Wear a tux – Hitman 2: Silent Assassin

Hitman 2: Silent Assassin is the successful expansion on a somewhat surprising minor hit from Danish developers IOI. An assassination simulator with a fair level of complexity, the sequel takes it deeper in several ways. With each mission, you are given a target and instructions and real-time surveillance which lets you check a map for where everything and everyone is in your target location. They are big, complex places whose inhabitants carry out an intricate set of movements, and you have to force your way into the choreography, stepping carefully and thoughtfully. Or not. Avoid everyone, or incapacitate someone to take their clothes as a disguise and hopefully still pass unnoticed, or blast your way through. The complexity of the set-up lends itself very well to a complexity of choice. 

It also makes for a lot of tension. Get spotted, or leave a body placed too conspicuously, and an alert level will be raised in a reasonably intelligent way (looking for a suspicious bald man, or a suspicious bodyguard if that’s your disguise). Soon enough, the nature of your task may have completely changed. Hitman 2 provides freedom but also a huge set of ways to fail. Your plans have to be intricate, adaptive, or, usually, both. The series’s roots as a PC game are pretty obvious, as the difficulty is configured for a game where you can quickly and easily save your progress any time you like. It even restricts the number of saves per mission as one of the changes between different difficulty levels. But I found the patience required for the PS2 to save to a memory card a strong discouragement in its own right. Which may highlight that lack of patience is a crucial weakness for me in stealth games in general.

I could blunder my way through instead, at least for a while. Technically, you just have to kill your target and what you do on the way is up to you. Your character is meant to be the best among his guild of assassins though, and part of that is being stylish and having standards when it comes to killing that isn’t in the contract. Making inventive use of anaesthetic, disguise and hidden routes is much better than doing more killing than absolutely necessary. You could call it a sort of assassin’s creed. It means that if you shoot everyone in sight you will still pass the level, but get labelled a ‘mass murderer’ on the results screen, which stings a bit. And ‘what if we made a killing game that gives you points for not killing?’ is a fascinating inversion of the usual tabloid take on violent games.

That mass murderer label feels more an aesthetic criticism than a moral one, which fits with how strong Hitman 2 is on aesthetic in general. Its prologue in a church (which it loops back round to at the game’s end) drips atmosphere and, in its sense of a quiet and contemplative life being taken away, sets up a simple motivation that’s effective without being overplayed. Right from its first tutorials, Hitman 2 works to set up beautiful looking moments, chances to take in its careful architecture. Its soundtrack includes dramatic choral music, and it has an assured grandiosity that’s given room to breathe. Even the softly spoken, but far from mute, main character feels like a refreshing change from other action games of the time. When he has to carry out an assassination at an ambassador’s soiree, nothing about it feels out of place.

Hitman 2’s cultured air is enjoyable, and how it interacts with the gameplay makes for interesting juxtapositions throughout. How deep that culture goes is another matter. The game takes in a world tour of assassination that mainly goes through Asia. The offensive ignorance of the section in India went far enough to force developers IOI make significant changes to remove sections for their racist insensitivity. Even when they weren’t causing that level of harm, the game’s engagement stays on the shallow side. You go to Japan and poison someone with incorrectly prepared fugu — a level of cultural engagement that could be reached by watching The Simpsons. You get to visit a range of impressive locations, but they stay at a surface level. The fact that stylish but empty still feels like a refreshing change compared to many of its contemporaries is a wider indictment.

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Top of the charts for week ending 12 October 2002:

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