I always knew I would play this after enjoying the previous game so much, only that was four years ago! It simply took this long for me to get around to it after waiting for all episodes to be released. I have to confess that I haven’t actually finished everything yet before writing this. There’s just too much content so I’ll leave the DLC content for a later date. Even with the base content trying to be truly completionist is too much. I’d had to settle for doing all of the mission stories and achieving level 20 mastery on each map but I gave up on the really exotic and tedious challenges.

Story-wise it continues directly where the previous game ended and indeed, it’s even a little difficult to understand which content belongs in which game as the edition I have integrates the two. The game really wants you to play all of the previous content as it nags you about it and has Steam achievements for it. I don’t much care for the main story itself so suffice to say that you bounce between working for Providence, a shadowy cabal who all but runs the world, and the Shadow Client who wants to destroy the group. At the same time, 47 picks up clues about the people who turned him into an assassin in the first place and makes contact with Lucas Grey, who was a child from the same orphanage. I will note that the base content doesn’t bring the main story to an end, you need to play two more missions from the DLC to know everything which must be irritating to those who avoid buying DLC.

The main draw of the sequel are new maps and missions so the gameplay mechanics are mostly unchanged. The most significant improvements to me are the ability to blend into crowds, the lack of which in the previous game I complained about, and being able to hide in tall grass and bushes. You can now also more easily see which areas are covered by cameras and so avoid them. I’m not sure if the levels are any bigger or if the graphics are any better but they’re plenty big and good enough for me so it doesn’t matter. You get plenty of new gear as well but I still bring the old standbys like the lockpick and simple coins for most missions. One minor technical problem I had is that by default the game tries to download content for every DLC you have access to. This make it eat up a huge amount of HDD capacity. Since there is so much content here already there is no way I’m going to replay all of the previous game in this one, so I had to manually disable all of those maps.

The first New Zealand map is really another tutorial, even if the game insists you do the tutorial that is reused from the previous game. The Whittleton Creek map is somewhat amusing to have secrets and murders going on in a stereotypical small American town but it’s really too tiny and easy to be really interesting. All of the other maps are great however with the Mumbai one being probably my favorite. It has slums, part of an under construction skyscraper and the mission set in it has 47 interact with another assassin who is after the same targets. The guided mission stories now are a little less by-the-numbers, so you may have to figure exactly where to get a particular tool yourself, or get around guards and that’s great by me too. In some cases they simply make the target vulnerable but it’s up to the player exactly how to take advantage of the opportunity without exposing yourself.

Writing about the previous game, I’ve mentioned how much detail goes into each mission but I found myself impressed all over again here. I’ve played and replayed each map enough times that I thought I knew each of them pretty well but I still routinely find new shortcuts in the form of ledges and ladders to climb. The amount of scripted conversations and interactions between NPCs is insane, especially as the vast majority of it will never be noticed by most players. My favorite example of this is the Whittleton Creek map where you can cause one of the targets Janus to visit his neighbor Helen West and they have a conversation about her deadly secret. That’s simple enough but if you keep trailing West, you’ll see her make a call on her phone due to being scared by the interaction with Janus. Even random guards have conversations of their own and you can spend all day just hanging out in different spots on the map to see various stories between the different NPCs play out.

I will say that after getting so much practice at it, merely completing each mission cleanly with a silent assassin rating is rather easy for me now. The final mission on the Isle of Sgàil map does ramp up the difficulty dramatically with the almost total inability to move anywhere without a disguise and each target being trailed by a personal bodyguard. Some spots on maps now are particularly hard to crack with multiple guards covering the point of interest and no easy ways to stash unconscious bodies nearby. Those are fine with me as there are easier alternative to complete the objectives. I do find myself irritated that the possible story paths to take are increasingly comical and silly. For example on the Santa Fortuna map, in order to start the ceremony for the statue going you need to locate the drunk musicians around the town and wake them up. Many of the optional challenges are also very ridiculous, like dressing in some specific costume to do something silly. In many cases, the only feasible way to accomplish those actions is to almost kill everyone on the map which is just tedious and not fun to me.

Anyway there is so much content even in the base game that I’m feeling a bit burned out. The Hitman formula really works and I think it’s almost unique among video games in how much of the map the player can interact with. In most other games, you have this perfectly realized, gorgeously rendered world, but the only thing you can do there is fight in it. This franchise however makes full use of the virtual world to populate it with all kinds of semi-realistic NPC behaviors and interactions. Then it incentivizes the player to play close attention to these NPC behaviors and details of the environment itself to complete the mission objectives as cleanly as possible. The powerful instinct mode makes it easier to note which elements in the environment can be interacted with but even so it can be easy to miss ledges and windows and drainpipes that add more infiltration possibilities. When using a sniper rifle, the options change completely again as you start thinking about good sniping spots and the particular sections of a target’s path when they will be potentially vulnerable. The entire map is a vast playground in a way that few other games can match.

Still as good as the formula is, it can get repetitive. This game adds some new elements, the way the identity of one of the targets is hidden at the beginning of the Mumbai mission for example, or how Janus’ bodyguards will not automatically trust you as the new physical therapist and so you are faced with a time limit while they do a security check. I believe the game needs to keep adding new mechanics like this to stay fresh. I think it would be cool if the death of a target caused more changes in the behavior of the other targets. Currently if the body of a target is found, it may cause the other targets to go into lockdown but that’s it. It doesn’t make much sense for example in the Miami map for her father to not react when his daughter dies violently and visibly in a car crash even if everyone thinks it’s an accident. Anyway I’ll be back with the DLC content soon but it might be a while before I psych myself up to play Hitman 3.