I knew solving the mystery would eventually put me in the room with my murder target, but I felt downright inconvenienced when I finally outed the murderer and still had murdering of my own to do. It feels like a dare from IO, like "Hey, we're so good at this now that we can get you completely invested in solving a murder mystery for the person you're here to assassinate."Īnd reader, let me tell you: I was invested. As you hunt for clues and interview suspects, a new and thoroughly engaging game-within-the-game takes shape. ![]() Dartmoor deviates from Hitman's typical target hunt by giving you the option of also solving a murder mystery, in a clear nod to Knives Out. Now we're back to the idea of Hitman III being a victory lap. But this one's secret spaces spring more out of the characters that populate the manor. It's one of the more straightforward locations you visit in Hitman III, just an old-money mansion that feels a bit more like a museum than it does a family home. The very next stage sends you to a manor in the marshy English countryside. Hitman III is a victory lap for IO Interactive. The opening stage, set at the top of Dubai's tallest skyscraper, is bright and open at first glance, but explore deeper and you'll find a labyrinthine set of access corridors and balconies, as well as a whole network of outdoor window ledges for you to shimmy along. In typical Hitman fashion, each space you visit has its own personality and hidden life that unfurls as you access previously forbidden areas. It fundamentally changes the way you approach and interact with that level's sandbox. Where Hitman missions are traditionally an exercise in improvisational stealth with an eye toward minimizing collateral damage, this one tells you up front that everyone is a disposable threat. There's even a level that gives you permission to go completely wild and slaughter everyone. Or the one where everything suddenly goes off the rails, leaving 47 stranded deep in hostile territory with no help, little in the way of resources, and a difficult path to making his escape. There's the level where a particular character on the map needs to survive. What does a Hitman level look like when there's no rundown up front of who your targets are and why they have to disappear? How do mission stories take shape? What's even possible when you're not given the option of choosing which tools you bring along?Īcross every intricately designed play space, Hitman III demonstrates how it's operating from a mindset of subverting expectations. When 47 ends up cut off from his allies and operating on his own at one point, the level that follows becomes a platform for flipping the pre-mission briefing, a longtime Hitman standard, into something that's delivered only after you've entered the play space. But you're meant to do the deadly deed only after one of Agent 47's allies pops in on a video chat to give the marked men a little something to fear before you show them to the door of their lives.Īs Hitman III continues to reveal itself, that story-forward focus has an even more direct impact on how you play. ![]() In one early level, a possible end point involves engineering a meeting between two targets and then offing them both in one go. But rather than robbing the levels of their replay value, the approach fills them with loads of added texture. Multiple times over the course of Hitman III, the big picture journey inserts itself directly into the levels. Let's start with the plot, as this is maybe the most story-forward Hitman game after 2012's exceptional and deeply underrated Absolution. Not only is it the capper on a story that's been building over the past four years, it's also a showcase of everything IO has learned during that period. Hitman III is quite literally the end of an era, as the title of one story mission explicitly states. You'll spend at least an hour or two in each one, and much more than that if you start digging into the various mission paths and unlocks.īut there's more happening here. Its six assassination destinations are comparable in size, scale, and flexibility to each of the two games that preceded it in IO Interactive's reboot trilogy. Yes, it's absolutely a "full" game that is ready to thrill you for however many hours you spend in it. Make no mistake: Hitman III is a victory lap.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |