I know everybody loves this game but I’m sorry, I just need to rant.
So I’m hyped and fresh from my recent back-to-back Hitman 1 and 2 playthroughs. I start up Hitman 3 and immediately get immersed back into the role. Dubai looks amazing, if not from a level design POV at least from a visual one. I go through the mission, which is more of the same, but since I love Hitman’s gameplay loop that’s what I wanted anyway. Get briefly disconnected once, no biggie. Then the game really hooks me when I get to Dartmoor, easily one of my top favourite levels in the entire trilogy due to its interconnected areas and uniqueness in playability. At this point I’m just drooling over what’s coming next.
Then the story changes (spoilers on this later) and I’m like ‘meh, not a fan but whatever’ and I continue playing. Onto Berlin, another visually impressive level even though, like Dubai, there isn’t much greatness going on in terms of design. Get briefly disconnected again, that’s fine. At this point though, I just can’t shake the feeling that something feels off. The story doesn’t have the same emotional grip anymore, the beats don’t seem as well paced, and the whole thing just feels like it’s being rushed to the finish line. I get to Chongqing. ‘Looks dark and moody, awesome’, I thought, but the mission just seems like it came out of nowhere for filling. I go through it, and when I get to the Mendoza cutscene I’m like ‘What?’ At this point the story isn’t making that much sense to me, it’s less focused, less refined, almost like it’s just there for the sake of it, and I’m feeling detached from the whole thing. ‘No worries’, I say to myself, ‘it’s almost done and I love the gameplay anyway, back to disguising as a waiter and poisoning everyone’s muffins or something’. Mendoza’s an unremarkable mission, I go through it quickly and without much effort. Another server hiccup here, and a cutscene that needs to play out again because of a disconnection, but that’s okay I guess.
Then I get to the Carpathian Mountains, and I quickly find out this level’s relentless linearity is the antithesis of everything this trilogy has tried to be up until this point. Limited agency, minimal options, one way forward. Halfway through the mission, when I’m already questioning several of the game’s design choices, the servers decide to tell me to fuck off. I get disconnected. I try to reconnect. No good. I try again. Nah. I check my internet, it’s fine, so I know it’s a server problem. I restart and try again. Nothing. I’m like ‘Fuck it, I’ll go offline’, no mission score or challenges or whatever, but at this point I just want to finish the game. I go offline and then it dawns on me that I can’t even save the game. I notice that, at first glance, this level is a lot more encouraging of direct confrontation than any other level on any of the 3 games, a style that the gameplay mechanics aren’t particularly designed for. I die after a good chunk of the level, and because I couldn’t save, I need to load up one of my previous saves I got in before I started having server issues. Save file is corrupted, the game tells me, and deletes it. Apparently, all my save files are ‘corrupted’ and I can’t load any of them. I try to go online again. Nope. So I restart the mission only to die near the end once more, this time due to a silly mistake, admittedly because at this point my patience was already wearing thin. I restart the mission yet again - all the while getting interrupted because the game keeps trying (and failing) to auto-save -, eventually making it to the last scene, at which point the game decides I’ve had enough and graciously grants me online status and the ability to save again. I finish the game with a mix of frustration, annoyance, and the feeling of an underwhelming story payoff (alternate endings notwithstanding).
Always online games are rage inducing. Even if your internet connection is top notch, there’s absolutely nothing you can do if the game servers decide to act up. It’s already ridiculous to remove so much of the single player content if you can’t be online, but to downright remove the ability to save your game is next level asshole. I try to be objective when I write about my experience with games, but this particular one directly impacted the enjoyment of my playthrough and I can’t dissociate my views from it.
This issue added to the already questionable changes the game makes, especially when it came to its story. I fully appreciated the return of the cutscenes, but the story itself was a clear downgrade from the previous entries. Lucas Grey’s untimely, somewhat non-sensical death was a blow to the entire narrative, because it meant losing its main driving force, and the story never quite knew how to adjust from there. I almost wonder if the game was made shorter as a consequence. The moment when Diana and 47 reunite is weird too, because it happens without any questions or doubts whatsoever. Did 47 assume she had been kidnapped, and if so, why didn’t he try to find out more? Ask more questions? There was just a total acceptance of the situation without any exploration, which didn’t sit well with me, but perhaps I missed something. As for the rest, presentation is amazing and the gameplay is solid as ever, but there was an inconsistency in level quality I hadn’t seen in either of the previous games. Dartmoor was easily one of the best maps in the entire trilogy, but by that same token, the Carpathian Forests was arguably the worst one and almost a middle finger to the creativity the franchise has always - or almost always - encouraged. I liked that there was more variety in terms of mission goals, but the longer nature of some maps, and the fact that the level design wasn’t as tight for the most part, turned it into a less enjoyable experience.
All of this really tarnished my overall impression of Hitman 3, resulting in a lacklustre conclusion to a trilogy I had been having an awesome time with. I know this will be a highly unpopular opinion, and I truly wish I had enjoyed this final instalment as much as almost everyone seems to, but I just didn’t. Hitman’s usual gameplay, the graphics and the Dartmoor level carry it, but the combination of the server issues with the game’s pitfalls, especially when compared to its predecessors, were a real bummer for me. 7/10.