Hitman 2 (2018) Review - No, not that Hitman 2.

By Sam Coles:

It has been nearly two decades since the bald headed, well dressed assassin Agent 47 debuted in the gaming industry with the unique brand of stealth gameplay where you had to take down your targets in creative ways. In 2016 IO Interactive rebooted the Hitman franchise, which had a mixed reception not because it was bad but it was due to its episodic nature. Now they have scrapped the episodic structure with Hitman 2, another example of the games industry messing with my archive system as I now have two games in my collection called Hitman 2.

You once again step into the smartly dressed shoes of Agent 47 the world’s most deadly assassin, who has been tasked with taking down several high profile targets who happen to be a part of a shadowy secret organisation. It turns out this is intentional as they are traitors and they are using 47 for their own agenda. To be honest the stories in the Hitman games have never been that good, with the exception of Absolution back in 2012, it’s about the gameplay in these games rather than the narrative.

The game is a stealth game set in big wide open spaces, where you are dropped into a location and are left to your own devices and have to decide how you are going to find and kill your target. This is what I love about the Hitman games as it is all about learning what your target’s routine is, where you can learn when they are going to eat dinner, go to the bathroom to relieve themselves or collect certain items in a secret place. This is where you can use the environment to you advantage, you can just shoot your target in the face but that is boring and you don’t get the highest score. No the game rewards you by being creative with the environment, this can range from poisoning food, tampering with a car so it spirals out of control or causing electrical faults with certain piece of equipment. The choice is yours.

Hitman does give you the choice to go loud and shoot everything in sight, but this is a bad idea as you will have more holes than the average flute because you will be gunned down immediately and 47 is as tough as a mouldy peach. It is very much encouraged to go in quiet, but again this can escalate quickly as you will get caught knocking someone out and then you have to knock that person out etc. It’s like spinning plates on a stick, when one falls and smashes the rest will follow, so it turns into this overwhelming mess that ends in your death.

Hitman has always been on the line between grim and goofy as you can kill people in brutal and horrific ways, but you can also do it dressed as big bird as you throw an explosive rubber duck at someone.  This leads into the disguise system, you can take down targets in your standard suit, but this makes things very hard and will take longer. You can dawn disguises to help you slip into restricted areas, you can find them in lockers or you can take a score penalty and knock someone out and steal their clothes. People will no longer stop you going into certainly places, but there will be high ranking officials in that profession you have disguised yourself as who will see through your deception.

Visually the game is okay, not a bad looking game by any stretch it’s just okay. The main focus of the game are the big wide open environments and the crowd system, the game is really ambitious with the amount of people there are on screen which does make the framerate tank a bit if you play with the uncapped mode which I would recommend locking the framerate. The game’s environments are varied and quite beautiful, you have the cyan soaked waters of Miami to the humid and drug riddled jungles of Latin America, they are all interesting and never get old.

Hitman 2 is a great stealth game that will test you with both patience and skill, it’s nice to play a game that kicks back and tells you to take your time compared to the more action focused game. It is a step up from the 2016 reboot and builds upon its framework, where it ditches the episodic nature and gives you a highly re-playable game with different play styles for each level.