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I believe the Hitman games were my gateway to the stealth genre. I started with Hitman 2: Silent Assassin way back when. When I first played it, I remember getting frustrated and I had the same experience with Contracts. It was Blood Money that really pulled me in and cemented my love for the concept and series. I never actually played the first game until I decided to do this review and that’s because I was always under the impression it was terrible and buggy. That’s what a lot of people said, anyway. And since I found Hitman 2 and Contracts to be frustrating, I could only imagine how much worse the first game would be so I just never bothered with it. Until now.
Developed by IO Interactive and published by Eidos Interactive, Hitman: Codename 47 was released for PC in November, 2000. If you plan to run this on a modern system, I would suggest consulting the game’s PCGamingWiki page to figure out what you’ll need to get it running properly and how to prevent certain issues.
The player is put in the shoes of Agent 47, a bald assassin who his hired by the International Contract Agency (ICA), an organization that specializes in assassinations for various clients. The plot has him travelling to different locations around the world to execute various targets and the story doesn’t really get interesting until the end. More interesting is 47, himself. He’s a bald, efficient killer with a barcode on the back of his head and throughout most of the game, his backstory is a mystery. Even though I think the plot is nothing special, at this point, 47, with his black suit and red tie has become an iconic figure so it was interesting to see how he was introduced to the world.
Hitman is often classified as a stealth game or stealth action game because you can go through the levels all guns blazing if you wanted to. Personally, I think I would describe Hitman as a puzzle game. A puzzle game disguised as a stealth game. On the surface, the concept is pretty straightforward. You’re given targets to execute and you must find and assassinate them. How you do that is all up to you but the most efficient way is usually the most challenging. And what makes it challenging is finding all the pieces and putting them together. The most rewarding and satisfying thing about Hitman is eliminating your targets without getting compromised and without getting into firefights. Getting in and out clean. Figuring out where to go and when, what items you’ll need, who to interact with, and in what order to accomplish these things so you can get close to your targets and take them out.
Almost every level is basically a puzzle and sandbox and in most of them, you can take your time to scout the areas, see what’s what, study enemy locations and patrol patterns, and explore for items, weapons, and ammo that may be lying around. But you have to be careful and that’s where the stealth elements come in. Most of the levels are rather large and consist of multiple areas, typically with enemies like guards patrolling and standing around.
47 can walk, run, and enter sneak mode where he moves slowly but quietly, great for sneaking up on foes. He can take the clothes off bodies and wear them as a disguise which allows him to blend in with foes and grants him access to certain locations. He can holster small weapons and store small items on his person but will have to carry big things like rifles and cases in his hands. If civilians witness him attack or kill anyone or see him carrying weapons, they will typically run in fear and enemies will attack him. Foes also get suspicious if they find dead bodies so it’s wise to hide them somewhere out of view.
You are paid for completing the assignments or levels. The money you earn can be spent on weapons and equipment and the game features plenty of weapons to use like various guns, knives, and fiber wire to strangle people. Sometimes you don’t necessarily need any of these things to eliminate people. You can get more creative like by poisoning food for example. However, some missions do encourage combat like the final one. Unlike future games, there is no rating system so it doesn’t matter if you’re the silent assassin or the maniac with a gun, you’re not penalized for how you go about your business. However, you do have to be mindful of who you kill because killing innocent people will result in money being deducted from your payment.
There are three difficulty levels but no matter which one you choose, the gameplay will be very unforgiving. Hitman is not very accessible and even for it’s time, it was considered unrelenting. For one thing, you can’t manually save, quicksave, and there’s no checkpoints. The game saves after every mission. That means if you die or fail an objective, you have to start the mission over from the beginning. Second, you can die very quickly even with body armor equipped. You’re always outnumbered so if 47’s disguise is blown, that means he’ll be attacked on sight and can easily get overwhelmed. Also, enemies and civilians can be very sensitive to his behavior so there’s basically no room for errors.
