Hitman 2: Silent Assassin

Rating: B+

Playing Time: approx. 24 hours

Jumping right into this, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin (hereafter H2SA) is pretty much a leap forward from HC47 in every way. I'm not going to spend any time comparing the two because there's simply no point in doing so. Of the four classic Hitman games (which I have now beaten all of, with Silent Assassin ratings for every mission that has a rating), H2SA is arguably the best of the lot. It wasn't for me, personally, hence why I am giving in a lower rating than I'll give to either of the next two, but I can easily imagine metrics under which it would be reasonable to say H2SA is the best one. It honestly had no real business being as good as it was, given the jankfest from just two years earlier that it was following up.

That said, H2SA definitely still has some jank on its gears. In particular, it commits one of the game design choices that never ceases to piss me off. I can't fairly give it an A rating, but even so, it's about as high of a B+ as it's possible to be.

While the plot in Hitman games isn't anything special, H2SA does try. Picking up two years after the events of HC47, 47 is in retirement from the whole assassin business and hanging out at an abbey in Italy while he tries to sort his mind out. He's got a lot of questions about himself, not only because of his previous line of work but also because learning that he was a clone raised a lot of questions in his mind about what it means to be "human" and whether that term should apply to him. None of this really goes anywhere in terms of being addressed openly by the game (H2SA shows a lot of ambition that doesn't pay off, which I'll get to more as this review goes on), since the only other person at the abbey, Father Vittorio, is kidnapped immediately by some local mafia to kick off a plot about a crafty arms dealer trying to manipulate 47 to his own ends.

It's nothing remarkable on its own, and I'm probably spending more time writing about it than I really should, but I really liked this direction for 47's character. It was jarring for the manual to clearly retcon what 47 had been like in HC47, but it was a much more interesting character than being a knock-off James Bond with a small bladder, so I was down for it. As someone who definitely thinks too much about whether or not I'm really human, it was nice to have a character echo similar thoughts, especially without needing to use androids or aliens or some other clearly non-human character to do so.

On the music front, Jesper Kyd crushed it. The general music during the missions in Russia was my favorite overall, but this game was a pleasure to listen to from start to finish. Nothing more needs to be said than that it was fantastic.

H2SA follows a similar pattern to HC47 when it comes to the mission format: each area has a few consecutive missions of generally-increasing complexity finishing with a big send-off before moving on to the next locale. In a bit of a return to the mechanics for Colombia in HC47, you only get to pick 47's load-out for the first mission in each place, and then he'll carry over his gears for the subsequent ones (though not any disguises, since he'll always start each mission in his default clothes). Unlike in HC47, rather than paying for gear from ICA, you're able to select anything that you'd finished a previous level with for your load-out, although you will have to still have those items on you when you finish that mission for them to stay saved in your stash back on the abbey grounds. There's an actual shed that you can visit to see all of the weapons you've collected (and which ones you're missing), which is a nice little completionist touch, and if you repeat any individual mission, you'll be able to select a load-out for it regardless of whether it's the first in a given locale or not.

That all said, that whole load-out mechanic is mostly unnecessary, because aside from a silenced pistol (which you get by default when starting the first mission) and anesthetic (likewise), anything you might need for a given mission can always be acquired during it.

Oh, speaking of which, anesthetic means that 47 can actually do non-lethal knockouts now instead of needing to kill everyone. This is critical for getting Silent Assassin ratings (the best rating, and I think it's also the only one that can award certain weapons), even though the anesthetic is fucking terrible. It takes an ass and a half to prepare because 47 soaks a rag in chloroform every time he draws it, it's slower to use than a garrote, it has limited uses, and it only lasts for a maximum of about four minutes. As bad as all of that is, it's still very useful and important, but above all else, I'd say H2SA is a game that doesn't want to provide easy answers to its problems.

