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Hitman 2 Review November 12, 2002 Rory 'Hubris' McGuire |
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Summary: Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, the much-lauded sequel to the inspired but flawed Hitman: Codename 47, has hit FiringSquad. Rory plays the game inside out, and shares the revelations that 47's meditation brought to him here!
 Overview | Page:: ( 1 / 8 ) |
Return of the Barcode
It’s official, the stealth action game is it’s own genre. It might be ninjas, it might be special agents, and of course, it’s also hitmen, or a hitman as the case may be. The first Hitman, while not a revolution on the PC, was certainly well received critically and by the populous.
Rightfully so, the first game brought you complex gameplay, beautiful level design, and altogether an ambience that just felt real. It had a Chinatown with visual layers upon layers, down to little dragon paper lanterns hanging in shop windows; a Columbia covered in trees with gnarled roots emerging from a richly textured ground.
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No rest for the wicked
But Hitman: Codename 47 also had its own issues. The AI, for being one of the games principal gameplay mechanisms, was actually quite poor. Hitman also suffered from a number of frustrating interface problems ranging from not being able to walk backwards to clunky cameras to not being able to save. There were many reasons why the game wasn’t a revolutionary title.
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In Hitman 2: Silent Assassin our hero returns after a long religious break. While acting as a gardener in a monastery in Sicily, 47’s mentor and religious guide is kidnapped. His only option is to return to the business again, and with a palpable reputation to back him up, the enigmatic “Agency” has a long list (20) of jobs for our bald and bar coded hero. Eidos and IO Interactive bring 47 back to the limelight with Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, and attempt to address many of the issues that plagued the first game. The focus on this touch-up is the AI, the interface, the controls, and the overall fun factor. New to the plate is a gorgeous graphical engine, new models and of course, many a new toy to play around with.
SIDEBAR: Athlon/Pentium 450 MHz
128MB of RAM
16 Meg video card
DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card
800 meg install
FS Recommends
700 MHz processor
256MB of RAM
Much patience with driver updates
| Interface, Controls and Sound | Page:: ( 2 / 8 ) |
Be gone ye controls of doom!
Yes, the controls in the first Hitman were quite possibly one of the most unintuitive beasts in the history of the shooter. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or a geneticist for that matter, to know a genetically engineered super assassin should be able to do fundamental things like walk backwards and jump. The good news is you can now walk backwards, the bad news is you still can’t jump.
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However, IO Interactive obviously saw a need to address a number of interface and control issues that simply had to be dealt with for the franchise to proceed. You now can lean around corners, you have a toggleable button to run, when you draw your garrote, you hold the button to pull it back and now release to wrap it around some poor sap’s neck, not to mention a whole other briefcase’s worth of updates. Don’t like how your camera is blocking the action? Use your mouse wheel to zoom it in and out a wee bit, or drop into first person if that suits your flare.
The controls in Hitman 2 do not suck, in fact, if you hadn’t played the original you would have no idea how far the controls have come. You still can’t jump, which is a major gripe, but the levels are designed well enough that not only does the player not need to jump, it’s also not really on his mind as he is sneaking through bushes and scurrying along walls.
Staccato gunfire
Many a developer has come to the realization of how important sound is to a single player game. Hitman 2 is not a slouch in the arena of sound. The guns sound as real as they come, the ballers, shotgun and desert eagle shake your speakers with bass as you pump some crazed middle eastern cultist full of lead, and the silenced 9mm leaves a soft “pfft” in its wake.
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The sound excellence isn’t limited to weaponry. 47, in his return to the art of the man hunt trots around the globe again, but this time, IO Interactive populated the levels with a number of authentic speakers of the native tongues. Shoot a Yakuza member in the leg and you can watch him drop to the ground and curse in colorful Japanese, or Russian when you’re in St. Petersburg, Italian while in Sicily, and the list goes on.
Away from the simple sounds of the game, Hitman 2 has easily one of the better soundtracks of this year. Played by the Budapest Symphony Orchestra, the soundtrack not only integrates elements of the music native to the area you are in, but also depending on the situation you are in the music changes seamlessly. You are walking along a rooftop crouched over in stealth mode and you have a slow ponderous tune, as you grow closer to the action the tempo picks up, until you are almost seen where it reaches a crescendo, and then cools back down as you fade into the shadows. The soundtrack is not only outstanding, but such excellent use of it makes it even more memorable.
