We’ve seen a lot of games that revolve around killing people in the past. Everything from the memorable Wolfenstein 3D to Serious Sam tends to involve grabbing a select weapon, running into a specific zone, and pushing the “fire” button repeatedly until the only thing left moving in the area is the player himself. Yet there is a certain game series that takes “killing” to a much higher level. There are still lots of trigger-pulling action going on, but the focus is a much different, much more eloquent level of death, with a common focus on specific targets over a massacre.

I speak of course of the “Hitman” series. A natural baby of Eidos Interactive for the longest of times, this license has seen only two separate games to date, until now. The Hitman series has the exact focus one would expect upon reading the title – portrayal of a well-paid hitman. In this case, the player’s role is that of one “47”, a natural killing machine with a dark, dark history, genetically bred for the sole purpose of assassination tasks. The original game in the series was a revolutionary title, with ragdoll physics, a cool disguise system, an actual half-assed storyline, and a huge number of intricate scenarios where the player would have to go to huge effort to get to his target undetected. The second game expanded on the first with some new gameplay concepts and a new storyline, but was ultimately the same general experience – great for anyone who loved the original and wanted more, but a bit of a turn-off who disliked some elements of the original and wanted some new and refreshing concepts. So with the introduction of the third title in the series, is there a reason for aspiring would-be assassins (both new and old) to make a stab? Read on to find out!

After installing the game and grappling with the shitty copy-protection scheme for half an hour (I’m getting irritated at having to constantly disable my disc emulation utilities and jump through a half-dozen flaming hoops to get Eidos’ latest games working), I finally got in and was greeted with a nice pre-rendered intro movie. Without giving away too much, 47 has been severely wounded after attempting to pull off some kind of gig. Wandering through a hotel clutching his blood-stained midsection, he stumbles into his room and collapses. What ensues for the singleplayer campaign is a series of missions not from 47’s present, but from his past. As our favorite bald assassin degrades into a state of shock, he starts having flashbacks of past jobs he’s done, which is where the actual gameplay picks up. Each mission isn’t exactly connected to the other, but they represent different parts of 47’s past that are being recounted. An interesting twist, though it doesn’t exactly make for epic storytelling. With that in mind, some may be surprised to hear that a large number of missions in Hitman: Contracts are actually re-enactments of missions from the original game, with a few alterations.

The first mission, for example, isn’t exactly a duplication of its original counterpart, but more of a continuation, picking up where the original game had left off. Deep in the asylum where he had been created, 47 has to try and escape amidst a SWAT team attack and any number of tazer-wielding wardens seeking to put him down. Wandering back through the asylum was quite nostalgic, though finding a suitable disguise to sneak out through the front door and zoom away in a stolen car was all too easy an affair. Of course, future missions turned out hardly that simple. Hitman: Contracts’ campaign, while taking place in new territories with new objectives and implements of death is still the same title as its predecessors. The same feel to combat and movement, the same hilarious ragdoll physics, the same “spend hours searching through a level to try and unlock the magical proper route” gameplay are all still in place, and if anything, this latest title could be more accurately described as an expansion pack to Hitman 2 over an entirely new title. But since other articles have already rehashed this little concept repeatedly since the game was released, I’ll just move on to more interesting details on the game.

Hitman: Contracts can be either a very difficult or very easy title, depending on what kind of approach the player takes. Like previous games, there is a moderately non-linear approach to each mission, which gives the player the option of either running in like a crazed psychopath brandishing a shotgun to assassinate his target and run back to the exit point, or he can seek out the various implements and tricks the map designers have left him to discover a more stealthy and subtle alternative. For example, one mission (the second one, in fact) tasks 47 with getting into a private party to assassinate a disgustingly fat “Meat King” and his lawyer for a client who’s a little pissed off at the fact that the known troublemaker happened to get off from a trial scott-free thanks to bribes and technicalities, despite overwhelming evidence placating the Meat King as a bad, bad man. To top it all off, the client’s daughter had been kidnapped and must be recovered. Options open to the player include the unimaginative “pull out akimbo pistols and shoot up the joint, John Woo style” approach, or throwing on a disguise and attempting to infiltrate the party to make a silent takedown on the two targets and extract the hostage (which turns out to be a slightly nastier affair than it initially looks). With the ability to throw on disguises stolen from hapless NPCs and silently knock people out in a variety of manners (in a lethal or non-lethal manner, the latter having the annoying side effect of allowing victims to wake up later and notice their clothes have been stolen), players have a huge number of options at their disposal to getting around unnoticed until the time comes to take down the targets, but at the same time, intelligence and cunning must be used to avoid detection.

I think one annoying problem with the Hitman series in general is that it has never been clear on what kind of disguise exactly needs to be used to slip past a pair of errant guards without accidentally turning the mission into a shooting spree. Noticing patrolling guards wearing well-covered winter jackets in a thick snowstorm during one mission, I decided to catch one alone, give him a nice strangling with the Fiber-Wire, and sack his clothing so I could march around the base unmolested. Much to my surprise, most guards I encountered became incredibly suspicious when I got close, and started shooting at me if I lingered too long. I considered the idea that the guards had simply noticed that Boris VonDrunkenStein had been replaced by some strange bald person wandering around aimlessly, but my experience with other disguises having a less severe effect on close-contact situations led me to believe that there was something else wrong. Brandishing the same gun the guards were carrying didn’t seem to improve matters any (it actually made it worse sometimes), so I’m not sure if I was simply mis-interpreting how the disguise system is supposed to work, or if there truly is a design problem. More clarification on what kind of effect disguises will have on NPCs would have been greatly appreciated though, especially in levels where I was just starting out and trying to figure out how to get into guarded areas (which effectively make up for almost the entirety of any active mission zone). This isn’t such a severe problem that I would reconsider my purchase based solely on it, however.

