Hitman: World of Assassination

Rating: A-

Playing Time: approx. 173 hours

At last, I come to the final (for now) Hitman game, the World of Assassination compilation trilogy. I had considered treating each entry as its own review at first, but after seeing some footage of what the earlier parts had been like prior to the repackaging, the differences were substantial enough that I don't feel qualified to talk about them outside of their final form. With no further ado, let's get into it.

After whatever ways one might describe the deviation that was HAbs, HWOA tried to steer closer to HBM, so 47 is back to being a globe-trotting assassin hunting down people who someone else was paying him to kill. That said, as soon as the game starts, HWOA has a huge departure from Hitman tradition by actually having a good tutorial. Shockingly, six games into the series, the developers finally decided to just have a small but otherwise typical mission with some guidance as the entry point for the game. And frankly, I'm underselling it by describing it like that, because it's actually a great tutorial. Not only is the set-up incredibly clever (it's supposed to be 47's tutorial in-setting, so ICA has a fake yacht set up with their own actors giving 47 a chance to recreate a past hit [with non-lethal arms] as a combined teaching exercise and trial demonstration), with humor that actually fits the context (such as one of the exfiltration options being a helicopter that's clearly just a cardboard prop or one of the staff wearing a bandage on their head in replays if you follow the guided advice to knock them out with a blunt weapon) rather than fighting against it like so much of the forced comedy in HBM and HAbs did, but it actually opens up to be a freeform mini-mission after the first completion, which I'd imagine would help a new player understand how much of the fun of Hitman comes from being able to pick your own approaches and potentially replaying missions to try different methods. The "final test" mission that follows it is also a nice extended tutorial for introducing the new mission story mechanic; miniature trigger-based scripts that can give 47 a good opportunity to eliminate a target as a reward for doing them; as well as just giving a bit of a different way to test what you've learned if you're new to the game. It's honestly one of the best tutorials in any game I've played, which is all the more amazing since it was apparently a rather late addition to the game.

Following this is an abstract cinematic representing 47's time as an assassin, which was rather cool for including a montage of iconic moments from each of the previous games (getting ready to use a sniper rifle for Kowloon Triads in Gang War from HC47, poisoning Hayamoto Jr. with the misprepared fugu in Tracking Hayamoto from H2SA, drowning Fuchs in the pool in Traditions of the Trade from H3C, killing Don Fernando Delgado while he's playing his cello in A Vintage Year from HBM, and taking the shot through the Vixen Club mirror in Hunter and Hunted from HAbs). Granted that they were all embellished compared to how those all would have actually happened in the past games, but I thought it was a nice nod to the past of the series.

Speaking of which, get ready for a lot of those, because the plot of part 1 is a retread of HC47; the initial spat of seemingly-random contracts are all actually being requested by a single client who's using 47 specifically for some shadowy conspiratorial ends. It even finishes with 47 killing the person who put him through the tutorial in Situs Inversus, which was the final mission of part 1 (though, because the tutorial was actually fun this time, the experience was a far cry from the cathartic relief of Meet Your Brother). Admittedly, having an actual budget and staff to do it all with did make the story quite a bit better this time around, but that all fell apart for me from part 2 onward. It's disappointing, since part 2 actually tried to do something original for Hitman, but it was the basic tired spy story of everything always being part of some bigger shadowy conspiracy such that even your successes are meaningless in the wider view, and then part 3 decided to just not even bother trying and repeated HBM's story of Diana turning the conspiracy against itself by pretending to destroy ICA and kill 47 so that he'd be in a position to take out the real conspiracy leader. I could have almost enjoyed that if 47 had revealed afterward that he recognized the ploy (considering it's literally the third time Diana has done faked one of their deaths, the third time that Diana is recreating ICA, and the second time that she's pretending to sell out 47 to do so), but no, 47 was actually fooled and had to have a living retcon explain it to him.

In short, this game's plot hits a recurring theme of taking stuff from older Hitman games but then acting like it's all new and shiny, which just comes off as insulting to me as someone who has played through the whole series now.

