List of Reasons Why You Need to Play Hitman
If you wrote down a list of franchises that might as well have been dead in 2015, Hitman would have been near the top. 2006’s Blood Money was the last game that truly embraced the series’ trademark sandbox formula. By all accounts the reboot was on life support as soon as it was announced. The game’s episodic structure was met with extreme skepticism, as we all assumed this meant the game was being dragged across the finish line in a body bag. That wasn’t the case.
Having just received a full retail release as Hitman: The Complete Season One, the Hitman of 2016 stands as the gold standard for action games, sandbox games, hell, just games. I know you’re skeptical, but you needn’t be.
Here are 8 very good reasons to be paying attention to Hitman.
The Environments
Hitman season 1 includes 6 fully realized environments. A Parisian fashion show, a waterfront Italian town, a Moroccan market, a Bangkok resort hotel, a Colorado militia base, and a Japanese VIP hospital. Yeah, there’s some variety. Sure, some of the maps are better than others, with Sapienza being far and away the best, but there’s a level of thought and creativity on display in Hitman that’s far beyond almost anything else out there. Each of the maps is physically huge, most with a great deal of verticality complementing the actual map size. The sheer number of nooks and crannies just waiting to be exploited is frankly insane, and this leads to situations that can’t be predicted or planned for in nearly every run. IO interactive designed the environments to be playgrounds, and littered them with all manner of havoc causing items.
Absurdity
This game is dumb. Really dumb. The best kind of dumb. The countless powerbars sitting in puddles and obscene numbers of large laundry hampers are carefully placed to maximize chaos. It’s endearing and thought provoking forcing you to react to situations, and also to come up with absolutely harebrained schemes. Name another game that lets you poison a man with expired spaghetti sauce, triggering a violent gastric even and then allowing you to hide in a box and bean the guy with a can of that same expired sauce. I rest my case.
Lateral Thinking
Whether you planned some elaborate James Bond kill using the game’s built in opportunities, or just rolled the dice, Hitman constantly encourages you to wonder – ‘can i do that?’ The answer is almost always yes. Hitman practically begs you to get outside your comfort zone and see what you can get away with, or even more entertaining, what you can fail to get away with and live to kill another day. The AI isn’t the most sophisticated I’ve ever seen, but the placement of them in levels is masterful, with a super satisfying risk to reward balance. Figuring out how to get from A to B while completing C and D and avoiding E has never been this entertaining.
A True Sandbox
There are of course scripted events in Hitman, but the really joy of playing comes from the emergent gameplay. IO built a complicated set of systems to poke at and prod – and the result is remarkably resilient. Nothing feels like it breaks, regardless of how weird you decide to get. Each AI plays its part in the play, really lending to the feeling that anything is possible given the right set of tools, disguises, and timing.
Click on through to PAGE 2 for the next 4 reasons…