SIDEBAR: Andrew WK lent his musical “talents” to the commercial for Hitman 2, but (thankfully) has not one track in the actual game.
| Graphics and Performance | Page:: ( 3 / 8 ) |
An assassin with an eye for beauty
Poking around the screenshots you may find that Hitman 2 isn’t quite as up to date on a visual level as UT2k3 or the early screens we’ve seen of Doom 3. What the Hitman 2 screens won’t reveal is how incredibly fluid the game’s visuals actually are. Each of the models in Hitman 2 has literally thousands of frames of animation. As guards patrol they saunter about, stop for pee breaks, smoke breaks, stop and adjust their requisite bad guy sunglasses. Moreover, the models in Hitman 2 benefit from “ragdoll” physics, depending on the pose a fellow is in when you sneak up behind him and strangle him he’ll react in different ways, occasionally reaching up to stop you from choking him, grasping his neck. And don’t forget high caliber weaponry, hit a man with a sniper rifle and send him flying, empty your twin ballers into a random goon and watch as his body recoils from each shot.
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The levels in Hitman are still breath taking, the attention to detail is fantastic and benefits well from a number of technological advancements, the most notable of which is bump mapping support. The locales for the game’s 20 levels are well chosen, ranging from snowy Japanese castles, Sicilian monasteries, Afghani villages, Russian capitals and the basement of the two largest skyscrapers in the world. These locales would be squat without the aforementioned attention to detail. The Japanese setting takes place in dead winter, at an ancient Japanese castle. The snow swirls off of steeple towers at slants with the wind, as you dodge from tree to tree watching for the movements of guards. The graphics in Hitman 2 are not just beautiful, but immersive, as there’s commonly a hundred little details moving at once, and you have to carefully pick out amongst them which is the threat.
Caveat Emptor
Somewhere along the line with all this graphical excellence, someone pushed a few too many buttons. Hitman 2 on the PC is about as stable as a manic depressive ex-girlfriend. Our experience was the first level played through fine, no slowdowns, no crashes, we moved on to the next level and lost our sound randomly, at first just echoes like you were playing a game of phone with tin cans, then lost it all. Then we began to experience crashing every 30 minutes - everything ranging from desktop crashes, to BSODs and total lockups. We tried updating all our various drivers, and it stopped, for about an hour, then caught up to us two levels later where the crashing resumed, then we would randomly lose sound or it would become distorted and echoed. Then it would stop, we tried swapping from D3D to OpenGL and back, disabling EAX, lowering sound channels, sound acceleration and more. We seemed to have reduced the crashing a little bit, but after testing it on four separate systems (On two separate OSes, three chipsets, four videocards and more.) the game still maintains at least a minor (every couple hours) level of crash frequency on three of those machines. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to be the only folks with these issues, as it seems to be common in hundreds of others, with a requisite few who are experiencing nothing. If you do pick up Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, a lot of folks are curing their remedies by turning their sound acceleration down in their DX dialogue, this, however, did not work for us.
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If it were just occasional crash issues we might be able to look over it, but the bugs continue in the actual gameplay as well. For example, one level while attempting to enter into the snowy Japanese castle 47 finds himself going through an underground tunnel network populated by thugs bearing low-light goggles patrolling the roads. Trucks periodically pass through the area, and anyone moving through the area, even other guards are stopped and identified. Now, these trucks are an interesting feature and 47 can climb into the back of them and travel around. However, the guards aren’t so bright, and will meander around in the road and get run over by the trucks occasionally, which not only sets off alarms and alerts other guards to your presence (despite you not being in the truck much less being involved in the killing.) The unnecessary killing then affects your rating on that level, and if you’re an assassin perfectionist you’ll find yourself reloading many a time.
To continue with those bugs, the same guards who check ID are ludicrously stupid about it, they simply saunter over, and say “Show me some ID!” in Japanese. They then go through an animation that they are looking at a wallet and examining it. However, they don’t move and don’t react to movement, and our hero can walk around behind them and knife the elite guards in the back while they are examining his ID, or simply walk away if that’s his inclination and they’ll have no idea where he went. These are the same guards that spot you in absolute darkness while you’re sneaking behind a pillar 50 feet away.
Keep in mind this is but one level, numerous other bugs crop up over the course of 47’s world jaunting experience.
SIDEBAR: Master assassin Chow-Yun Fat will be re-united with Producer/Director John Woo for the 2003 slated release Bulletproof Monk. If you haven’t seen The Killer stop reading and go get it now.
| Gameplay | Page:: ( 4 / 8 ) |
So many ways to kill, so little time
The first Hitman suffered from a few problems in relation to gameplay. It presented religiously deliberate gameplay requiring stealth and sneaking, but didn’t offer a save system. The lack of a save system in the first game certainly created quite a bit of tension, but it also presented a heck of a lot of frustration. The player sets up his assassination perfectly with the bomb and the poison and the sniper rifle and th… and then someone sees you and it breaks out to a firefight. Hitman 2 not only offers a number of saves based on the difficulty level you choose, but also touts a more interesting fighting system so in case a firefight does go down, it’s not quite as plain as the first game.
