i ended up here on hitman after having tried it a few months ago and not moving much beyond the first paris mission. then i played death stranding for a night, popped open mgs v for a few days and then decided that maybe what i really wanted was hitman and i was right.

i had fun playing this and i think that sort of just rolling with it became what made it most enjoyable. I think it took the greater part of me working through paris before i realized how npcs behaved, how much stealth i needed to deploy, and how creative i could get. By the time i had finished paris three or four times, i had finally gotten a handle on the mechanics enough to opt-in to how much work i wanted to do in the later missions. and honestly, the later missions are great, they each have a slight twist so that you don't just spam a certain technique and they make exploration pretty rewarding.

that said, having finished, i dropped into hitman 2 and that game's tutorial level is just so much better than hitman's tutorial, i think starting off with the basics of exploration and then shifting into stealth is really a good strategy and i think it makes it easier to understand how the game wants to be played.

and that's really the big thing here and with all stealth games i think, they all have a sort of way they expect to be approached, but it takes a lot of frustration to figure out what that is exactly. hitman i think makes this a bit easier by sort of doubling down on the groundhog day strategy of endlessly replaying a single level, but i wish it were even more committed to the conceit: once you've completed a mission once, it would be nice to be able to seek out story missions and complete those without needing to also resolve however many extra eliminations are needed. while escape is definitely part of the fun, it's clear that rewarding you with extra starting locations is an attempt to make completing story missions much less frustrating, but it would be honestly better if the save/reload mechanism were faster and more seamless to let you really go all-in on trying to perfect a the eventual speedrun for each mission you're attempting.

thankfully it's easy to see if you'll enjoy this game, the starter missions in 1 and 2 are fun and give a good sense of the overall mechanics and they're worth dipping into if you're skeptical of the game or its approach to or handling of the 3rd person stealth genre.

I struggled to enjoy Hitman initially. The game is brilliantly developed but missions can be dull and very frustrating on your first playthrough as you wander around the map like a headless chicken hoping to find something useful. Once you do find a weapon or method to dispatch your target you often have to wait around for your target to get into position. For example I poisoned the drink of one of my targets only for them not to take a drink in the 5 or so minutes I waited before giving up.

Where the Hitman titles excel is through their replayability. Once you have painstakingly learned the layout of a map, the movements of your target and the various devices at your disposal, there is a tonne of fun to be had in beating the numerous challenges the game sets you. I can appreciate this; and possibly if I had played the game during its episodic release I might have spent more time replaying levels while waiting for the next to be released. However, after I had completed the levels once each I was had no desire to play the levels again anytime soon.

I moved swiftly on to Hitman 2 and was relieved to experience the improvements that were made while still keeping the core aspects of the game the same. If you are intending on playing Hitman I would recommend that you play the levels via Hitman 2 as this will make the experience much more enjoyable for you.

The Hitman series is basically a rated M puzzle game. You put all the pieces together to find the solution, the solution just happens to be murder. It makes you think creatively about killing, ha. This entry into the series does this very well.

They split the game up into episodes, which I think can work for this series. Each one just a different contract Agent 47 accepts. The joy of playing these games comes from the gameplay, so the story doesn't need to be the main focus. it needs to be good still... Absolution. There is an overarching plot in all 5 episodes of a rival spy organization using ICA to do their dirty work and there's this rogue agent, who had a good intro speech. Admittedly they don't reveal much of the story & that's one of my biggest conflicts on this game. They're trying to set it up like a serious TV drama, ala "House of Cards" where they stretch the plot out for a few seasons. It may work, but it does leave this game a bit anti-climatic at the end. When TellTale does a game they always end the 'season' with a satisfying conclusion.

As mentioned earlier, the gameplay is really fun here. You're given a big sandbox with a target and options to get the job done. They are sorta short levels, but the game banks on replay-ability. "You killed him with a chandelier, now this time use a fork." And there are plenty of ways to dispatch targets, I don't think I fired my gun once in any of the missions. The new "Opportunities" system helps show you all the available options of unique kills.
The locations in this game are also very fun and never feel like they repeat. You get to visit unique places from a fashion show in Paris, to a Bangkok hotel housing a rockstar, to a hi-tech Japanese hospital. And 47 does his best Pitbull disguise while in Italy.

All in all, this was a fun puzzle game. It was a good mix of challenging & making you feel clever. The difficulty does ramp up to Colorado, but the last mission in Japan did feel a bit easier in comparison. If they keep this up, I'll play the next Hitman installation.