This brings me to another issue I have – the mission structure. The game pacing itself is great, but the way the missions are set up in such a convoluted and obscure manner, I commonly found myself spending hours just walking through a level with totally no regard for stealth or subtlety so I could scout the level out. No matter how hard I scrutinized the maps, it was just absolutely no match for actually seeing the area for myself, especially with all the hidden items and options lying around. It got to the point that my first several attempts at a mission would all simply be “scouting runs”, with me blindly running through every obstacle to just get a feel for how everything was before I finally began my “real” attempt. The way the maps are laid out, you practically need to understand the design and patrol paths of each NPC in your path like the back of your gun before you can successfully pull off a mission. Well, wait, scratch that – it’s still entirely possible to win just by running in and shooting at everything (as mentioned earlier), but the player is penalized in this by getting a much lower score at the end of a mission. Helping the player is a map that can be pulled up at any time, which will helpfully indicate the position of each and every entity and objective currently active on the map, though the accuracy of this will vary based on the current difficulty level.

And what does a higher score promote? What kind of incentive do players have to spend hours planning their approach over taking a “pull trigger, repeat” tactic? Well, crap, not much. If a player makes it through a mission by killing very few NPCs aside from mission-priority targets and raising minimal alarms, he’ll be granted “Silent Assassin” status at the end of the mission and given access to a new unlocked gun. Except that there’s no way to gain access to this new unlocked equipment aside from playing old missions over again – taking unlocked hardware into a new level that has not been played yet is not a possibility. On top of that, actually using unlocked hardware in a previous mission is a slightly obscure and tedious affair, as players must load a saved game from after the point where the equipment was unlocked, then quit out to the main menu and access a new “Current Game” function, where they can then choose an already-accessed mission and select which hardware they want. I understand how the unlockable weapons add to the game’s replay value, but the frustrating round-about method required to actually utilize this functionality coupled with the inability to use the equipment in any new level not seen by the player yet makes them ultimately useless to anyone not planning to play the game over again. This alternatively deals a severe blow to the entire mission structure as a whole, as I was left with a big conflict once I realized how this system worked. If I couldn’t use any unlocked hardware in future missions, what was the point of working my ass off to set up the perfect hit and get a good rating? Absolutely none, except for the self-satisfaction of a job well done. I’m getting really tired of the “satisfaction of playing is the reward” crap being portrayed in most games lately, though in Hitman’s case, the experience is almost rewarding enough to make the effort worth it. Almost. Hell, I think the only thing to stop players from running in guns-blazing is the difficulty – on easiest, 47 can take roughly the same number of bullets as his name before going down, while moving up makes him a little more fragile, but even this isn’t enough to dissuade people from an action approach if they’re bent on playing that way.

So while you debate for a minute on if trying to kill targets in a careful, stealthy manner is actually worth it when a straight-up massacre approach will yield nearly the exact same results in the end, I’ll discuss the game engine. The codebase powering Hitman: Contracts ran stable as a whole, with quick load times and high performance (once I disabled the “Post Filter” option anyways, which I learned is the cause of a huge number of potential issues in the game after a quick glance at the official forums). The graphical style might not win any awards, but it certainly holds its own, with some decent texture-work and impressive character detail. The game sports a first and third person camera perspective, though this raises a small complaint of mine – the weapon models look hideous up close, especially toys like the Steyr AUG. But in any case, the game certainly ran great on my XP2500/Radeon 9600 Pro configuration, even when there were several dozen enemies crammed into a corridor all trying to take a crack at me. The game’s ragdoll physics are also quite cool to see in action (seeing bodies go flying around after being hit by a pair of hand cannons up close is hilarious), though they’re also quite exaggerated. Players have the option to “drag” corpses to dark corners when needed, but sometimes I noticed some strange effects when I grabbed onto someone, such as their body suddenly erupting into spasms and dancing throughout the air (common in complex, close-quarters geometry) or just doing weird stuff in general. Also, my congratulations to whomever handled the snow effects in the game – mission 3’s blizzard was incredibly convincing, though I wish the rain in other levels looked a little better. With all the different environments and locations that 47 travels to in the duration of the game, however, rest assured that Hitman: Contracts will deliver a solid graphical experience. Not ground-breaking, but solid.

On the other hand, the game’s sound engine turned out a little problematic for me, as I consistently encountered strange static in the special effects until I wandered into the sound configuration screen and flicked off EAX. Doesn’t seem like EAX and my SB Live have gotten along in a kindly manner for the longest of times, but anyone experiencing strange sound issues should try turning that off and seeing if it helps. Otherwise, the sound effects are very solid (I love the weapon sounds), and the music tracks are downright excellent, but I found the dialogue to be a little iffy. Oh, sure, the voice acting was spot on and very decent, but half the time I had to jack up my volume just to hear anything, only to be deafened when a gun went off because I had crept too close to the conversing duo I was eavesdropping on. I don’t know what it was about this game, but every time there was spoken dialogue (47’s voiceovers and the briefing segments aside), I had to strain just to make out select words. Might have just been me.