On which note, what exactly does it take to get a Silent Assassin rating? There's a lot of mystery behind that, but generally, you're allowed a total of only 3 for all of the main tallied stats (shots fired, close encounters, alerts, non-target enemies killed, and non-target enemies harmed), no innocents killed or harmed, and you need a certain minimum stealth rating and maximum aggression rating. This is already pretty stringent (and tends to rule out using automatic weapons), but unfortunately, some of the game's jank makes it even worse.

Firstly, 47 is unable to interact with the environment in any way aside from context-sensitive menu interactions or shooting. He can't use a fire axe to break that camera system that you have to disable on a certain mission, nor can he punch it (if he could do unarmed melee at all, which he can't in this game), so because it must be disabled with a shot, that mission effectively has 33% less allowance for other "mistakes". While it's not exactly common, there are multiple missions where something like this comes up, which comes across to me as artificial difficulty because there could've easily just been a context-sensitive action to do it like there is with picking locks.

Speaking of missions, H2SA has 20 in total, almost doubling the mission count from HC47. As my playing time was also roughly doubled, the individual missions are generally not particularly more complex, but the frequent use of either multiple target or secondary mandatory objectives (or both) does make them more engaging overall. There are a few stinkers, though, because the developers were seemingly still trying to figure out exactly what made for a good stealth game.

For instance, the Japan missions are among the worst, individually and collectively, in many ways for similar reasons as to why the Colombia missions in HC47 were the worst part of that game. Both start out with 47 manipulating some locals into revealing the location of his true target, then have at least one mission of just getting to the target (because somehow ICA can't just drop him off on its periphery, despite all of the other places where they can do exactly that), ending that leg by overcoming some unique obstacle (and frankly, a territorial jaguar makes more sense for being unique than laser alarm thresholds), and finish by going through a heavily-guarded fortification (likely by means of getting a disguise that just gives access everywhere to a degree surpassing any other part of the game) in order to kill the target (which can be shortcut by taking an obvious-in-hindsight alternate approach that requires a little set-up instead of just rushing into a big fight) and accomplish a secondary objective (which is later revealed to have been less altruistic than it might've seemed at first) before exfiltrating, possibly using the target's own private aerial vehicle to do so (mandated in Colombia, while Japan gave the option to just walk out of the castle instead of taking the helicopter).

It doesn't help matters that the second and third Japan missions also suffer from serious bugs. Hidden Valley has a number of transport trucks moving about, stopping at occasional checkpoints to be inspected by the ninjas in the underground road. Unfortunately, there's a high chance that one of the trucks will accidentally run over a ninja (because of the hitbox sticking out much further than than collision box), which will set off an alert when the body is noticed, which will make the other ninjas at the checkpoint flock over and potentially get run over by the stationary truck and thus set off even further alerts. Hell, even if they somehow don't set off alerts because the bodies clip far enough into the truck to not be seen, the deaths still count against 47's kill counter. It's a sad state of affairs when hoping the game bugs out and has all of the trucks stop while you run on foot is actually a better way of getting Silent Assassin than trying to do it by riding in the trucks. The following mission, At The Gates, doesn't have that bad of a gimmick, but it does have a certain set of doors that will randomly bug out and not be available for 47 to open, and they're on a critical path for accomplishing the objectives without being noticed, so again, the game's jank can just decide that you can't get Silent Assassin without restarting.

The other mission that stood out for bad reasons was The Motorcade Interception. The idea of the mission was pretty simple; kill a dignitary during UN motorcade procession through a city; and I'm not too annoyed by the game essentially requiring taking a shot with an anti-material rifle to do so (because no other guns can get through the target's armored limo), but the physics engine seems to have an underflow issue that interprets "drop the rifle" as being "send the rifle flying across the whole fucking map". While it's technically not an alert for NPCs to notice the rifle, there's a high chance that doing so will be followed by them noticing 47, so I ended up with several failed attempts at getting away after a successful shot before finally getting my Silent Assassin rating for that one.