The game will take you to a lot of cool locations in Hong Kong, Colombia, Budapest, Rotterdam, and Romania. Most of the time, being stealthy is the safest approach but if you want to go in all-guns-blazing, you can. As a third-person shooter, Hitman will feel dated. The controls take some getting used to and can feel clunky at first. Enemies will often exhibit questionable behavior during firefights which can sometimes pull you out of the immersion, like when they shoot each other trying to shoot you because they’re not smart enough to move around each other and they will often get stuck on parts of the environments.
Enemies can be triggered very easily. Pulling out weapons and picking up items can sometimes set them off. Quietly killing a foe with fiber wire or a knife can set off a nearby enemy even if his back is turned. Even if you do everything carefully and let’s use the word “correctly”, foes can still be very finicky and it can lead to aggravation. If a body is discovered with their clothes missing in a distant location, the enemies become alerted and if you’re in enemy territory, you may die before you even realize what happened. Even if you’re in disguise, carrying a weapon or certain weapons in view of enemies will put them into attack mode.
If you’ve played the future games, it does become obvious fairly quickly that you’re not given as many options here. I found that there’s usually one or two silent ways to eliminate your targets. Reaching a target quietly may require you to do a series of very specific things and one mistake can fuck it all up. Plus, even if you read the briefings before each mission, the game lacks information. Hitman does not hold your hand… At all. You’ll have to figure everything out. Talking to certain NPCs can lead to helpful information or even items that you can use. However, you’ll have to figure out how, where, and when to use them. There’s no way to knock anybody out like civilians so if you want their clothes, you would have to kill them, resulting in a loss of income. Furthermore, some levels are large and depending on how you go about things, it may take you a while to reach your target and the inability to save your progress can make it very stressful.
If you want to be as silent as possible, you’re going have to figure out each piece of the puzzle and that may mean playing through a level over and over again until you get everything just right. For example, you could be close to the target but the body you thought you hid in the beginning of the level was discovered so you’re disguise is blown and every enemy in the area is aiming for you now and then you die, and you have to start all over from the beginning. To make it even more challenging, some targets will flee if they are alerted to danger or you may have to kill them within a time a limit. Then there’s the Colombia missions which can be pure hell if you don’t know the best way to complete the objectives. Whatever weapons and equipment you bring with you for the first mission is all you get to bring with you into the subsequent missions along with whatever other items you acquire in the environments.
For it’s time, Hitman looked pretty decent and from what I understand, it is one of the first games to use ragdoll physics. The environmental variety is good and most of the indoor areas hold up the best visually in my opinion. There’s a good amount of detail pumped into them from the way things look to the NPCs moving around and doing things, helping make the locations feel immersive and realistic. I do love the audio work. Everything from the sound effects to the music is great. The soundtrack was composed by Jesper Kyd and I thought a lot of tunes helped add to the atmosphere of the experience. Other than some clipping here and there and 47 getting stuck on parts of the environments now and again, I didn’t encounter as many bugs as I thought I would. However, in the first Colombia mission, the frame rate tanked hard and I wasn’t able get it running smoothly.
I finished Hitman wondering if it was all worth the headache. Silently eliminating your target is extremely rewarding but figuring out how to do that in each mission without a guide will be a time consuming process. It’s a very trial and error experience. It’s actually not as bad as I thought it would be but it is as frustrating as I thought it would be. I don’t mind challenging gameplay but I do think Hitman goes a little overboard. I can see the lack of accessibility turning off a lot of people.
The lack of manual saving and/or a checkpoint system is what’s going to keep me from coming back. I don’t mind this kind of thing on higher difficulties but it can be stressful and the repetition can become tiresome. For example, you figure out the first three steps and then die trying to solve step four only to have to repeat the earlier steps again and again and again until you finally figure out what you need to do and can then move on to step five and rinse and repeat until the mission is complete. Unless you use a guide or run and gun all the time, that’s how almost every mission is and that kind of punishing gameplay is just not for everybody.
I find it hard to recommend Hitman because at this point, the formula has been significantly improved in the sequels and I can see some people viewing this as just a very frustrating game. If you want to be the silent assassin, you’re going to need a lot of patience and when you finally figure things out, the reward is always satisfying in typical Hitman fashion. For the longest time, I was under the impression Hitman was a terrible game. After finally playing it, it’s certainly not perfect but I wouldn’t say it’s terrible. It’s just unforgiving.