Though IO Interactive is billing Hitman 2 as a game where you can choose action or stealth, the game truly shines when you choose the latter. As a stealth assassin you can turn a hall, whip out your silenced 9 millimeter and pop the head of a goon rounding the corner. Sprint over, and drag the goon’s body into an alcove just as his partner rounds the corner, you don the dead goon’s clothes and walk right past. Be careful, for every second you hang around you run the risk of opponents catching onto you, as shown by the addition of an “awareness” meter in the corner of your screen, showing how at risk you are to being discovered.
The game also offers a number of different creative solutions to situations, yes, they all boil down to you killing your target, but all the levels offer at least two methods, the Rambo charge or stealth, but then also numerous breakdowns between those. For example in one scenario you are trying to kill two targets meeting in a park, you might simply climb a local building and take two difficult shots with a sniper rifle. Perhaps you prefer to take down a couple bodyguards and your targets with double car-bombs to blow them up when they try to leave. You might simply wait for them to each walk past and pop them from a distance with the silenced nine millimeter, and let’s not forget the aforementioned guns blazing method.
The game has a number of different pathways and methodologies to it, and the game rewards you with bonus saves as you try out obscure ideas or explore parts of the map that aren’t necessarily quintessential to the path at hand.
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Hey! You there!
But in application, the game doesn’t always play in the stealth mode. The simple fact is, it’s ludicrously easy just to walk into a room and blow everything up with an AK-47. The other issue is, besides three levels out of 20, there is absolutely no reward for being a faceless ghost leaving only a whiff of cologne and discarded suits behind you. On those three levels, you can get bonus guns, on the others, it’s a pat on the back from your local assassin grading school and a big thumbs up. Why take an hour to assassinate a Mafia don when you could do it in two minutes? The reward is strictly personal, which is one thing you must realize when you sit down to play Hitman 2, if you blaze through the levels just fighting everything, the game is ludicrously easy. You’re very likely to finish it in a sitting or two, if you bother finishing it at all. For the complete experience you have to pursue stealth assassin status, even if it’s just for your own satisfaction.
The AI for fighting is absolutely terrible, enemies don’t flank you, don’t attack in pairs, don’t take cover. They simply rush at you in hordes to be cut down by an SMG or an AK-47. The combat AI in Hitman 2 is a call back to Doom. Aggravated guards can be kept out of rooms by repeatedly closing the door on them. All of this is incentive not to pick a fight, and instead go with the flow and be an assassin.
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Which is where the AI truly shines. The stealth detection AI in Hitman 2 is simply awe inspiring and curse inducing. The AI will catch on to subtle nuances that at first you think are bugs, and later on realize are positive features. For example, in the first level, which is available in the demo, you are infiltrating a mafia don’s house. If you whack one of the bodyguards and take his clothes your chances of being detected are high as the bodyguards work together and know each other. If you whack the delivery man coming in, you are able to freely roam around the estate without your disguise being revealed as no one is on intimate terms with the mailman, but as a result you can’t get into places that a bodyguard would be able to get into. The AI is so advanced that if you are spotted and get away, the guards will then be looking for a bald man or a mailman (makes you wish 47 would invest himself a membership at the Hair Club for Men –ed), and you’ll be forced to change your guise again to throw them off.
This intelligence in the detection AI is true in all the levels, but also offers variance. For example on the Japanese levels your disguises are useless, you’re not Japanese now are you? What if you whack a Russian soldier and take his uniform and walk around with a submachine gun out? Well when the Russian soldiers who have standard issue AK-47s begin to wonder where you got that SMG at you can try and come up with a story, but the jig is definitely up.
SIDEBAR: A Mafioso dictionary.
| Gameplay continued | Page:: ( 5 / 8 ) |
Globe trotting assassin
The level design of Hitman 2 is not just visually impressive but well designed from a gameplay perspective as well. When 47 returns to action, the agency demands he perform a few heinous deeds in order to receive the intelligence information he is requesting. One of these is to off the head of an ancient Yakuza family, unfortunately the head of said family hasn’t been seen in public for 10 or more years.
Which is when 47 does a bit of research and realizes that the Yakuza boss is hidden, but his son’s location is quite public. So, what’s your assignment? Sneak into the estate of the Yakuza boss’s son, and get him to swallow a transmitter, and then insure that he dies. When good ol’ pops has the son’s body shipped home for the funeral, you know exactly where he is. It’s ruthless, creative, and entirely badass.
