If you’ve ever wanted to see what it’s like to wish upon a monkey’s paw look no further than Hitman. The latest entry returns to its roots with large open environments teeming with things with which to eliminate your target and brings back the dark humor of Blood Money. Of course, as per Monkey Paw rules comes the always online restrictions and some frustrating performance issues.
Hitman
Developer: IO Interactive
Price: $60 (Full Game) / $15 (Intro Pack)
Platform: PC, PS4, and Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PS4 code for review
I won’t go into much detail of the prologue missions since they’re the exact same levels that were in the beta and you can read my impressions of them here. The only change you can expect is the inclusion of various challenges that you can complete for fun and the Escalation game mode which I’ll go into detail later. The main event is the Paris Showstopper level and is the first of seven planned stages for the game. Compared to the prologue levels, the Parisian fashion show is massive and dense. There are countless ways to approach the mission everywhere you look and it brings that familiar Blood Money feeling that Absolution failed to deliver on. The only issue I found with the Paris level was that while the game is nonlinear in how you approach the mission, the targets themselves follow an incredibly linear circular patrol while only deviating from the path if you trigger a few moments. Besides that, and some minor AI quirks, the Paris Showstopper level is an impressive step up from Absolution and paints a bright future for Hitman fans.
Due to the episodic nature of the game, IO clearly wants you to replay each level multiple times and one way they do this is through the challenges system. The Paris stage has a “mastery” meter that will fill up with XP earned by completing dozens of challenges. There are simple ones from completing the mission, or more complex challenges that require executing your targets in specific ways. Increasing your mastery level awards you with new items to use in the planning menu, where you’ll pick from a variety of options of how to start the mission. You can choose to have a weapon smuggled somewhere in the mission (and where that box is), what items you start with, and where you are placed in a level with an appropriate disguise already equipped. One change from the beta that I’m happy to see is the removal of opportunities from the map screen and instead placed in their own separate menu tab. Opportunities are more complex methods of killing your targets requiring multi-step objectives to be completed in order to complete the opportunity kill. These are revealed to you in-game through NPC chatter or by your handler, Diana, mentioning it to you. Of course, the game still wants you to turn on its step-by-step guide to completing an opportunity kill by alerting you of a nearby opportunity with a big pop-up that takes a stubbornly long time to go away.
Create a contract returns from Absolution and functions practically the same way. You’ll hop into a level, select the NPC you want as the target, kill them however you see fit and set the rules for other players to follow. Nothing really has changed since it wasn’t really a broken system but this really isn’t the main attraction of the game. The newest addition to the franchise is the Escalation mode. This is where you take all the things you’ve learned from playing the story missions and apply them to a set of challenges offered by the game. Each mission has various Escalation missions, each with their own set of rules and objectives for you to complete. There are five “levels” to work your way through in each mission with each building upon the previous one. The first level in a mission might task you with killing a certain guard while the next level requires killing the same guard but this time with a specific weapon or disguise equipped. Later levels will have you juggling multiple targets that each have their own rules of execution. Most of these missions require an absolute mastery of the level and it’s incredibly satisfying to finish all five levels of a mission.
Now with Hitman only releasing with a single level and every subsequent area being released one month at a time assuming there are no delays, it makes you wonder how IO is expecting to keep you entertained during each month-long wait; the answer to that is their Elusive Target game-mode. These are supposed to be unique targets added to the game with their own back-story that are only available for 48 hours. In that limited timeframe you have a single shot at taking out the target so whether you’re successful or not means there’s no re-dos. To add to the challenge, the target also won’t show up on the minimap or your instinct vision so you actually have to hunt down your target. Unfortunately, the first elusive target still hasn’t been released at the time of this review and looks like it’ll likely come out around the same time the next level is added to the game which begs the question if this is the big feature that’s supposed to hold our attention while we wait for the next level to drop, how is it supposed to do its job if it’s being delayed?
It’s almost amazing how a game’s performance can both improve and worsen since its beta. In the beta released in February it was plagued with audio clipping, frame-rate issues, and some general bugginess. The good news is that most of that seems to have been fixed, but the bad news is that the full release has its own slew of issues. First off, the game suffers from some ridiculous load times. I haven’t experienced a game with loads like this since last year’s Bloodborne and it doesn’t stop at level loading. Once you’re in the actual mission, simply opening up the map requires a 10 second wait with it even pushing to 20 a few times. Even in the menu itself, simply switching tabs has a significant delay and when entering the challenges menu I can never tell if the game is taking its sweet time loading the menu or if it just froze on me.
To add on top of that, Hitman also requires an “always online” connection and if you lose connection for a second you’re immediately tossed back to the title screen. It makes absolutely no sense for this game to require a constant internet connection, even when playing a contract created by another player, when the game isn’t really tracking any sort of online data to require this sort of thing. To make matters worse, if you were in the middle of a contract when you lose connection, your only options are to either wait to reconnect or start all over in offline mode. When you’re in the middle of a hit that requires a solid chunk of time to perform and the servers drop suddenly for thirty minutes it can really destroy any enthusiasm to continue playing. Hell, what’s going to happen when the first elusive target is released and you lose connection while playing? Do you lose your only shot at tackling the time-sensitive event and are now stuck having to wait for the next target to release? For some mind boggling reason the challenges are also only doable when online; you can’t even view the challenges menu if you’re offline. Considering you need to complete challenges to unlock new items in the Paris mission it’s pretty ridiculous to lock off a part of the game to players who might have spotty or no internet connection.
The Final Word
Hitman is a mixed package. While its core mechanics are solid and brimming with potential, the insane load times and required online connection sour what could have been a proper return to the franchise roots.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
