Hitman is back…in chunks.

After first hearing that a new Hitman game was coming out I was immediately shitting my pants with excitement.  Then it got delayed, and now its in the form of episodic content.  While that’s fine, its kind of shitty for people wanting the entire game right away and in disc form.  Right now its going to be all digital.  Releasing a new “episode” every month as part of the “season”.  I’ll just say, they better have some amazing missions each month or this will fail hard.

Now getting on to the Beta, which came out Feb. 12 for anyone that pre-ordered the game.  There are only 2 missions in the game, set 20 years ago when Agent 47 was first becoming an assassin for the Agency.  So basically these are training mission.  First mission you are infiltrating a yacht to kill some rich punk.  The great thing about this game, there are numerous ways to complete a mission, a true return to sandbox, unlike its predecessor Absolution.  I found myself replaying each mission about 10 times trying to eliminate the target in a unique way each time.  They also have challenges for each mission, which adds replay value not only because its a challenge, but they are unique too.  For example, kill the target by drowning his face in a toilet full of puke.

So while the yacht mission was more of a “training” mission, the 2nd has you infiltrating an army base.  This one was a bit more challenging but again, kind of felt like advanced training.  One thing I hope they improve upon is offering even more ways to kill a target.  In both missions you can poison the target and drown him in the toilet, that kind of gets old after doing it once, since its the same process.  Also I hope they offer a hard mode in the real game that has the AI changing their routines.  After playing a mission 2-3 times, you quickly know where and when someone will be.  That’s typical Hitman, but for the Beta it left me a little underwhelmed, I wanted to see more, different, something exciting, not just 2 training missions.

They have some issues to iron out too as well, there are frame-rate drops every now and then, especially during the load screen/cinematic, and character pop-ins.  The Beta does show promise of returning to the roots of Hitman games, but they better have some great missions to accompany that.

Check back when the Hitman Season starts for a review on each episode!