Hitman III is the third Hitman in the third Hitman reboot series. If you find that a needlessly confusing sentence, tell that to IO Interactive, they won’t listen for love nor Blood Money. Once again it released the way I like it, complete enough to the point where I’m not waiting several months for the final mission to be playable. Though it was still a bit short in terms of what I like. A few months back, I did a review of Hitman II, the only other one I’ve bothered to play more than the first mission, and I quite enjoyed it. All despite being a shadow of its grim and outlandish self, it was flashy enough to make some of that clown-suit wearing not matter so much.

Returning for a third time to the adventures of the man I’ve decided to refer to as Barry, it continues the mystery so weak I could see through it from a mile away with a high-powered sniper rifle. It kicks off with a glitzy Dubai hotel so tall I’m sure you are legally in space, followed by a murder mystery, and the rest is often ignored because presumably everyone is disconnected from the servers sooner or later. Yes, we’re back on this train to complaints streets.

I will never understand putting a single-player experience behind an always-online DRM system. You could so easily make the entire game without the online requirements, but instead, players of the previous 3 Hitman games have been subject to mid-game interruptions just so their progress can be saved properly. This ruins the game for those that own it while pirates of the game see no problem as they just want to play the game, and most presumably don’t care about their progress being saved. If they are pirating the game, they probably don’t care as they’ve played it and will move on to pirate something else.

Why does that annoy me so much? It punishes those who have given money over for the game, while those that pirated the game got it within 24-hours. I’m not suggesting anyone does it, but when DRM is meant to be the deterrent and it simply doesn’t do that, what is the point? Why are customers paying to be punished while those who aren’t paying end up getting away free with the game? In a 20-minute timeframe, in the middle of a busy period of internet traffic, I can get stopped two or three times to see if I own the game. A game bought with money that has the disc in to play, of course, needs more excessive DRM.

Clearly I am the stupid one, not the person that decided to reboot Hitman again and call this one only the third Hitman game. Not that the design team is stupid, they understood the unimaginable assignment of creating two and a half extremely interesting open-ended worlds, then were swaddled in for the rest of them. It has the same gameplay as before though, so you’ll stumble about picking up everything, save-scum a few times when you walk into the view of some cameras, and stand about listening in on conversations said a little too loudly for these to be normal conversations.

As a core, the Hitman adventure game is refined to a T, and I can’t fault that at all. Especially with dry grumpy misery guts over here grumbling every few moments about how when he leaves, his target won’t be there anymore either, and all the other lines that made someone immensely happy. It is all very well and good to have those moments, but I don’t get the idea of the more whimsical nature of the series in this one. There is no dressing as a big flamingo in Florida while walking about a race paddock, massive and pink, but still with that dour expression and emotionally callous voice.

The fundamental focus is pulled toward a mystery that goes nowhere interesting. Capping off the 16-episode thriller that has been this trilogy, it lands with all the pomp and circumstance of a mild fart in a lift and wasn’t really doing anything even at its midpoint. For those that don’t know, the midpoint is meant to be the point where your character is at their lowest and building themselves back up for success. The third mission, yes there are only six levels, took about 20-minutes and I am not joking. It is a fantastically intriguing idea for a level, hunting down ICA agents, but it isn’t long enough or difficult enough to sustain itself.

This is why before buying you’ll have heard so much about Dubai and Dartmoor. They are both this reboot of Hitman‘s brand of massive levels, open-ended up the wazoo, and full of character to urge you into exploring every detail. Berlin has you being tracked as you hunt down and kill ICA agents, then suddenly you are left on the map alone and free to roam. Yes, that does offer me more freedom, but I no longer have targets on the map. There is no point after I’ve done the very obvious things, to explore an otherwise dead map. The thrill of the chase is in the hunt.

To reiterate my point, which I made in the previous review about the design philosophy stated in the No Clip documentary, there is the roamer and the Princess Fiona. One walks the grounds of the mansion, hotel, or whatever, and the other is held behind heavily locked doors and men with very large sticks that make shouty noises. The latter very rarely sees open air, or if they do they need to be teased out of the location they’ve turtled themselves into. A bit like me when I play a game of Total Annihilation or something else.

Berlin tries to do this, but at a considerably more rapid pace. The first target walks in front of you, the others you have to go searching for, but it doesn’t take long to figure that out. This is where I say some of the design is wrapped up like a baby. Out of any of them, Hitman III feels like the one that is most linear in terms of how you go about a mission. Yes, you can kill the targets in any order, but I am talking more about the flow, the discovery, and the general feeling of the mission. Berlin is the biggest offender: Stick left once you reach the fence and you’ll get directly into the club’s back exit, in perfect alignment to get in and out again with all targets killed.

All these complaints aside, there is one thing I loved and it also came from Berlin’s club, the sound design. Whoever did that is a genius and I love them because they made all the metal rattle to the bass from the speakers. It is a tiny, insignificant piece of design, but it is one that is important if you know it is there and would be artificial if it wasn’t there. Doors, fences, everything, all the metal has this inconsequential bit of additional sound to it, as the bass rattles the warehouse turned German techno-rave and fills out the world more than if those additions weren’t there.

