Pope. Side note: the newly introduced Evie Frye in Assassin's Creed: Syndicate earns the runner-up here, if only because she hasn't appeared in as many games. She's still quite the bad-ass, though.

Agent 47: The guy is the main character in the Hitman video game series, so he’s a perfect one for this list. A cloned killer, Agent 47 is called on by the most powerful people in the world when they need a job done. With his trademark hardballer pistols, Agent 47 has spawned an entire universe around his myth. A sixth Hitman game will come out early next year to go along with a slew of spin-off content. In terms of the latter, they range from an online arcade game, which provides a casino-gaming twist on Agent 47's assassin-like skill set, to an Android mobile title, which transforms Hitman into a chess-like strategy offering. Both are worth a look if you're a fan of the franchise.

Bret The Hitman Hart: Hopefully this got a laugh, but think about it for a minute: Hart was the WWE (then the WWF’s) marquee wrestler for most of the early 1990s and his skills were on point. He was a super-technical wrestler armed with a supreme knowledge of holds, counters and reversals. Also, Hart could be an almost-impossible-to-defeat video game wrestler in the right hands. He appeared in a wide-range of games to from 1992's Royal Rumble for Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis to the current versions of the WWE 2K series. In total, he's appeared in a whopping 22 games, so he's definitely deserved a spot on this list.

JC Denton: The main character of the Deus Ex series sometimes slips through the cracks, partly because most of his exploits were done on PCs and Macs in the early 2000s while gamers fled toward rapidly improving consoles. Considered one of the best games of all-time, Deus Ex follows Denton as he kills in the name of the government only to have them turn on him and his brother. To get his revenge, Denton uses his training to efficiently and systematically take out those that betrayed him.

Thane Krios: The top assassin in Mass Effect, Thane Krios is known for his up-close-and-personal kills, but unlike a lot of hit men, he actually has a conscience. That gives his character an immense depth not found in many other gun-for-hire type characters. Not only that, but it provided a storyline for Mass Effect that added even more layers than most video game mythology.

Do you have a personal favorite assassin? Feel free to sound off in the comments with your top picks!