It’s probably best to think of Hitman 2 as season two of the 2016 revival. It doesn’t have many new features, but it does deliver all six of its clever murder sandboxes at once.
The wide variety of options for pulling off stealthy kills makes playing and replaying them a majorly satisfying draw. Beyond that, though, agent 47 barely gets any new toys to play with, and the story around it is just embarrassing on multiple levels.
Some peoples compare this game with Warframe. I mean seriously, This game is very much different then Warframe and the character of this game is also different from the Warframe character Mesa prime build.
Why Its Different From Other Games
Unlike most games, which love to send you to wild and exotic places, Hitman works best when you’re taking down targets in the most relatable everyday environments possible.
Everyone remembers Hitman blood money’s classic clown at the birthday party mission. Similarly, Hitman 2’smundane suburban Vermont and dense Mumbai slum’s missions are the standouts.
The former has you doing a bit of home invasion in between wandering the quiet neighbor hood while the ladder’s three objectives are so spread out that it feels like you’re walking a packed city with a wealth of ways to accomplish your mission.
By contrast, the finale on a Ludacris bond meets eyes wide shut island of cultists, which borders on the comical. Hitman 2 sandboxes are as full of gadgets and disguises as ever.
And I mean precisely as full. They’re only a handful of new weapons, and none of them are game-changers. But it is genuinely impossible to see and do everything a mission offers in one playthrough.
Side stories tell little tales within the framework or the larger story if you overhear their details. – You know the exterminator guy who’s working on Batty’s house? – Same guy who just did Cassie. –
I enjoyed these playable novellas, and some of them are even time-limited. If you don’t trigger them quickly enough, the moment of opportunity passes, and they expire.
Highlights
A highlight was when I impersonated the corpse in the cult’s funeral ritual and then sat up and stabbed my target neck as she paid her last respect.
You also unlock new item drops, starting points, and other sandbox altering perks when you play the missions in a certain way so that the next time you go back in, the replay ability is both built in and actively encouraged. Hitman is one of the best and funny steam names to use.
Even the difficulty levels change the gameplay parameters. Hitman 2 doesn’t just ask for your patience; it demands it. The slightest failure can completely ruin your entire mission, but smartly deployed autosaves as well as manual saves mean you never lose too much progress unless you’re on the most significant difficulty.
It can still get frustrating to fail over and over, but you have to remember that there are so many choices at any given level that you can completely change your approach if something isn’t working.
That said, Hitman 2, as smart as it usually is, can sometimes be stupid when the AI goes wonky. In Vermont, I hid in the bathroom of a heavily guarded house, overflowed the sink, and then cleaned out a dozen or so dim-witted goons who just kept coming to investigate the distraction one at a time.
It was funny, but it’s hard to feel good about winning that way. Then again, the opposite happens when a murder you’ve been working up to for hours finally pays off. It feels fantastic.
Final Escape
The final escape took me three hours, and it was worth it. And I loved the last bit of tension added by the fact that you have to make it to one of several escape points after the final kill, and some will be locked if you don’t have the right key or disguise.
Annoyingly, the storyline that ties Diana and agent 47 into these missions is not only absurdly dumb; it’s also poorly presented. Cut scenes are just narrated storyboards.
This low budget attempt to explore 47’s backstory is as bad as the 2007 Hitman movie starring Timothy Olyphant, and all I wanted was to get back to garroting some goons.
Meanwhile, the sniper assassin mode returns with tons of customizable scenarios to further increase replayability, and ghost multiplayer is brand new. It’s one v one in parallel realities.
So you mostly can interact with your rival. And while it is novel, its fast pace feels out of sync with the rest of Hitman2’s deliberate hunts.
What Developer IO Says
Developer IO says we’ll also see more of Hitman’s excellent elusive target missions, including one where we’ll get to join countless TV and film characters by killing Sean Bean.
Hitman 2 doesn’t add much of note and feels more like Hitman 1.5. But by offering more of the deepest, fullest stealth sandbox and gaming in one single package rather than six episodic ones, it earns its key.
The inclusion of Hitman 2016 is a bonus for those that didn’t catch the reboot initially. Here’s hoping they put more effort into the plot next time. For more on Hitman, check out our review of the 2016 version of the game, and for much more on all things video games, keep in tune right here to IGN.
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