Hitman: The Complete First Season brings its episodic adventure to PS4.
Hitman: The Complete First Season did not meet expectations. I remember being at Sony’s monumental 2015 E3 press conference watching reveals of The Last Guardian and Final Fantasy VII Remake before my eyes. Sandwiched in between was a slick CGI trailer for what would be a Hitman reboot. It felt a bit out of place – especially when considering what else Square Enix announced – but as a fan of the series, I was more than pleased. Then the missteps started to trickle in. The game would be episodic. Different packages cost different money. You could upgrade for a fee if you only bought the introductory episode. And then IO Interactive and Square decided to reshuffle those plans.
Fans of the series were starting to feel burned. The press couldn’t help but ignore how confusing the situation was. After the stumble of Hitman: Absolution it looked as if the Hitman might reboot by falling flat on its face. But, like I said, Hitman: The Complete First Season did not meet expectations. Now that all the collected content is coming out on a disc, anyone who didn’t book an earlier flight for Agent 47’s globe-hopping tour now has a chance to board. And this is a world of assassination players won’t want to leave.
Hitman’s introductory training missions provide players with a basic understanding of how each chapter of the game will unfold. Agent 47 needs to prove his worth as an assassin by taking out a target in a simulated mission. The target is Kalvin Ritter, a high-profile art dealer who moonlights as a thief and he’s having a party on a yacht, all you need to do is get on deck and find a way to end his life. The water may be cement and the yacht plywood but the stakes are real for players. 47 boards the model ship by knocking out a member of the maintenance crew and stealing his disguise. Our handler chirps in our ear about how unique of an approach that was, providing context for the series’ lore.
What follows is standard Hitman fare: you casually walk past most people unnoticed. After all, you’re just a nobody maintenance person likely checking to see if the ship is running properly. But try to go past the first deck and security will notify you that maintenance isn’t allowed up there, so it’s time to improvise. You can disguise yourself as a crew member but just keep in mind Ritter hired everyone, he’s going to recognize an unfamiliar face.
Poor Kalvin Ritter, I killed him so many times on that yacht. I shot him in the face with a silenced pistol from around a corner while he was having a meeting. I gave him a bit of rat poison and drowned him in the toilet as he violently puked in it. Then blew him up with a remote explosive. Then choked him with a fiber wire garrote. Oh, and dropped a life raft on his head. What a tragic fate.
The real beauty of Hitman is IO Interactive’s sandbox playgrounds of death and how it allows players to improvise in both static and ever-changing situations. IO’s attention to detail isn’t quite apparent until after the mission is over. During each chapter in Hitman, players are presented with dozens of challenges to test their skills. These range from the trivial, like distracting a person with a tossed coin or finding a particular disguise, to more complicated or specific ways of assassinating a target. Then there are complex tasks like going through a mission without being seen, only pulling off a hit in your suit, or multi-part objectives that culminate in a brilliant death for someone.
As a player, you slowly begin to unweave the threads of the game. The intricacies of these maps can often be mind-boggling. They aren’t massive areas like those found in open world games but rather intimate settings where everything was crafted by a team that wanted players to extract every drop of fun there could be had. I won’t speak much to the story except that it is mainly told in a handful of cutscenes and dialogue; it’s obviously not the primary focus here. Environmental storytelling gives way to lengthy conversations NPCs will have about the world or a potential target you are on the hunt for. It’s a world that feels lived-in, despite being filled with things that make it an excellent video game level.
Players can start a mission or a chapter and just explore for minutes or hours at a time. AI paths can be mapped out, exposing the slightest opening or action that would allow for an opportunity at completing a challenge or performing a brilliant assassination. Both patience and assertiveness are rewarded. The thrill of figuring out Hitman’s challenges is on par with solving a complex puzzle or going through a stealth game without ever being seen. There are definitely moments when the AI can be a bit stupid. I found myself walking into areas I shouldn’t have and hiding before anyone raised any real alarm. But then there were times I would bump into an NPC or casually grab an object and suddenly bullets started flying as if I had visibly set off a bomb on a busy city street.
Hitches like this are one of the few gripes to be had with Hitman, yet IO left a good amount of room for slip-ups when it comes to taking out a target without any restrictions. By getting the whole first season at once, players are allowed to jump into any chapter at any time. Sapienza is a brilliant chapter in how massive the scale is, giving players ample opportunities to work out how they will complete the chapter-specific challenges. Hokkaido is another standout in how it changes up the formula of using disguises to move throughout the level.
Some of the magic is lost when having the entire package available to you at once, however. Surprisingly, one of Hitman’s strengths was in its episodic release structure. With releases of each chapter spaced out by a few months, players could really dig into everything the sandboxes of Paris and Colorado had to offer. The release of a chapter felt like an event because it meant that days and weeks of beefy Hitman content was available. Now that everything is available as a whole, players may feel inclined to simply move on after tinkering around in each environment and killing a few targets, losing sight of what really makes the game such a treat.
I found myself completely addicted to Escalations over the course of Hitman’s release cycle. Escalations were objectives that consisted of taking out one or more targets and having to complete these objectives with increasingly difficult tasks. First players would have to kill the targets, then they might have to do it with a specific weapon. Security cameras might be added to the level and players would have to erase 47’s presence from the recording. Maybe a wild card character would be thrown into the mix, adding unpredictability to a situation. Completing any challenges and escalations would unlock new gear for 47 to use, new disguises to wear, and new starting points to begin a mission. Each piece of Hitman worked in unison to ensure players would never grow old of the content. It is this constantly evolving experience that made the game transcend its roots into a new generation.
Because of the high quality of Hitman: The Complete First Season, I’ve found myself hoping other games – especially ones with stealth components or massive worlds – will include elements from Agent 47’s reboot. The timed Elusive Contracts might be absent from this release (please Square and IO, find a way to introduce them for players who missed them) but are a brilliant way to test players’ skill, provide a long quality of life, and convince us to keep coming back for more. I would love to see something like Elusive Contracts or Escalations make their way into a game like Ghost Recon: Wildlands or Red Dead Redemption 2. Nothing pleases me more than when a game defies expectations, especially when you initially expect everything to fall apart. Hitman is a convincing argument for other games of similar scope to adopt an episodic model. Honestly, it even gives me hope to how Square will approach Final Fantasy VII Remake’s release. In surpassing all that I could hope for in a Hitman game, I find myself waiting with anticipation for what I can do as Agent 47 in Hitman’s second season.
Reviewed for PS4
