It’s almost hard to believe that it’s been more than 20 years since Codename 47 release. Hitman franchise went through so much, slowly evolving and occasionally making very radical choices. And the the “World of Assassination Trilogy”, as its now known, might be the best era yet. Started out as a episodic season-based game with “live service” concepts in 2016, this evolved into a trilogy of titles, each next entry superseding the previous one while slowly evolving the ideas. Hitman 3 is the end of this period and being a title that can also contain the preceding games content it’s undoubtedly the best. But on its own, it’s quite disappointing.
As you might guess, Hitman 3 doesn’t play too differently from Hitman 2 or Hitman of recent years (not to be confused with the original games subtitles Codename 47 and Silent Assassin, these simple reboot titles are really obnoxious sometimes). There are new things and tweaks to the existing elements, but nothing as meaningful as the ability to conceal yourself in foliage or crowds which was added in the previous game. It remains a “social stealth” game where you must find a creative way to eliminate your target while disguising yourself as someone else to not attract suspicion. But if you so desire you can attempt to play it in a more action heavy or straight out bizarre way, trying to find the most ridiculous solutions to your problems. And you can still try to follow “mission stories” that slightly guide you towards specific story-based solutions, or go full sandbox and try to game the systems.
The set of missions for Hitman 3 is fun, with some creative ideas like an ability to play a detective to solve a mystery in one of the levels, but it’s not entirely unlike what you’ve seen in the series so far. It’s beautiful, it’s exciting to explore and it’s fun to play. The game looks its best ever with promises of even further improvements. The ability to play the content of the entire Trilogy (if you own it) from within this title makes the previous ones mostly obsolete. And the story, started in 2016, is finally given a closure. It’s not a great story, but then again – Hitman games never had great storylines to begin with, so it hardly matters. The final mission of the game is more of a story-driven set-piece than a proper mission, somewhat reminiscent of the final mission of Codename 47, which was most likely intentional. But it’s done much better, even if the contents of it are far simpler and less interesting and stylish than those of the first game’s ending.
Basically, if you’ve loved Hitman games before, you will love Hitman 3 as well. And if you haven’t played them before, technically Hitman 3 with the content of all previous games is the best place to start. Technically.
In reality, it would be remiss of me to not speak about how gigantic issues that plagued this “World of Assassination” from the very beginning are not only still here 5 years later, but have also gotten worse in some cases. Despite being self-published this time around, it’s still incredibly hard to understand what edition of the game gives you what without looking at comparison tables and fine print (and the naming scheme isn’t helping either). The completely unnecessary online requirement is present and now actively interferes with the playthrough. You will be playing your completely single-player mission until suddenly the game would abruptly stop with a connection error and a wait before it can reconnect to the servers again.
I’ve not seen experience this horrible and stupid even on a design level since the Assassin’s Creed 2 initial release on PC with Uplay. Granted, that was even worse (because connection errors just hard booted you to the main menu with no fanfare), but we’re talking about dumb Ubisoft decisions from 13 years ago implemented in a fresh new game for no logical reason whatsoever. Oh and the timed “live service”-ish targets are also still there for no real reason other than to invent ways to keep you playing and spending money on worthless mission DLCs while risking the future preservation of the wonderful game by design.
Did I enjoy Hitman 3? I loved the series since the very beginning and this Trilogy has been a joy to play for me. So of course the “most complete version” of it all is awesome. But the experience of playing the game was constantly conflicting the experience of using the game as a service, even though it absolutely has no need to be one. The intentionally confusing way the game is sold, the horrible experience with the connection dropouts, the question on the game preservation in the future are as inexcusable as they were with Hitman 2016, if not more. I recommend it, but I wish that I didn’t have to do it with this many asterisks, because the game doesn’t deserve the treatment its own publishing model gives it.