Hitman Reviews

Hit Man isn’t the most visually stirring film, it’s a story that will stay with you, just as much as its kinetic lead performance.

Hit and run

Hitman is arguably a pinnacle for the series, possibly even eclipsing Blood Money as Agent 47's finest moment. Each episode is a sandbox that you don't simply play and then forget. You'll want to master it and discover all of its hidden secrets and nuances. And therein lies Hitman's innate brilliance. It's deep, expansive and open-ended enough that you'll never want to stop playing. Hitman is quite simply magnificent.

All in all, Hitman is a very promising start to the reboot series. The visuals are good, the voice acting is excellent, and with the longevity promised in Contracts mode it should be a series that runs and runs. The issues with the AI can be addressed in future episodes, we hope, and if that happens then the game will certainly hit a higher score than we can give it this time. With five further episodes to come in 2016, the future's looking bright for our shiny-headed assassin.

To add on top of that, Hitman also requires an “always online” connection and if you lose connection for a second you’re immediately tossed back to the title screen. It makes absolutely no sense for this game to require a constant internet connection, even when playing a contract created by another player, when the game isn’t really tracking any sort of online data to require this sort of thing. To make matters worse, if you were in the middle of a contract when you lose connection, your only options are to either wait to reconnect or start all over in offline mode. When you’re in the middle of a hit that requires a solid chunk of time to perform and the servers drop suddenly for thirty minutes it can really destroy any enthusiasm to continue playing. Hell, what’s going to happen when the first elusive target is released and you lose connection while playing? Do you lose your only shot at tackling the time-sensitive event and are now stuck having to wait for the next target to release? For some mind boggling reason the challenges are also only doable when online; you can’t even view the challenges menu if you’re offline. Considering you need to complete challenges to unlock new items in the Paris mission it’s pretty ridiculous to lock off a part of the game to players who might have spotty or no internet connection.

Hitman looks very promising so far even as an episodic release title, but the always-online DRM hampers it and may prove a serious black mark if it remains this unstable.

It’s hard to give a verdict yet of this game until I am able to cover all episodes and its upcoming feature/modes from updates. I will give the game a final score when all of its content are released. Scores will be updated per episode as of now. For Graphics, Gameplay, Sounds, and Replay Value these will be included after the full experience is released.

If the next episode has a stronger architectural design, it might well erase many of my criticisms. I'd thought the piecemeal model might work to IO's advantage, allowing them to refine and reflect between releases, but we won't know for sure until we can see the whole picture.

(Ed’s note: score updated on May 10, 2016 to reflect additional impressions of the game in progress.)