Now, I can forgive the game's jank, having certainly played games with worst (like HC47), but the first of the main things that held me back from giving this a higher rating were the moments of seemingly-malicious game design. The initial mission in Italy and the subsequent missions in Russia drill it into the player's head that running in viewing range of NPCs will spike up their suspicions, only for Afghanistan to ignore at that lesson for no discernible reason. As mentioned earlier, certain missions will require actions that count against your rating (the closest HC47 came to this was encouraging killing a waiter to try poisoning Lee Hong, and it's entirely possible to just snipe Lee Hong during his meal instead; that was the approach I took to avoid having any innocents killed in my playthrough of that game), and that's not even considering that the next-to-last mission is bugged and considers your target to be a non-target enemy. The mission that's about taking out a group of assassins trying to intercept 47 has an assassin who isn't a target despite everything about their behavior screaming that they should be. An early mission has killing certain NPCs as a failure condition, only to later expect you to kill each one of them later on, with no clear reason why you shouldn't have just killed them all at once. The game's design encourages stealth and enemy avoidance all the way up until the final mission is an all-but-guaranteed shoot-out where you get to start with only a garrote. In a game that is legitimately hard for many fair reasons (which I will talk about more below), stuff like this sticks out.

The other main complaint that I hold against H2SA is that the game has a number of missions that are very signposted if not outright restrictive about your approach. I can accept there being occasional critical NPCs who must survive (even if the reasoning is terrible), but then there are missions like Tracking Hayamoto having basically only one reasonable approach for Silent Assassin rating or The Motorcade Interception having only one reasonable approach to complete it at all. These are a minority, but in contrast to how HC47 was very permissive about the player using any approach that fit within the game's general rules, it was jarring for H2SA to be a more open sandbox in most ways but suddenly throw you onto a railroad at times.

That said, part of that was because of the game's ambitions. Tracking Hayamoto had a great idea (plant a tracker in some intentionally-misprepared fugu so that the target's location can be followed after they die), executed poorly (because the server moves so slowly that you're likely to spend a minute or two just waiting at the exit to be allowed to leave). Terminal Hospitality had a great idea (infiltrate a hospital to kill a target by botching a surgery while posing as a doctor), executed poorly (turning off the lights basically disables all of the NPCs and turns what should've been a tense ruse into an easy stroll). St. Petersburg Revisted had a great idea (which I'm not going to describe because figuring it out in play was a wonderful moment even with the mission being an obvious set-up), executed in a way that cast a harsh highlight on some of the game's flaws (namely that 47 is helpless if unarmed). I judged the game based on what it was, not on what it tried to be, but there were so many shining moments of wonder that, even with the limitations of the final results, I was impressed at how much the developers tried to do, and I was even more impressed at how close they actually came to realizing those ambitions. In the present era of extremely conservative design approaches from even moderate-sized game studios (let alone large ones), it's a refreshing reminder of how at least some developers used to take chances to be great.

Something worth mentioning is that playing several of the missions in H2SA was a tense experience. That eased up some towards the end when things somehow got easier, but the unforgiving difficulty for much of the game imparted a constant sense of being a moment away from disaster, especially because disguises tended to lose effectiveness if enemies were too close, unlike the perfect protection of HC47 (which would become standard later on in the series). I loved this, personally, because being the world's best assassin should sensibly be difficult, and getting that Silent Assassin rating on each rated mission was a rush in large part because of it. It felt a little off that some of the easiest missions were towards the end, after 47 was warned that his demands on the ICA were going to get him assigned to suicide missions, but that bit of inconsistency aside, this game felt rewarding to get good at.

Granted, I did play on "only" Expert difficulty because I wanted to be able to make a couple mid-mission saves after the experience of going through HC47, but Professional difficulty might be something that I try clearing in the future.

I'm sure I could keep rambling on, but to sum things up, despite my criticisms, H2SA was a great game, and I fully accept that my issues with it in the past were largely because of being unwilling at the time to approach it on its terms. It's hard (not always fairly), it's got some jank, and it requires some grace for its rough spots, but it's closer to being a diamond than it is to being sand, and I can understand why it's still considered to be among the best stealth action games ever made.

Rating: B+

Playing Time: approx. 24 hours