Hitman: Codename 47

Rating: C+

Playing Time: approx. 13 hours

It's been a while since I've written one of these, huh? I got the original four Hitman games from GOG recently when they were 90% discounted, and I've been trying to play through them in order. I've been talking with friends (who haven't played them, for the most part) about them as I've been going along, and then I decided that I should spare them my nattering by doing that on here instead.

My personal history with the series prior to this: I'd played some of Hitman 2: Silent Assassin on PS2 about 20 years ago; I never finished it and generally found it frustrating and not enjoyable compared to other stealth/action games that I liked (namely Metal Gear Solid and Deus Ex at the time). Recently, though, I came across some videos of people playing freelancer mode in Hitman: World of Assassination (hereafter HWOA), which looked pretty cool, and so when I stumbled across that GOG sale, I figured I'd give the series another try.

Now, it does need to be said upfront that Hitman: Codename 47 (hereafter HC47) was incredibly jank. The WASD control scheme is actually WZXC for some reason (and the numpad control scheme sounds just awful to use, as someone who has been using a keyboard and mouse for a few decades), and the game's physics engine is tied to its framerate, which is not internally capped by default. It took some fiddling around with it to get it to run somewhat sensibly (with some lingering issues like the camera wavering much faster than it was supposed to, dropped items floating in the air forever, and crouching causing 47 [the protagonist of the Hitman games, in case anyone doesn't know that already] to teabag relentlessly, but it was fine enough to play through all of that).

Also, it has one of the hardest tutorials of any game that I've played, including the Souls games. This wasn't because of any difficult execution requirements in the tutorial, mind you. It's because the tutorial explains fuck-all about how to actually play the game, and the control customization options don't actually let you customize all of the controls, so the player was expected to read a tutorial walkthrough in the manual to figure out that you can right-click to bring up a secondary menu when there are multiple options for context-sensitive actions, since you're otherwise stuck with just doing whatever the default option is. It's funny in hindsight, but it was aggravating at the time because I couldn't tell if the game was bugged or if I was just missing something until I finally watched a YouTube guide for that. Having a walkthrough for the tutorial in the manual feels like it should've been a sign to the developers that their tutorial was shit, but given what happens later in the game (which I will spoil, because I think it's impossible to talk properly about HC47 without mentioning it), maybe that was on purpose.

Once I got into the actual game, though, I started to have a good time with it pretty quickly. HC47 is broken down into a series of missions (12 in total, not including the tutorial) that generally have you check off one-to-three objectives before needing to reach an exfiltration area to finish the map. The game didn't quite have the stealth identity of later entries in the series, so there's no general penalty for breaking stealth (other than obviously raising your risk of dying when people are shooting at you), and NPCs were generally tolerant of 47 doing anything as long as he was wearing the right clothes and not holding anything that he shouldn't have. In fact, there's one mission that basically requires a shoot-out, at least two more where that's very likely to happen, and the final mission is just an open fight unless you do a little speedrunning trick to skip to the end quicker. This made it pretty forgiving while I was trying to get oriented with what the game considers as good play, since going loud when I happened to break stealth was entirely reasonable as long as I wasn't shooting at civilians or cops.

The developers were clearly ambitious beyond their capabilities, so let me talk about a few of the buggy/glitchy/janky/etc. things that I came across:

• The game's solution to hiding bodies was to either find areas where no NPCs wander or (particularly in Hong Kong) to drop them into convenient pits. Unfortunately, the dragging physics were far from "good", so in addition to the expected ragdolling, it could take some wiggling to get a body to actually drop into a hole without getting caught on its geometry, though at least anything that was entirely below surface level seemed to be safe from notice. The bigger issue with this is that 47 makes molasses look fast when it comes to his interaction speed with ladders, so if I messed up my wiggling, I'd drop myself into the hole instead (typically leaving the body behind up top) and then need to make the slow climb out before I could try again.

• Leaning around cover to shoot was very strong, because enemies tend to aim for 47's center of mass even if only his head is exposed. Unfortunately, since 47 is right-handed and too stupid to recognize when he's behind cover in this game, leaning left is generally pointless because 47 ends up shooting into whatever wall/post/rock/etc. he's hiding behind.

• 47 has no unarmed combat capabilities in this game. He's entirely helpless if he's unarmed, which is seemingly intentional because one of the early missions is figuring out how to kill someone when going to the meeting with them requires being frisked and handing over all of your weapons. There's also no way to attack enemies in a non-lethal way. Both of these being the case despite HC47 coming out two years after Metal Gear Solid was just bizarre.

• Rather than having a clean way of restarting a mission after death, there was a weird checkpoint system that would respawn 47 at a nearby point, less some money. This wouldn't reset anything else about the map, including guard alert status. There was also no way of saving during missions. In short, while it's technically true that missions didn't have to be completed in a single continuous try, that might as well have been the case in practice.

• Mission briefings and marked points of interest on the map often didn't really tell you everything you needed to know. This generally wasn't an issue because most missions were quite short, but there were a few cases where it was a massive headache for no good reason (Plutonium Runs Loose being a prime example).

