I’ve been a vocal detractor of the Hitman reboots the same way I have been a detractor of the Tomb Raider reboots: the first one is godawful, and the second makes a marked improvement. That kids, is how to give the game away early and show your hand. However, after the video review earlier this year where I did silly things, I think that turn of events was obvious. I didn’t shy away from my rather playful opinion on the story of Barry Hitman, the shelf stacker of a medium-range British supermarket, and his penchant for nightly stabbings.

I think, like most of my certain vintage, the early Hitman games sparked an urge to dress as a French maid and go about mansions stabbing cartoonish millionaire villains, but that’s enough about my personal life. It all began for me with the demo of Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, and this is why we can’t just keep rebooting series and only numbering them.

From memory, you started the mission on a hillside by a mansion, a delivery bloke is walking about outside, you choke his Smurf until he passes out in a bush, you steal his outfit, get past the gate, and that’s usually where I died. I said I played them when I was young, I never said I was good at them.

I think we’ve all matured since we fed sex pests to the sharks in Blood Money, but I think a majority of us would agree that it was the balance stuck well. At least better than whatever the ninja nuns with rocket launchers happened to be.

That said, back in 2016 I was throwing the toys out of the pram, as it were, with the episodic releases exhausting any interest I already had for a new Hitman, especially one that was so large and flashy. Maybe I hold a contrarian’s position, but a smaller, tighter, more focused level designed to interlock on itself with lots of hidden secrets makes for a more interesting Hitman level in my opinion than, say, “The Finish Line” from 2 (2018).

I like Miami as a level. I want more large-scale feeling event levels that allow you to walk backstage in many other games. However, the level that stood out to me the most had been the Blood Money reference tipping the scales at fan service, “Another Life.” Hell, I even enjoy the small nature of “Nightcall,” the tutorial level this time around.

The trouble I have with the larger levels and the general scope of Hitman 2 is just how grand it is trying to be. With flashy, larger levels, that means there are fewer levels and with less substance, at only five plus the tutorial area unless you picked up the expansion pass. Blood Money had nine to boot and one of them was the White House where you killed the VP.

So Barry Hitman continues his mission to do whatever it was the first game was about, while being only a few episodes into its 16-episode long international thriller, it abruptly stopped. It is almost as if the first game was a series of disconnected events, loosely held together with the idea of being a hub with gameplay that you could slot anything else in. Nonetheless, there was something about the origins of Barry’s lobotomization at a young age, mystery, intrigue, enemies to friends or friends to enemies, and that cult Q-Anon tried to warn us about. Sorry, I got their name wrong, Meta tried to warn us about that cult with memes via your racist uncle.

Some would argue that’s all you need: a loose-fitting story hanging low around Barry’s little silent assassin, keeping it hidden like a sorority student wears her boyfriend’s hoodies, flashy locations, and cathartic gameplay sprinkled throughout. Yes, there is something good about two of those things, but if you are one of those pretentious “games are an art-form” kind of people, the story should be just as important.

The thing is, while it does wrap up with the third from early 2021 and its continued support in 2022, I don’t care. It is not an interesting story. It is something made only to loosely fit around the extravagance of the handful of locations on offer.

As I said, the Miami level, “The Finish Line,” is a large-scale event and it wouldn’t surprise anyone to find that it is one taking place at a racetrack. Two targets, one roaming the map and driving in her featured race, while one is locked away in his fortress of PMC hardware and heavily guarded. As the rule of thumb tends to go, if this is what you are doing out of the gate, then I’d like to know what else you have in store for me. Well, this is the largest, possibly most public, and generally the most flashy in terms of color and explosiveness. I might contemplate the size a bit too much, but generally a good level.

“Three-headed Serpent,” on the other hand, is a bit smaller in focus but still grand in nature. There are three targets this time, and the map is still quite large, taking a good moment to trek from one end to the other. “Chasing A Ghost” is similar, three targets and a focus does come through, but overall, Mumbai is still large with one target locked away like Princess Fiona. It is Whittleton Creek in “Another Life” that shines for me, sleepy suburbia with dark secrets hidden all around, lots of security, and lots of small colorful American neighborly festivities in full swing. All about to be rocked by the death of at least two people.

While the map of “Another Life” is larger than most of Blood Money, it is those restrictions that make you wonder in your devilish mind what the best course of action is. Again, as the design team spoke about with No Clip a while back, the philosophy is to have at least one target locked away and one roaming, and it is not a particularly difficult level. One might even suggest it is the easiest and quickest level you’ll encounter in Hitman 2, and I don’t begrudge that as I’ve already made that clear. All this said, I also seem to be a contrarian with my opinion that a level should be one and done.

Sure, replayability is fantastic, but I simply don’t care about your checklist of challenges, with most of them the button-prompt-based easy kills. On the one hand, yes, it makes the spectacle kills a little easier; however, I don’t want a guided tour around the best murder weapons the first time out. So Checklist Charlie was happy with the leaderboard-style score nonsense that adds no value to your life, and for those that think of stealth as hard, the chocolate button guidance system is another welcome addition. So surely the thing for me is just more Hitman, so why am I complaining so much? I don’t know.

