Gaming Target - GameCube: Hitman 2: Silent Assassin

Written by Kyle Williams on August 29, 2003

Full Review: The next big thing from the house that Lara built.

Even if you owe your company's whole existence to the success of one franchise, you must learn to gather your food from more than one tree. I mean, what happens if the first tree ceases to bear fruit? Eidos has learned to make quite a fruit salad with a wide array of flavors, ranging from the buxom adventures of Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider games to the zany antics going on in Swingerz Golf. Perhaps the sweetest morsel amidst the medley is the recently harvested gemstone that is Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, a shrewd mix of stealth-based puzzle solving and brutal violence. Intrigued? You should be.

Hitman 2: Silent Assassin tells the story of Agent 47. He is one of the most effective hired killers to ever carry a Desert Eagle and then, with a sudden change of heart, leave the trade and move to a monastery. Of course, no one can ever leave a profession like that behind and 47 soon finds himself taking up arms in an effort to rescue a kidnapped Padre. Traveling from St. Petersburg to Japan, Malaysia to India, the missions are as varied as they are challenging. And boy is this game challenging. If anything, you could say that Hitman 2 is sometimes too hard. Let me put it this way: In a game that emphasizes stealth over straight-up gunfights, Hitman 2 makes it really friggin' hard to sneak around. I mean, how the heck can an enemy soldier tell that the guy behind a ski mask isn't one of the normal guards? However, not everything is brain-numbingly difficult.

A good portion of Hitman 2: Silent Assassin is made up you, as Agent 47, performing surgical strikes against various persons of importance. From Russian Generals to Japanese heads of the underworld, you have the opportunity to put the hurt on all cultures equally. Of course, getting to your target is never a straightforward task and you will find that planning is just as important to your success as weapon accuracy is. Your chances for making it out alive increase exponentially in direct relation to the amount of time spent studying your intelligence. It's very important that you know where all of the exits are because when you pop a cap in the head honcho, you won't have any time to look at your map to figure the best way out.

Now, you might be asking yourself why a "Silent Assassin" is going to rely on noisy firearms to take down his marks. Well, that is a very astute question and you've earned a cookie for thinking it. As you may have guessed, 47 has a number of noiseless options for dispatching enemies. While a couple of them are just silenced firearms, you can also use chloroform, kitchen knives and a fiberwire to incapacitate people without alarming everyone in the general vicinity. There is nothing quite as satisfying as sneaking up behind an unsuspecting cook, wrestling him to the ground with a rag over his face and watching him twitch. By dropping him without killing him, the cook won't count against your kill count but he will wake up later, alerting various armed guards to the fact that someone (you) took his clothes.

The extreme emphasis that Hitman 2: Silent Assassin places on stealth makes everyday game players like you and me think a little bit more than we usually do. As a silent assassin, the name of the game is infiltration, not penetration. This is the difference between gaining access to a facility undetected and shooting your way in. In order to pull this off, you will need to use several unorthodox methods to enter the various strongholds. They aren't going to let an armed assassin in through the front door, or the back door for that matter. They will let a postman in, though they may search him. However, they will probably not search the box of groceries that the delivery boy is carrying. The key to finding the path of least resistance lies in being perceptive and thinking outside the box.

Of course, not everything in Hitman 2 is as cut and dry as you would hope. In fact, the game gets so stinking hard that you have to wonder if there are a few bugs left in the game's AI. Let's use one of the missions in Japan as an example. In this mission, you have to infiltrate a castle to eliminate it's owner and recover some stolen goods. Naturally, the castle is heavily guarded and you need to sneak your way through a snowstorm to get inside. The real interesting thing about this level is that, while acquiring someone's uniform (including full face coverage) is not too difficult, most of the guards can still spot that something is out of place, from 50 feet away, through the snow. True, the snipers are fooled, but it makes getting past the roaming sentries nigh impossible without killing a number of them. Of course, you still have to be careful to alert too many guards as you kill their comrades because then your mark will leave the castle. I don't mind the change of pace that this provides, I just wish that it was more consistent with the levels that came before wherein you could walk within two feet of a guard, without wearing a ski mask, and still not alert him.

Hitman 2: Silent Assassin even has something for all of you complete freaks that are out there. After each mission, when you return to the church that the game starts at, you will see all of the weapons that you've acquired throughout the game hanging on the wall of your shed. Now, you can't just pick these weapons up and drop them again, you actually have to reach your exit point with the weapon to bring it back. This becomes especially tricky when you find both a shotgun and a sniper rifle in a level and 47 can only carry one non-concealed weapon at a time. This means that to completely fill the walls of your shack you have to play some levels a couple of times. Also, some of these weapons can only be acquired by meeting some very strict level performance criteria and achieve the ranking of Silent Assassin. When I say strict, we're talking about only being able to kill one guard, fire one bullet, be involved in one close call, etc. Pulling this off is almost impossible in your first trip through a mission as you will need to memorize patrol patterns and guard placements. It helps that IO Interactive allows you to save the game at any point during a mission, but all of you save freaks must beware, you are limited to seven saves per level. You actually have to plan out when to save your game!

The mechanics in Hitman 2 are a well tuned machine, mostly. There are a few glitches that caused a guard to be stuck in a wall, allowed me to shoot a soldier to death by only striking him in the arm that was sticking through a wall, and that made a guards AI go to where I was standing 10 seconds ago to check my ID. These are fickle points that just barely tarnish the otherwise impressive game. Each of the weapons are unique in both sound and appearance, the game's graphics and animations are near flawless, and dragging bodies around shouldn't be so much fun. When it comes down to it, Hitman 2 hits a triple in the baseball game of videogame development.