That said, one of the great things this game did was bringing back challenges from HAbs, only done better. The scoring system from HAbs is gone, so aside from the simple completionist enjoyment of doing them, each challenge now grants a chunk of XP for the mission location. Each location has 20 possible levels of mastery (aside from the tutorials having none and the special maps to start part 2 and end part 3 having only 5), and advancing in mastery unlocks more load-out options, ranging from more gear or more locations for dead-drops of an additional item to different starting locations that can even come with alternate starting disguises. Even putting aside that some challenges give their own additional reward on top of all that (like one challenge in Farewell rewarding the Mr. 17 suit from H2SA), this was a brilliant way of rewarding doing challenges by giving the player even more ways of playing the game (which it's technically possible to get to maximum mastery without trying to do challenges since all sorts of actions grant some trickle of XP, those miscellaneous actions grant around 15-75 XP while challenges typically grant 1000-4000 XP).

Honestly, given how well the challenge system was worked in like that, it's so strange to me that the game still had difficulty settings. I played on master (hard mode) because of course I would, but I'd say the game was really designed to be played on professional (normal mode), because the differences between the two are mostly just some extra waiting or other tedium before you can do whatever you wanted to do. Escalations (a sort of challenge mission mode that I'll talk about later on) are locked to professional difficulty, too, and master didn't even exist on the 2016 release, so it's almost certain to me that the developers wanted people to play on professional. Oh well, that's not the only bit of strange design that never got cleaned up.

One of the real landmark missions is World of Tomorrow, the game's second main campaign mission. This is a fantastic mission in almost every way except for one; one of the objectives is to destroy a virus in a secret laboratory, which there are very few ways of doing (either infiltrate the clean room to sabotage it, shoot it, or get a USB dongle on the other side of the map to interact with a laptop in the lab to destroy it). This is easily the worst part of replaying that mission, and the developers tried to do essentially the same mission twice more (with Shadows in the Water in part 2 and End of an Era in part 3) with different reasonable considerations for handling that pesky static objective (Shadows places its equivalent to the USB dongle much closer and also has a vent outside of the secure area from which 47 can drop an explosive to destroy the objective, and Era just makes the static objective optional after the first mission completion). Why neither of these was ever patched into World, no one will ever know. There are other missions that were updated to address player complaints (most notably Freedom Fighters in part 1 receiving multiple updates to take it from the worst mission in the trilogy to being one of the better missions, in my opinion), but somehow, the mission that they liked so much it can actually still be bought as its own stand-alone version of the game got left behind.

I suppose I should just include my personal tier list for the main campaign missions, since I wrote that up for someone already (note for context: my approach was to play every mission until I got maximum location mastery, silent assassin suit only, and sniper assassin before moving on to the next one):

• Great mission that is among the best in the series: Apex Predator

• Very good: Showstopper, World of Tomorrow, Situs Inversus, Finish Line, Shadows in the Water, Death in the Family

• Pretty good: Freedom Fighters, Another Life, Golden Handshake, On Top of the World

• Mediocre: End of an Era, Farewell

• Somewhat bad: Club 27, Chasing a Ghost, Last Resort

• Shitman: Gilded Cage, Three-Headed Serpent, Ark Society

(Nightcall and Untouchable omitted intentionally since they can't be compared fairly to full missions, but I liked both a lot for what they were)

While HWOA tries to roll back the clock on a lot of what HAbs did, one thing it preserved was a vestige of instinct mode. It's no longer a magic power that lets 47 facepalm and/or shoot exploding bullets, but it does still highlight things that 47 can interact with and still gives him wall-hacking silhouette vision. There are times where it's useful (like getting better visual clarity for sniper shots through chaff like tree leaves or window curtains), but it really feels like something that could've been removed entirely. The game already has button prompts appear when 47 gets close enough to objects to do something with them. Granted, I don't hate it as an aide for players who want/need the help, but it's just this bizarre thing that feels so much more disconnected from the in-setting reality than anything else does. Still, it's far from the worst thing about HWOA.

