Developer: IO Interactive
Platform: PC
Release Year: 2002
Stephen's Rating: 7/10
Basic Plot
You play the role of Agent 47, a clone, who was created with the sole purpose of being the ideal killer. The game opens with Agent 47 having given up his previous life for one of peace with Father Vittorio in a remote church in Sicily.
Just as things seem to being going well Father Vittorio is kidnapped and a ransom note is left. 47 is forced to contact his old agency to track down Father Vittorio along with the bonus of earning money to pay off the $500,000 ransom.
47 completes various missions and eventually tracks Vittorio down. The Russian mafia kidnapped him to lure Agent 47 out of hiding. They have obtained a nuclear warhead and need to silence everyone who was involved or knows about it (including 47). After freeing Vittorio, 47 decides he is incapable of forgiveness and thus resumes his life has a hitman.
Gameplay
Hitman 2: Silence Assassin is a third person stealth and assassination game. The game is broken up into missions which are all at completely unique locations.
Each mission has an objective which is always to assassinate one or more people and then escape. The game encourages the use of stealth by awarding higher rankings for the less people you kill. The highest ranking "silent assassin" is usually only obtained by only killing the targets.
Within a mission the player needs to avoid detection. This requires finding disguises and avoiding people who might see through it. A common way to obtain a disguise is to kill or put someone to sleep and steal their clothes.
Putting people to sleep is required if you want to get the Silent Assassin ranking, but means 4-5 minutes after doing so they will wake up and alert everyone. This requires you to find new disguises often to keep safe.
Every person within a mission has a schedule they will keep. This allows you to study people and find opportune moments to slip past them, or take them out.
Missions usually have multiple possible strategies. For example; you may be provided the means to poison your target's food, but you could also slip in and kill him with a silenced pistol instead. There is a certain level of creativity involved which is left up to the player.
One of the best parts of the game was the weapons shed. In between missions you could roam around the monastary, and you had a shed with all the weapons you had collected in the game so far. To add a weapon to the shed you only had to finish a mission with that weapon in hand, and you could replay missions as many times as you wanted. Additionally you could unlock special weapons by meeting certain achievement criteria. These weapons could then be taken into missions when you re-played them.
Positives
Decent story, excellent gameplay. Well designed and fun levels which are replayable. I like how you can replay levels to try and get a better ranking or bring back a new weapon, and I loved the weapons shed.
Negatives
The start didn't really grab me, but I am glad I stuck in for the first couple of missions. I don't really like the ending... it seems a bit futile to do all of this when in reality he's just going to give up and go back to his life of violence anyway. Reminds me a little bit of how the story of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines completely and utterly negated and shat on all the concept and story in Terminator 2: Judgement Day. How did "There is no fate" suddenly turn in to "Your fate is inevitable"?
Memorable Moments
There was one ballroom/hotel mission with lots of guests. I failed to stealth when I first played the mission so I ended up having a full on fire-fight with everyone in the entire hotel.
No comments:
Post a Comment