T w e n t y S i d e d

I hated Hitman: Absolution. Developer IO Interactive took their clever, unique sandbox game and tried to turn it into a story-based stealth shooter. What we got was a tepid stealth shooter, a horrendous story, and (worst of all) a terrible Hitman game.

I thought this was it for the franchise. When a series takes a dramatic turn like this it’s usually a sign that the company culture has shifted. Maybe new creative people are in charge, or budgets have been drastically cut, or the property has been given to an entirely new developer, or corporate is pushing the creative people to make the product more “mainstream”. In any case, this is usually a one-way transformation. Maybe if the backlash is big enough the next game will walk back a few of the changes while stubbornly clinging to their new vision, but I can’t think of a franchise that’s tanked this hard and later returned to its former glory.

But here we are. It’s been four years since the abominable Absolution and we get Hitman: No Subtitle. It’s not just a return to formula, but a high point for the series as a whole. The levels are, if anything, larger than what we’ve seen in the last few entries, bucking the prevailing trend of games that sacrifice scale in favor of shinier polygons. And yet it manages to look stellar despite these gigantic levels. The locations are varied and exotic, and the targets are all interesting and appropriately deserving of Agent 47’s style of deadpan murder. There are usually multiple targets in each mission, with many different ways to approach them.

I honestly have no idea how they turned the writing around so quickly. Absolution’s cutscenes were interminable. The vapid dialog chattered on for several minutes, spoon-feeding us forced exposition that was somehow both obvious and nonsensical. They were ugly, overlong, boring, and at odds with the tone and themes of the series. It was just so magnificently wrong. And yet here comes Hitman 2016 with a lightweight story that returns to the cloak-and-dagger stuff the series is known for. The dialog is compact and the writer trusts the audience to understand the sides without needing to spell everything out for us. Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or anything. It’s not trying to be. We get exactly as much story as we need to set the tone and give context, but otherwise the focus is on the missions.

The disguise system has been fixed after Absolution made it nonsensical and borderline useless. Swiping the right outfit will typically let you roam around freely like you should. In Absolution, so many people could see through your disguise that you often wonder why you bothered wearing the damn thing. Here in Hitman: [awkward silence] there are occasionally people that can out you, but now they’re rare challenges that force you to adapt and not a hive mind of paranoid killjoys.

So it’s good, right? Well…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Dumb Industry: Hitman’s Days are Numbered”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.