Trend chasing? The attempted live-service model? Another story that ends with a maybe friend or maybe foe walking off into the sunset, expecting me to have pre-ordered Hitman 3 or Hitman 2‘s expansion pass as soon as I was done with “The Ark Society?” Look, I like setting men on fire on Scottish islands as much as the next psychopathic KLF fan, but that ending did nothing but make me ask, is that it? The only thing that hinted at a climax was all the people with weird masks and a penchant for leather. Otherwise, it felt like it petered out.

As far as gameplay goes, yeah, you still feel cold and detached but with slightly more toys to play with. 47 moves about the place a touch more realistically than he did in 2006, as I’ve noticed when watching David’s Blood Money series. Of course, with 10 and 12 years between the next proper Hitman games – I know Absolution came out between then, but its existence doesn’t mean I have to acknowledge it – there have been a number of advancements made to present games to be more free-flowing. So none of this comes as a surprise, and in some cases, there are welcome enhancements.

However, despite the minimalistic improvements from Hitman (2016) to Hitman 2 (2018), it still left a bland, unseasoned chicken taste in my mouth. The aforementioned displeasure with Tomb Raider (2013) and the first of this reboot of Hitman comes from the homogenization of a majority of games these last few years. Hitman as a series still has an ember flickering in the burned-out bonfire where its spark once sat, but that lone ember isn’t particularly setting my underpants on fire when I try to dress like the bonfire but with a barcode on it. “Three-headed Serpent” is a good level, but a majority of it you don’t bother with because it is so large.

There are parts of that mansion I’ve never seen and I’ll probably never see either, just as the drug caves are a labyrinth into themselves. I’m sure I’ve missed something in Mumbai and Miami, too. That attempt to look big is little more than being as wide as the ocean, yet as deep as a pool of blood at the bottom of that elevator shaft. Once again, I’ll bring up the contrarian’s position, saying I’d have been satisfied with a smaller village and the mansion, or just a couple extra floors to the towering high rise. Pulling the focus away from the flash locations we travel to and, instead, concentrating more so on the gameplay and the assassinations we’re here for.

Though concentration is difficult when you have two things consistently vying for your attention, the breadcrumb hints from Diana after she recovered from that minor car accident and your dodgy internet connection. Yes, if you have a patchy internet connection, you might have missed the news about that dark joke, and it will make playing a modern Hitman quite frustrating. We’re all sick of being told to sign up to everything and increasingly restrictive always online-DRM, for which outside of MMOs the Hitman (reboot) series is one of the most aggressive. While Hitman 2 fixed some of 2016’s problems (no, not those ones), it still moans at you for not playing with constant reminders that other people exist.

Sure, I don’t mind locking the leaderboards behind your always online DRM-thing, do that online while a bald man chokes you for pleasure. What I don’t like so much is that all the challenges upon which the game’s entire ethos is built are also locked behind that. So IO Interactive, you made a game where you tried to reiterate multiple times that Hitman is now a game where you are meant to replay the level to complete ridiculously precise challenges, then put that behind always-online DRM? You do understand you cater to the anti-social curmudgeons who sleep with swords above their beds, right?

Sure, have your DRM. It didn’t stop piracy, it may have slowed it, but in the long run, it has only annoyed people like me who bought it and tried to somewhat enjoy it despite that. Though thinking a little further down the line, say several years from now, what happens to half the game’s core concept when the servers are shut down and you can’t connect online at all? If it is as simple as a patch, why not do that now, a few years on from its release? Or better yet, for those who bought the disc, which is a solid way of rights management, let us play the game we paid for!

The sniper missions aren’t bad, as I use this hint of gameplay to talk about something that doesn’t make me hate the game, but neither is it the most fluid of the game’s mechanics. Some might disagree, and I understand that, but the Hitman games have always felt cold and stiff, which might be from the number of times I’ve hidden in a freezer. The sniper missions are no different, with the said sniper mechanics being less Sniper Elite and more Final Sniper Fantasy, i.e. the coldness of a JRPG with guns. An interesting idea to be a small game mode off to the side, but not an exemplar of the series.

Sure, it is an improvement gameplay-wise over Blood Money, but the scope and general feeling don’t remind me so much of Hitman, as it does the homogenized grey mess of most triple-A games. At no point do I feel like I am able to wear stockings and suspenders while beating a man to death with a fish as I sing “Sweet Transvestite” in a voice so monotonal Mark Zuckerberg wonders if Barry is a robot. Nor is Hitman 2 entirely straight-laced. It is a safe retreat from Absolution‘s hijinks. A solid game lacking a conclusive story within itself while wishing it was like everything else garnering high praise for flavorless gameplay.

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Hitman 2 (2018)

$59.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Solid Gameplay
• Interesting Locations
• Sniper mission are Fun Enough

Cons

• Larger in Scope but With Fewer Levels
• Lengthy Load Times
• Challenges Locked Behind Always-Online DRM.