Hitman: Codename 47 (2000)

You wake up in a mental hospital in Romania with a barcode on your neck. Need I say more? Personally I was hooked instantly back in 2000 and I’ve been playing every Hitman game in the series ever since. The OG 47 comes from humble beginnings however, and took some time to evolve into the version we know today.

Presentation, user interface, music and voice acting are great, with A tier story telling and cinematography throughout the campaign. Missions take you from Hong Kong, Colombia and Hungary, to the Netherlands and back to Romania, all having authentic environments and details to them making the levels wonderful to replay and explore more than once.

You have a main objective / target and several ways to go about achieving or eliminating that target and finish the mission. You can go apeshit and kill everybody or you can go the silent and stealthy approach (My personal favourite). The jungle missions are not as fun consisting of more classic run-and-gun gameplay, with the beginning and end-stretch being the most solid in terms of writing, presentation and game design.

There’s lots of trial and error playing this for the first time, especially going for “Silent Assassin” rank, but the way the missions play out different each time due to AI and the amount of options given keeps it fun. Replaying levels after you beat it with different mods and cheats was just an amazing time and added to the lifespan of the original Hitman. Certified, Legendary, Classic!

[4] / [5]

Hitman codename 47 is a 2000 stealth game.IO Interactive, the producer of the game, and Eidos Interactive, the distributor of the game, have done a great job.The story of the game is as follows.A contract killer named Agent 47 is created and hired by the ICA and does the jobs given by the ICA.The gameplay is as follows.in this game consisting of 12 chapters, you are trying to complete the tasks.The music of the game is beautiful.The graphics of the game are not bad.My rating for the game: 10/10 (y) Good games to everyone 🙂

I've finished this game yesterday and it's been mostly a torture playing it. Yes, I hated Hitman: Codename 47. At first, I've made an attempt to write a usual review, but it was so toxic, I chose not to post it. Instead, I'll keep it brief and boring and just make a list of a few theses summing up things that influenced my experience the most:

• The concept of playing as a contract killer with an open-ended stealthy approach. It makes sense that this franchise got so popular.
• The execution is very underwhelming. The game often has a very narrow number of ways to go through a mission. Mostly, it is a 'guess what developers expect you to do' quiz. A straight up shooter approach doesn't work.
• Checkpoint system makes things worse. There's no manual save feature, but there are a couple of places in the larger levels where the game allows you to respawn (the number of times depends on the mission and the difficulty level). The problem is that your death doesn't reset the progress, so if you were killed, enemies will still be after you. In most cases it just lead to game over. Frustrating as it is, it forced me to use a walkthrough guide.
• Good things about the game are the main concept, a few nice musical pieces here and there, and the hotel mission, in which Hitman's concept truly shines.

Don't play it unless you really really really have an urge to see how the Hitman franchise started. The ideas introduced here deserve a much better execution.

This game took a lot out of me. What started as a fun play through the only Hitman I hadn't played (apart from Contracts) ended in a finale which couldn't have happened any later. The basic Hitman traits are here, of course: "stealthily" eliminating targets (I'll add to that in a moment), costume stealing, different opportunities (however limited) and unique kills. However, to get to iconic situations like these you'd first need to get through 1 or 2 filler missions, without prime targets, in order to get to the eventual 5 contracts of the game. To bring up an example, the mission "The Jungle God" is one in which 47 has to get to a tunnel, past a sacred jaguar (which you can't kill because he's a god or something). Now, this would be fine and all, if it was part of a larger mission, however this takes up a whole mission, of which there are only 12 in the game (excluding the prologue), which makes most of the game feel like padding in order to stop the game from literally being 5 limited-area prime targets. Even if the areas around the targets were more branched out, or there were more than one target in each mission area, like in Hitman 2016 and its follow-up, would be better, but as they are it feels very basic. I know the game was made 20 years ago, but a few more targets to take the spaces of those dull filler missions would be great. (I did go in trying to like this game, I swear.)

And for the gameplay, it felt very rough. Most of the time, I felt like I was forced out of the stealthy shadows that Hitman is brilliant at and forced into long-haul gun fights, which it isn't great at (at least in this game). My frustration piqued many a time when I had barely any health left after a long gunning spree, feeling as if I'd been dropped off into a poorly made shooter midway through. And the health is wiped away like a knife through soft butter, which would be fine if stealth felt even a bit approachable.

Overall, the game felt like the pilot experiment for the better and more enhanced Hitman games to come.

P.S. I do have to mention the one exception to all this though - the mission "Traditions of the Trade". Gee did I love this mission, pretty much everything about it! While it still suffers from the limited amount of differing choice, it still had a great atmosphere, area design, sequence of events and story behind it that made it feel like a wonderful vacation from the otherwise war I'd been having with this game (you might even say it felt like a warm (thermal?) bath after a long day of chores. A beam of light through the otherwise darkness of my playthrough of Hitman: Codename 47.