One of the Hitman series’ greatest strengths is its willingness to let the player run wild with the professional assassin role. Level design tends to focus on large, realistic environments, populated with dozens of NPCs carrying out tasks both menial and entertaining, and filled with all manner of potential tools and hazards to help those virtual people into an early grave. Imagine then if the player were not allowed to freely explore those elaborate level architectures at all. Imagine if Agent 47 were planted on a distant hilltop with a silenced sniper rifle, only able to see the world down the scope of his gun. Incredibly enough, this seemingly antithetical approach to Hitman’s traditional gameplay not only works but excels at delivering much of the series’ classic fun, albeit from a very different perspective. No pun intended.
Sniper Assassin is a new mode introduced in Io Interactive’s Hitman 2. While the full game is still months away, I got to play a preview of this new side campaign. While it allows for online cooperative play between two players, the meat of the gameplay is just as accessible if played solo like I chose to. The main difference is that you must depend entirely on yourself to pick out targets, judge the trajectory of your shots, and learn the movements of the many NPCs roaming below Agent 47’s hilltop vantage point. This solo approach keeps to Hitman’s traditional atmosphere of being a lone professional contract killer who rarely, if ever, needs backup.
The mission in the preview build revolves around a group of retired thieves called the Yardbirds who go by various avian nicknames (“The Red Robin,” “The Goldfinch,” etc.) in attendance at the wedding of one thief’s daughter. Naturally, one of the Yardbirds has hired Agent 47 to eliminate his three remaining partners in order to collect a cache of money they hid together long ago. Agent 47 has to stake out on a nearby hilltop and eliminate the three from afar, along with their sizable team of bodyguards as a secondary objective. Ideally, he does so without alerting anybody to the situation. I’ve always enjoyed the brevity of the backstories in the Hitman games. Agent 47 has gotten a couple narrative arcs to himself in past titles, but his targets are usually given a short, colorful intro or simply passing dialogue and dossiers for background information. It’s usually just enough to spark intrigue without slowing the games down with exposition. Sniper Assassin benefits even more from this presentation since Agent 47 never actually gets to set foot in the villa where the wedding is taking place. All the more reason to jump ahead to the main gameplay.
As Agent 47 looks down the scope of his rifle, he can view the world with his naked eye or with an overlay that highlights various targets. He can also place a mark on one individual target at a time. This is great for keeping track of a wandering NPC to study their movements, or just to avoid losing them while searching for somebody else. When firing, the location of the bullet’s impact is important for where the resulting corpse will go. The villa is on a picturesque cliffside overlooking a lake, so there are a few ledges and bodies of water to hide bodies in with carefully placed shots. There’s a morbid cleverness that the game silently tries to teach the player with both the layout of the level’s architecture and the NPCs’ tendency to wander near its convenient hiding places.
While there was only the one silenced sniper rifle available in the preview build, it comes with over a dozen unlockable upgrades earned with points. Points are scored with every successful action taken during an attempt at the mission, and then are multiplied based on other factors (never alerting anybody to your presence, for one). Agent 47 has access to a few different ammo types, including one that pierces walls and other objects effortlessly, and another that sends out a shockwave on impact. The real joy of the upgrade system isn’t simply that there are attachments to unlock but also how well it meshes with the gameplay loop itself.
It’s rare that a video game is able to make the process of making mistakes, much less losing, enjoyable. Somehow, Io Interactive has managed that with Sniper Assassin. I played through the one mission offered dozens of times without tiring of the scenario. The traditional open-ended gameplay of Hitman and player freedom grants the games a strong replay value, but there’s also an underlying goal of mastery that’s engaging and addictive. Taking out targets can be chaotic and messy while still being successful, but the highest bonuses often come from playing excellently and being an unseen phantom. Sniper Assassin lacks the open-ended gameplay and player freedom while nailing the pursuit of mastery perfectly. Every attempt at the mission adds a little bit more knowledge and familiarity with the targets and patterns of the many NPCs at the wedding.
Sometimes I would intentionally play risky or stupidly just to observe how the game would react as I tried to improve my strategy. Even if everybody knows there’s an assassin firing on them, the mission doesn’t fail unless one of the primary targets escapes. The reward for excellent play is not having to deal with people running around panicking, but even when they are, it adds a new challenge to trying to eliminate the three thieves among the innocent bystanders. High performance is encouraged and rewarded, but never mandatory. This staple of the Hitman series is alive and well in Sniper Assassin, and it really makes the fun of the experience. If Io Interactive can do this well with a side mode, I’m very excited to see how the full Hitman 2 experience will play later this year.
Check Out the HITMAN 2 Sniper Assassin Trailer:
HITMAN 2 will be available for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4 Pro, Xbox One, Xbox One X, and PC beginning November 13, 2018.
I've been gaming for 22 years, ever since my mom picked up a secondhand NES, and I've played on just about every gaming platform out there since. I think video games are one of most innovative and artistic mediums in the world today, and I'm always curious how developers will surprise me next.
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