It’s been quite a while since we last saw a proper Hitman game, 10 years to be exact with Blood Money. Absolution was a decent stealth game, but a Hitman game it was not. IO Interactive seems to have heard the complaints and have refocused their strategy with the latest Hitman game being set in much larger, sandbox environments similar to the original games. This game had a few stumbles in the last few months, most notably with everyone raising their eyebrows at IO pivoting the game from a fully fledged release into an episodic release, but after playing through the beta I’m cautiously optimistic to step back into 47’s suit.
Hitman
Developer: IO Interactive
Platform: PC, PS4, & Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PS4 code for preview
The beta opens as a prequel to the main game, and franchise, taking place 20 years before the new game. Here we get to see Agent 47 taking his entrance exam for acceptance into the Agency. There isn’t much plot happening here, but the bits of story the beta lays down does drop some hints of what we can hope to expect from the game. After taking you through a brief, handheld tutorial of the mechanics in the game, you’re tossed back in the same mission but with the freedom to approach it however you want. This single area was already more interesting than most of the missions from Absolution and it felt great getting that familiar Blood Money vibe of exploring a level to find what I could use to eliminate my target. Instead of going for the easy disguise the tutorial introduces you to I opted for the ballsy idea of going for a cop’s uniform. After a few well placed coin tosses and a split second of nearly getting caught, I had my outfit and was able to casually stroll onto the yacht with even more freedom to explore than I had in the tutorial. After patrolling the boat and satisfied I knew my target’s patterns I decided to just stuff his face in a toilet because I have a very sophisticated sense of humor.
The second mission places you in a Soviet hangar with an even larger layout than the boat. With the entire place filled with soldiers I was tiptoeing my way through making sure to avoid the certain death that was around every corner. Although I was somewhat disappointed with how much easier it was to get to the target here than in the previous mission, the methods of execution were a little more obscure. There were specific actions required to eventually get your target to do what you wanted him to and it was an entertaining endeavor to figure those out. On my third run, I found a mechanic suit I had never seen, sabotaged the ejector seat to the jet without anyone batting an eye, told the target we needed to run some safety protocols, and sat back as I watched the target activate the ejector seat and hurtle into the night sky. I then walked right out of the hangar while everyone stood in confusion and felt that sick satisfaction after a successful mission I hadn’t felt in Absolution.
What’s perhaps my favorite change from Absolution is the massive improvement to the disguise system. Sure, it was always silly how you could put on the clothes of a waiter who just went to the bathroom and that nobody noticed how he suddenly became an angry looking bald guy but it was a silliness that was accepted. Absolution attempted to fix this and failed spectacularly with their garbage system of having everyone constantly suspicious of you and requiring that you hide by burning through a resource that was refilled with kills. I’m still amazed that everyone on that team thought that was a good way to fix the disguise system of the previous games and the latest game finds a nice sweet spot between the two. Donning a disguise will allow you free reign to do whatever you want within the limits of your disguise without anyone really questioning you; this means that as a mechanic you can run around and generally do almost anything (within reason) in the areas where mechanics hang out. Messing around with the engine of a jet will raise suspicions if you’re dressed as a soldier, but doing so as a mechanic is perfectly fine. This time around, instead of everyone instantly questioning who you are, there are only specific NPCs within that disguise type that will begin to suspect you. If you grab a cop disguise, out of the dozen or so cops that are in a level only one or two will be able to see through your disguise and are identified by a white circle over their head. This is a massive improvement over Absolution that both gives you the freedom to properly explore an area while also keeping you on your toes.
Hitman isn’t without its faults though. The range at which an enemy can spot you is really spotty at times, with enemies sometimes getting suspicious of you from quite a considerable distance. The inclusion of the instinct system leaves me feeling mixed, if not mostly negative, feelings about its existence. It seems like instinct has been reduced into a simple detective vision a la Batman Arkham series. For all I know, instinct might still be the same god awful mechanic in the full game as it was in Absolution, but right now in the beta all it does is allow you to see enemies through walls. Absolution practically punished you for not using instinct so I’m really hoping the new game does away with the feature completely besides what’s in the beta. Instinct also illuminates anything you can interact with which I feel ruins the joy of discovering things for yourself. The minimap itself even spoils the locations for many of these moments. There’s nothing fun about walking into a room and knowing immediately what you can and can’t use to eliminate your target.
The challenges menu also adds to this major annoyance. IO clearly wants you to replay missions multiple times (mainly because this will be an episodic release so maps will be sparse) so they included a feats system that I assume will reward you in some way in the full game by doing specific things like wearing every disguise in a mission or killing your target in specific ways. This would be fine if it didn’t spoil every unique assassination option in the game and with the game actively encouraging you to look at this menu you’re bound to have all the surprise ruined. Part of my love of Blood Money was discovering new ways to kill your target years after the game released because the game made no attempt at handholding your way through it. The way Absolution was made felt like the developers didn’t trust players to figure out things for themselves so they made the most linear Hitman experience they could. Hitman feels a lot better in this regard, but the distrust is still there with the instinct system and now these challenges that point you in the exact direction of how to do everything in a map.
Now this is probably the most beta, preorder beta from a major studio that I’ve ever played. This isn’t your typical, pretty much a finished game demo beta that you always see; this is a proper ‘janky-as-hell’ beta. There were audio clipping issues, cutscenes constantly stuttering, settings wouldn’t always work, NPCs moving in odd ways, and there was an overall sense of bugginess. The most glaring issue is the insane 90° rollercoaster drop the frame-rate does whenever you enter an area with more than 10 NPC’s in the first mission or enter the hangar in the second. In small areas Hitman definitely hits a pretty high frame-rate, but entering those aforementioned areas makes the game drop around 20fps. I’m hoping IO can iron things out before the full release, especially considering it’s supposed to have dozens more characters on-screen, but being a few weeks away makes me incredibly wary.
All in all, I came away mildly impressed by the beta. Besides the spoon feeding challenges that effectively spoil the fun of discovering kills yourself, I’m glad that IO acknowledges that Absolution’s super linear approach was the wrong path to take this game and corrected its course. With the first act dropping next month, I’m eager to see what improvements might be made from the beta.