Something that is also not really the worst thing but did irritate me a lot was the lack of local language voice acting. Pretty much all of the NPCs for the missions in part 1 speak English, and the missions from parts 2 and 3 swing between doing the same or having a slight veneer of gratuitous local language phrases worked in. This is a really strange step back from how things were in H2SA through HBM, and it's especially baffling when the overall language can be switched to what would be local in several missions. The game has an option for showing subtitles for background filler chatter already, making it all weirder. And this can't even be blamed on HAbs, because at least that game took place entirely in USA (and maybe one mission in UK), so using only English there made sense. Again, it's not a critical complaint, but it was another tick on the list of things that held HWOA back from realizing what it could've been to me.

Beyond the main campaign missions, there's a lot more content that comes in roughly four categories. The first is Freelancer mode, which is a semi-roguelight approach where 47 gets to do missions with randomized targets and additional objectives. I'm not going to talk about it here because I didn't play it, but what I've seen of it was pretty cool, and it's likely something I'd play if I ever come back to this game.

The second are alternate one-off missions using the same maps. There was an actual campaign for these in part 1 called Patient Zero (of which The Vector and Patient Zero were easily the best missions, though mostly for having fun gimmicks that make them play very differently from any other missions), and then the developers decided to have all the others be a scattershot of disconnected odds and ends. They all make some amount of changes to the maps, usually by changing the time of day and maybe adding some extra decorations, but in terms of gameplay, none of them stood out as particularly notable aside from the two mentioned above.

The third are escalations. Most of these are a series of doing the same mission with an additional objective or twist each step for three to five total completions of, as the name suggests, escalating difficulty. Of the ones that I tried, they were all a tedious mess except for the Seven Deadly Sins DLC. That was actually very fun because the various steps were actually quite different from each other (except for Gluttony, which was by far the worst of them, and Lust, which was cool but had only one step). I'd rank Greed, Pride, and Envy up there with some of my favorite main campaign missions, and I appreciated that Wrath showed HWOA followed H3C's example of having high-grade protective helmets actually reduce damage from headshots.

Finally, there are elusive target missions, which are more or less regular one-off alternate missions except they have limited availability to actually play them (unless you use a 3rd-party local server substitute instead of IOI's official servers). To me, these were basically no different from the regular alternate missions except for baiting me into raging about capitalism (which, for the sake of staying on topic, I'll just link this video that covers most of what I'd say).

I've been fitting in a number of complaints and gripes about HWOA, but let me be clear: this is a good game. It's got aspects and design choices that I don't like, but I had a blast overall while playing it. I can understand why a lot of people say it's the best Hitman game. Personally, I prefer H3C and HBM. I feel like those had a more consistently-good-for-my-tastes experience, but having said that, I do need to sing the praises of Apex Predator.

Coming up about halfway through part 3's main campaign, Apex Predator might be the most creative mission structurally in the whole Hitman series, because needing to only kill five of the ten potential targets gives it an absurd amount of meaningful variety in approach, and the whole presentation of listening in on your targets' banter via earpieces takes what had been a cool idea from HBM (specifically from the mission Murder of Crows) and turns in up to a whole different level of awesomeness. Add to that the beautiful setting of an underground rave club/drug lab at an otherwise-abandoned old industrial facility, capturing some of that seedy darkness which was so wonderful in H3C, and it's no surprise that this was my favorite mission in the trilogy. It's honestly kind of heartbreaking to me that this isn't available as its own standalone mission like World of Tomorrow is, because it's a wonderful experience that doesn't deserve to be locked behind the (regular) price of two full games when there's likely a way for it to be available on its own, but alas.

In terms of music, the soundtracks never reach the heights that Jesper Kyd was hitting, but most of the music does feel fine while it's playing. It's a step up from HAbs, at least, but it's nothing particularly remarkable to me.

All in all, there is a lot to like about HWOA. There are also a lot of irritating things. The good handily outweighs the bad, but it still holds back the overall game enough that I was often left with a sense of "this was so close to being amazing" rather than simply appreciating what I got in the way that I could with my favorite Hitman games. Even so, I would easily recommend this to anyone who thinks the idea of a Hitman game is interesting.

Rating: A-

Playing Time: approx. 173 hours