• The map shows only some geometry (often not very well) and 47's location (though this sometimes bugs out and shows him in a clearly incorrect location). Not displaying guards was actually fine for the most part since they were always either entirely cool with you or ready to shoot you on sight, but there were some missions where not showing where the target is leads to a lot of wandering aimlessly for no reason other than to waste the player's time.

None of these were really all that bad on their own, or at least I was able to get adjusted to them soon enough. Mostly, they just made me laugh about how much expectations have changed since 2000. HC47 is definitely jank, but it's a fun sort of jank, because there was a lot about the game that I genuinely enjoyed.

It's also incredibly racist/xenophobic, which...I can't say that anything made me want to turn the game off, but there was a lot that made me cringe. Hong Kong and Colombia were the worst parts for it, which is unfortunate since those are also the first seven missions of the game, but the parts in Europe had some bad stuff, too. This was an unwelcome surprise in contrast to the cultural and regional sensitivity shown in HWOA.

That all said, there was a lot about the game that was legitimately cool and good, too.

From the start, missions give you objectives without mandating a particular approach; there may be one that's heavily signposted (like using a carbomb in mission 2 or hiding a weapon in the bathroom in mission 3), but there's never a case where a certain method is mandatory, unlike in the sequel (but I'll save complaining more about The Motorcade Interception for when I write my review of that game). I watched some guides and speedruns after playing through levels, and it was a delight to see different ways of handling each mission, especially considering I'd thought that lacking mid-missions saves would tend to push people towards the most obvious and risk-adverse approach, but it seemed to instead spur improvisation.

The music was very good. It's no surprise that Jesper Kyd seemed to blow up in popularity after HC47. There was a little annoyance with how the music would have a silent pause before looping, but with how much jank there was in this game, I'm just grateful that it never seemed to go entirely silent.

While they were basically all one-off instances rather than something implemented on a general scale, things like poisoning food, luring targets into explosives, or setting up "accident" kills were in the series right from HC47. The action-emphasis made 47 often come off more as a serial killer contractor rather than a stealthy assassin, but it was always fun to find these options, even if I didn't always use them.

The plot was something that I found myself enjoying a lot more than I'd expected to. I've never come across Hitman games getting much praise in that regard, so I bought on readily enough with it mostly being an Excuse Plot when I was starting out. Once I took out the main target in Colombia and found a letter that seemed very similar (if not identical) to one that the main target in Hong Kong had, though, I got intrigued, especially when the next target just happened to be the person who'd sent both letters. The final revelation that 47 was being used to hunt down all of his gene-daddies wasn't anything I'd call groundbreaking, but it was more than I'd expected from the game.

Most the mechanics were things that felt pretty standard, but I do have to commend the damage/health system. Armor only provides protection for the areas that are wearing it (i.e. just the torso), limbs take less damage than torso hits, headshots with even the weakest guns cause critical damage; it's surprisingly deep, with an end result that precise and intentional play gets rewarded far more than spray-and-pray gunning, in both directions (in other words, snipers are quite deadly to 47, while general thugs need to get a bit lucky to really threaten him).

Speaking of final revelations, I loved the idea of the final mission. Coming off of tow straight missions with esoteric puzzles to be decrypted in order to avoid things escalating out of control, it was nice to essentially return to the tutorial area to get your ultimate revenge on the motherfucker who put you through that fucking mess in the first place. Sure, from 47's perspective in the story, there's a lot more to it than that, but it was actually one of the most satisfying moments of revenge for me as a player in any video game. The fact that the way to do it is to shoot the asshole in the middle of his monologue just made it all the more satisfying. Bravo, HC47.

Now, admittedly, there are some missions that I rather hated. The whole Colombia trifecta (missions 5-7) sucks, and it's all the more confusing why those were essentially repackaged in the next game, considering they were seemingly hated so much that that's the only part of HC47 that was left entirely out of the flashbacks in the third Hitman game. Mission 10 (Plutonium Runs Loose) was clearly designed to drag on for no good reasons, even if one forgives the developers for choosing a terrible way of implementing a "get the secret password from the enemies"-style infiltration gimmick. Mission 11 (The Setup) was very annoying because it's an over-complicated mess of a map with no indication for how to make progress after the cops arrive; I spent about an hour going through countless rooms that all looked like variations on one of three options (cell, medical room, or furniture room) until finally finding the one patient with a different model from the rest, only for Agent Smith to give a Pixel Hunt request to move on. In the end, I'd say there were more bad missions than good ones (missions 3, 4, 8, and 12), so I can't fairly say HC47 was a good game.

The good missions were legitimately quite fun, though, so it wasn't a bad game either. A high-average rating feels fair; I'd initially wanted to give it a C-, but as I thought about it more (and as the bad experiences of missions 10 and 11 weren't seeming outsized from recency bias), the parts I liked were positive enough that I did finish up with anticipation to play the next Hitman game, despite knowing that it'd be a different experience. HC47 is an odd promise of a future that never quite came to fruition, a more grounded and mission-based version of Metal Gear Solid or Deus Ex, something where the grand shadowy organization is just nudging the world rather than controlling it and where its power is limited enough to get played by a single antagonist. I wouldn't recommend it for someone looking for a Hitman game (as the franchise is understood today), but for someone who's able to tolerate jank, it's fine to play, even if it isn't a must-play by any means.

Rating: C+

Playing Time: approx. 13 hours