Yame Yame Yame Yame Yame 🥷🏻
Guard Checking Your Id

Nice game

After a weekend playing Hitman 2, I went back to my office for work on Monday. There I saw a new co-worker I didn’t recognise. While watching them walk across the office, I realised they were walking slighter faster than anyone else, so of course I immediately shot them to death.

Hitman 2 isn’t the worst game I’ve played, I just did not enjoy it. I didn’t play it as a kid so I don’t have the benefit of nostalgia. It’s a frustrating experience, often leaving you wondering “when it gets good”. There are flashes of brilliance, and some levels absolutely click. However, the limitations got old fast.

The most egregious one is running. You cannot run in this game. Codename 47 allowed you to run where you wanted in the right disguise – perhaps not the best for realism but much better for enjoyability when 47s walking speed is so slow. Any fast movement is heard by the guard’s crazy good hearing and is a “shoot-on-sight” offence. This is particularly annoying when you get “caught” just trying to get to the next area and are executed without explanation immediately. Some civvies move faster than your default speed, and for some reason are amazing at seeing through your disguises. You must keep a snails pace at all times to blend in, but also never get too close to anyone. Furthermore, the silent weapons like fiber wire and anaesthetic (with it’s long wind up time) need you attack from the back – you must agonisingly creep up to hostiles and not take a single audible step, while they move faster than you and their buddies can all recognise each other by footfall alone with a hearing radius of about 50 miles.

Hearing comes into play with nightvision too – a couple of levels let you turn off the lights so you can run around in NVGs – oh except they can recognise the sound of an assassin moving past them and open fire with pinpoint accuracy in pitch blackness – what was the point of turning off the lights? Some patrols routes are painfully long – leading to long sequences of waiting where there’s nothing you can do.

The AI sucks at fighting. The Hitman series isn’t really a shooter to be fair (and this is from 2002), but it takes the edge out of the game. On your 10th time being caught for daring to move with any sense of purpose, you realise all you have to do is shoot one guard. The rest will come to investigate, stand in the exact same spot, and stare blankly while you line up a row of headshots. Bullets also move hilarious slowly in this game.

The story is just an excuse to get you killing (fair enough) and the voice work is awful (and downright racist for some NPCs). The inventory will sometimes give you a random item than the one you wanted.

Despite this, it’s not all bad. If you have a lot of patience it could be worth checking out. Jesper Kyd’s soundtrack always slaps. As I said, some levels let you forget all the frustrations and kick ass. While there was some jank (Again, 2002), performance wise it ran fine. I didn’t need to do anything to make my steam version work, and also look good. If you are a fan of this type of game and are happy to take it very slow, go for it. If you’re spoiled by modern innovations like walking faster than 0.2mph, don’t bother.