But while the original had some really interesting ideas, the actual implementation of those ideas fell short in a few key areas. Thankfully, the sequel fixes virtually everything that was wrong with the first game and preserves everything that we liked. Better still, the game doesn't take the fact that I'm an impatient hitman seriously enough that it keeps me from enjoying myself.
For those of you who are just joining us, Hitman 2 puts you in the role of Agent 47, an assassin for hire, and sends you all over the world performing murders for hire. But things don't start like that. The hitman, codenamed 47, has had a change of heart and repented from his evil ways and is now living in a monastery. Without giving it away, circumstances call him back in to action.
Soon he's in the midst of a dangerous world where he himself is often the most dangerous element. Hired to kill for money, he travels to various locations around the globe performing a series of seemingly unconnected hits that gradually come together to form a larger picture. Along the way, you can take many different approaches to your contracts. As long as the guy you're supposed to kill winds up dead, no one's in a position to complain.
To a large extent, that's the real beauty of Hitman 2. While Thief is a great game, the fact that you have to use stealth gives it a limitation (albeit a compelling one) that Hitman 2 doesn't have. Instead, Hitman 2 lets you play either blatantly excessive or artfully efficient in terms of violence and confrontation. Sure, most missions offer substantial rewards for the inconvenience inherent in sneaking around, but few of them categorically restrict the player to this approach. Given the practical benefits of going in with guns blazing, how you progress through a level is more a matter of taste than a matter of mission scripting.
That simply philosophy is apparent at all levels -- from the game's core concept to the execution of the smallest tasks. Since Dan played a great deal of the game for our previews, we've been sharing a lot of our experiences with each other. In nearly every case, I'm amazed that we've both come up with drastically different yet equally effective solutions to the same missions. Still more impressive is that he and I can have vastly different body counts for successful missions. In some cases, one or the other of us was able to focus on a much less bloody approach than the other.
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Like I said, most of my missions were a little too bloody, and there's a greater satisfaction to be found in infiltrating a level, avoiding all the guards, killing your lone target and then getting out again without anyone being the wiser. The game ranks your performance based on the amount of disruption you cause in a given mission. The efficient players will be labeled "stealth assassins," the more reckless ones are likely to be termed "mass murderers." Realistically, you'll wind up in between most of the time, coming across as a simple "hatchet man" or "slayer."
During the course of the game, you'll have to take on a number of tasks -- that is to say, you'll have to take on the same task (killing a dude) in a number of different circumstances and settings. You'll have to break in to a penthouse and make your hit look like a burglary. Or you'll have to ice a general who's interrogating a prisoner deep in a military basement. Or place a transmitter on a guy, then kill him so you can track his corpse to the guy you really want to kill, his father.
All of these missions are delivered to you via a laptop in your shed. One would assume that a state-of-the-art hitman would have access to better intelligence than your guy seems to. The large streets maps that you get don't show things like doors or windows or even how many floors a given building has. You get this info for some of the key structures but there are more than a few instances where looking at the map gives you almost no indication of what the level is really like.
As a result, some of the more difficult missions require you to go in and screw things up once or twice before you get a sense of how the various pieces of the puzzle add up to a successful mission. There are also a number of items and triggers that are hard to figure out exactly. Occasionally the game will give you an item (like a cell phone and a pager) without presenting a clear circumstance for its use. I really like the free nature of this approach and the improvisation required to pull it off is kind of fun. Still, it seems like a professional hitman would be a little better prepared before going off on a hit.
There are also some frustrating ambiguities in the mission briefings. In an early mission, you're told that you can pick up your equipment "near the pier." What this actually means is "complete across the street from the pier behind a dumpster." It seems amateurish that your employers aren't clearer about these things. In any case, this is a game that tests how resourceful you are and how quickly you can adapt to changes in the "plan."
But even if you figure out a particular path through a level, there are bound to be plenty of others that you didn't try or perhaps weren't even aware of. In one mission where you have to assassinate two men meeting in a park, I fixed it by planting a bomb on one of the guy's cars, and then climbed up a radio tower to snipe the other one. When his friend went down, the other guy raced to his car and boom! Dan, on the other hand, after placing the bomb on the first lime merely waited until the other limo driver went down an alley to take a leak. Dan snuck up and strangled him, switched his clothes and walked back to plant the bomb on the limo himself.
One big (and entirely welcome) change is the addition of a save system. Based on the difficultly level you've chosen, you'll be allotted a certain number of saves for each mission. At the end of the mission, your success rating is dependent on the number of saves you've used. The game also rewards more stealthy players with bonus saves for completing particular tasks without resorting to some sort of bloodbath. Being sneaky also rewards you with extra equipment for subsequent missions.
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