The majority of the missions in Hitman 2 follow these premises, there is always some catch or some dastardly deed you must do first, it’s very rarely “Go kill the bad man!”
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Weapon selection
A hitman’s weapons are his brushes, his pencils, his tool and purpose, they are quintessence. The weapons offered in Hitman 2, however, aren’t all that great. A few automatic rifles crop up, an SMG with and without silencer, a few pistols, a couple of requisite sniper rifles, and a few non-lethal weapons like the stun-gun and chloroform. For some silly reason, that extremely stylish and highly useful briefcase sniper rifle of the first game is gone, replaced by a pair of clumsy unconcealeable versions.
Defeating three of the earlier missions with Silent Assassin ranking (the highest) will unlock three other weapons, including silenced hardballers, 47’s signature weapons. However, if looking at Hitman from a hardcore perspective, your chloroform, your garotte and your wits are all 47 really needs. We still would have liked to see a few more weapons, that are actually practical, as the majority of the gadgets are entirely too lethal and loud to beat the game on Silent Assassin ranking. You’ll find the majority of the time you’ll be carrying an AK or SMG around a level just to blend in with the goons that you are posing as, with no actual intention of using it.
SIDEBAR: The origin of the word assassin can be linked to the group known as the Hashashin, or Hashishim as it is often anglicized. The assassins were active from the 8th through 14th centuries, claiming mostly Sunni Muslim enemies and were responsible for numerous deaths in the Mideast, including the assassination of the King of Jerusalem. Their name is drawn from the term for “hashish eaters” which the enemies of the Hashishim believed they not only ate, but also bathed in.
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 6 / 8 ) |
Pros
Graphics. This isn’t UT2K3, but Hitman 2’s visuals put up a mean fight. The model animations are stunning, the visual layers the level designers produced are simply beautiful. And unlike 2k3, you can have a pretty mediocre system, and with the right amount of scaling, can get a very reasonable performance from Hitman 2
Controls. Yeah, so you still can’t jump, but Hitman 2’s controls are about as good as they come. Camera control, leaning, all manner of sneaking and assassination, and it’s all very simple. Kudos to IO for sorting out an issue that definitely was a major problem with the first game.
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AI. The AI in regards to the stealth aspects of the game are simply ingenious, and thus far there has been very little that can even compare to it. Your enemies notice the slightest details that even you as a player may neglect. Remember to observe.
Sound. Positively outstanding. Easily one of the better soundtracks of this year in gaming. The dynamic update to the soundtrack as the gameplay changes produces memorable moments, emphasizing a narrow escape or close call.
Level design. There were only a small number of levels that left a bad taste in our mouth. The rest were well designed with an attention to detail on not only a visual level, but in regards to gameplay as well. Every level has multiple pathways through it, just when you are stuck you may find another alleyway, sewer lid, or abandoned building to weasel your way through to get to your objective.
Cons
Combat. Absolutely terrible. The combat AI in Hitman 2 is comparable to the earlier Dooms. The enemies rush at you, and do nothing else. In the day and age where AI’s in FPSes are taking cover, leap-frogging down hallways to advance with allies, flanking you and more, this is certainly sub-par. What is most disappointing is the AI when not in combat is so brilliant, and the fact that IO and Eidos have marketed the game as an action game as well as a stealth game. If Hitman 2 is an action game, it’s a very poor one. Those looking for the hordes-of-enemies-rushing-at-you breed of action are better off picking up one of the Serious Sams for a cheaper price tag and better gameplay in that area.
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Bugs. Far too many to count in gameplay, sound, major desktop crashes and the occasional BSOD. Some folks on the forums we poked around on even reported system instability from fresh restarts, able to undo said instability by doing XP system restores prior to Hitman 2’s install. We haven’t experienced this, but the game has more than its share of bugs on the PC.
Length. The game is incredibly short, being able to be beat in one or two olympic sittings if you mix it up between action and stealth. The lack of a real reason to go through the levels getting the top rewards is little incentive to replay the game. We need rewards besides a few new weapons on a few early levels.
Weaponry. If a game puts an AK-47 in our hands, we’d like to use it. If not, we’d like to see a wide variety of other gadgetry to make up for it, as Hitman 2 has only a handful. 47 isn’t Batman or 007, but what’s the harm in a bunch of stuff?
SIDEBAR: One of the most random pages we’ve seen: The 47 society. We’ll be sure to mail them a link to this review. Oh the 47 shenanigans that shall ensue!
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 7 / 8 ) |