Shifting back to the former two levels, I like them despite their immense scope that is as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle. Dubai is jaw-dropping as you walk up the stairs from the foyer with the unbelievable wide open area covered in sunlight, and the entire level continues that. Dartmoor itself is a murder mystery within the concept of having a target to kill as well. That is what makes it such a special level beyond the perspective of just being a bloody big mansion and surrounding grounds to explore. There are also plenty of secrets to explore and uncover.

This is where I get a bit controversial with my opinion of the modern Hitman games, and it is that once I’ve played a level and killed the targets, I don’t care. I am there to kill a target or two, so I get in, kill them, and get back out without a care if I bashed them in the face with a rubber ducky. The “challenges,” or ancillary guff, which show up at the end and light up which ones you’ve done, showing the 20 others you missed, aren’t interesting. I’ve argued this before and I’ll say it again, the levels are too big and busy for this.

Therefore, slowly plodding my way through levels again to fill out a wall chart of nonsense I don’t care about doesn’t bother me. I like to play a game, complete it, and be done with it for a while, maybe three or four years, or longer. After completing these previous two Hitman games, I don’t want to return for another attempt at what I’ve already completed somewhat recently. Once again, I like Dartmoor, but I’ve completed it, and it was a one-and-done mystery. As was the job of infiltrating the penthouse of Burj Al-Ghazali.

Those two are missions I’ll hold up as the best of Hitman. I thought something similar when it came to Miami and Columbia in Hitman II, they were great levels that were unique and interesting. I’d parallel those thoughts to “Another Life” if it wasn’t a big Blood Money reference. Mendoza felt like one of the only other levels that was open-ended, but I also don’t care for it you can quite easily kill the two targets within the same 20 square feet. The half a level I was on about before was Chongqing, a place I had to check was real and not just the stereotypical bit of racism from an English bloke calling for a Chinese takeaway.

That was a strong level in the first half, with neon-filled streets and creepy testing going on in back alleys, then it goes off the rails to contrive a linear mission for the narrative. This is what I was one about when I said this one, more than ever in this reboot, has been pulling focus. Three (well, two and a half) missions are little more than closed-off corridors rangling you into what every other game is, while the Dubai, Dartmoor, and Mendoza missions are your typical wide-open maps free to explore with all your cold dead heart.

The trouble with trying to wrap up this trilogy of games is that we’re running the same ring as we’ve done several times, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone to know this. Barry, I mean Agent 47’s entire backstory is summarized as a killer assassin bred to perfection within a petri dish, systematically going around killing people a secret organization orders him to until he realizes he works for some immoral people and goes on to kill some of them too. Hitman III outright plays with this, with the final mission either directly or indirectly hinting that this is the same Barry as all the others that Blood Money‘d all over the place.

Saying this was the last one in a trilogy was like “we’ve got rid of those Nazis” in April of 1945. No one is going to believe you, and you’ll be put in a mental institute alongside a bunch of bald men with barcodes on the back of their heads. Recounting this story must be tiring because I was sick of hearing about it back when this trilogy began, and I don’t really care how it is done, I just want more levels to stumble about in until I am spotted with a man naked in the bushes. So the question becomes, why attempt to end it when there was, of course, going to be another year of DLC, and why not just go on like Whitney Houston singing a Dolly Parton song?

It was the final mission that really did it for me, the one where you are riding Train-Force-One with security about as effective as the brakes on Richard Hammond’s latest car. Why set up all this evil villain nonsense in the same vein of Blood Money and a bit to only walk right up to the guy we’re sent to kill, half a mild-mannered chat, and if you are paying attention, inject him in a cut-scene. All that in-game murder you’ve done, setting up puddles of water and faulty electrical sockets, knives thrown from a mile away, poison, whatever, all of it ends with a cutscene after walking through a long corridor.

Despite all my complaints, I do enjoy Hitman III when it is truthfully being a proper Hitman game. However, I don’t think all that Hitman III offers in the base game or the second year of DLC amounts to a satisfying portion of the adventures of Barry Hitman, the world’s most boring man this time around. All three games with the DLC, sure, that sounds like a decent chunk of a game that would last long enough for you to say “story was a bit crap, but didn’t burdon the game overall.” The trouble is, that’s where I am with Hitman III.

Overall, the gameplay is still the solid murdering adventure game with stealth that it has been since 2016’s reboot. You rub some bullets up against some humans and see if they make a dead person. I can’t say I am disappointed in that regard. However, when it comes to the sprawling adventure with a good chunk of maps to explore, Hitman III doesn’t have that at all.

Sure, this time around you can load all three games in one and play the 16 base-game missions and DLC maps, but as I’ve stated before, that’s a Blood Money and then some. Treading the same ground again with a story that pulls down half the game from what the series is best at wasn’t a fun idea. It made IO’s best outing of this series stumble across the finish line in second place. Though at least the level and sound design teams have something going for them, possibly making the 007 game interesting, as you forcibly undress women as well as men.

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Hitman III

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Solid game, the same as we've seen since 2016.

Cons

• Needlessly aggressive DRM constantly.
• Half the levels are short or mostly linear.
• God-awful writing, one liners for 2-minutes.