Hitman Is Still The Most Fun You Can Have In A Video Game

Hitman might be the most video-gamey video game ever to video game. When the reboot was shown off for the first time by IO Interactive at E3 2015 and confirmed to be episodic, doubts swirled about whether this was the right decision. Players wanted a fully-fledged game that offered multiple locations to explore, not a drip feed of locales and inconsistent launch plans.

While the latter fear proved true, deciding to offer one map at a time proved to be one of Hitman’s greatest strengths during its early years. Each new map, whether it was Sapienza, Morocco, or Hokkaido, provided dozens of hours of entertainment and an immediate excuse for the community to obsess over this game all over again. Hitman’s World of Assassination trilogy began while I was still at university, with a few friends and I competing to kill targets in the fastest and most creative ways possible. And to this day, it’s still a blast.

Few Games Have More Replay Value Than Hitman

Hitman has always been fun, but prior entries were a little more concise in how they handled the assassinations of targets. Codename 47, Silent Assassin, and Contracts throw you into a location with people to kill or objectives to complete, and you are given freedom to dispatch them by any means necessary. But the stealth was less forgiving, the narratives were more serious, and there weren’t as many opportunities for incidental hilarity.

When Absolution came along in 2012, it took things too far in the other direction with a tone a lot of people didn’t vibe with and gameplay mechanics that tried to offer a greater feeling of freedom and experimentation but in the end felt more restrictive. After that, IO Interactive returned to the drawing board for a complete reboot. It was the right decision.

Hitman’s return in 2016 saw IO Interactive distil the formula down to its most basic aspects, but in doing so it laid the foundation for a gameplay formula that it could build on however it liked. There is a reason why, almost ten years later, you can purchase Hitman 3 and play all three games in the trilogy through a single launcher with progress carrying across each one.

Graphical improvements, quality of life changes, and mechanical innovations have grown into one another to create what is arguably the best stealth game ever made. But what matters most is how easy and fun it is to play and understand.

And Years Later, I Still Want To Play It Forever

Every map in Hitman 1-3 comes with targets to kill and objectives to complete, with an array of mission stories offering creative yet ultimately straight-forward ways to kill them. I’m not going to recommend these as the best ways to play, but they do act as tutorials for us to learn the layout of each map, the routines of targets, and exactly what we can get away with when it comes to a sneaky bout of homicide. Once you’ve earned some mastery points and have a grasp on level design, you can start experimenting.

You could drop into Sapienza right now, and I could go about dispatching my targets with a surgical level of precision, but still find time for bouts of outrageous slapstick violence along with a willingness to push myself on every single run. I might be gunned down or need to do a cheeky bit of save-scumming, but even when faced with failure there is a joy to Hitman. I’m not sure another game has matched since. At least not in this genre.

It can take hours to learn the layout of each level, the purpose of every item, and how best you can take advantage of its uncompromising systems, but once you do, Hitman is some of the most fun you can have in video games right now. If you haven’t played it, or are eager to dip in before the inevitable PS VR2 release, there is no better time than right now.

Stealth

Third-Person Shooter

Released

March 11, 2016

ESRB

m