Hitman Freelancer: The Definitive Review

Frogs, Toilets, Hammers, Tools of the Trade

If there’s something that always takes me by surprise, it’s Summer GDQ¹. I always forget that it’s happening and then kaboom, the schedule is released and I get excited. I pore over the timetable to find the rare sprinkles of exotica that’ll get me to commit to watching the livestream (or, more realistically, the post-event uploads to YouTube). This year, GDQ graced us with a run of Hitman 3’s Freelancer mode. Having already seen some fabulous Hitman attempts over the years, the Freelancer run proved to be amazingly brazen, showing off  immaculate timing, ludicrously deep knowledge and superbly executed skills. Hitman speedruns set a high bar for technical ability and game knowledge within speedrunning as a whole and, in an idiosyncratic fashion, these runs illustrate the gulf between an average player’s muddling and a speedrunner’s effortless transit.

When it comes to high-end Hitman play, I can count myself as a seasoned veteran in the art of failing. I would class myself as an outstanding agent of impatient chaos, having neither the professionalism nor the discipline to dutifully wander through the game’s various signposted kill methods, instead preferring a hybrid approach of jumping through enough hoops to get close and then ending the job with spectacularly wild abandon. My relationship with the series goes all the way back to the original Codename 47 and despite that one anomalous entry with the death nuns (etc), I’ve loved the series deeply. That taut balance between the proscribed solution and the allowance for improvisation is a thing of singular beauty. No game has managed to balance such rigidity with gleeful chaos. Thematically Hitman has always played with morality in a somewhat more nuanced and adult manner than other games that proclaim their ‘adultness’ far more earnestly, but it’s in that improvisational slant that I think the game’s true glory lies. There’s a wonderfully black comedy in following a signposted route to completion, only to spaff it up the wall with impatience or carelessness and then rampaging your way through to finishing the job. There’s a particular skill to ‘getting it wrong’ and still winning, where you’re combining game knowledge with a touch of aiming skill and bravado to come out on top. Really it demands an understanding of how the game’s semblance of reality collapses when you fuck up, of where you can choke the security AI, how the security is zoned, which disguises get you the furthest, which actions will prompt particular target behaviours. Being able to fudge through these on the fly is utterly unique to the series and it’s always warmed my heart that every Hitman title has allowed it to happen. In some ways, it’s actually closer to a speedrunner’s challenge than the game’s formal demands, for you’re more likely to be exploiting a stage’s machinery than complying with it as you would with ‘correct’ play.

Hitman 3’s Freelancer mode, however, throws a spanner in the works. Where traditional Hitman marks will often happily idle around their behavioural routes in spite of the horrific explosions of violence 47 can trigger, the syndicate bosses of the Freelancer mode are much more antsy. In the climactic showdowns of each cycle, the chief and other suspects will simply attempt to escape if 47 sets off too much non-prescribed mayhem. Whilst this often gets in the way of my incompetence-to-triumph playstyle, it does add a certain frisson. But it ultimately means I’ll only take campaigns that include Whittleton Creek, because of how that level allows you to poison an entire house with a lethal frog. Freelancer mode lets you take accrued equipment into the field, but if you ‘die’, you lose everything you brought. The risk here is far too high given my personal approach, which involves ‘dying’ quite a lot. Subsequently, my refusal to bring extremely useful goodies means I have to source my tools locally. And thus, Whittleton Creek is the ideal finale venue. It goes something like this:

• Run to the park and steal a hammer

• Run to the river and hide in the bushes behind the Cassidy house

• Nab the poisonous frog

• KO the gardener and the Cassidy bodyguard for useful disguises if anything goes wrong

• ALWAYS hide the bodies

• Climb into the Batty’s garden and KO Mr Batty

• Hide Mr Batty in his quite nice shed

• Go to the construction site and nab the insecticide by stealing a crowbar and breaking into the container

• Go back to the Batty house and faff with the fumigator to attract the pest control person

• Knock out the pest control person, steal the outfit, hide in the bushes again

• Repeatedly throw the hammer at the Cassidy-side fence to attract exterior guards

• KO any guards you can attract

• Once it’s safe to do so, use the insecticide in the Cassidy house fumigator to knock out the scary occupants

• It’s wise to make sure you start this when THE HAMMER² and Nolan Cassidy are visiting 

• The pest controller disguise lets you enter the house while it’s being fumigated, so nip in and deal with the CCTV recorder

• Make sure the Cassidy front door is closed at all times

• You can actually leave a bodyguard on the front porch because the poisoning process is silent and he won’t notice

• Now go through the entire house, breaking the neck of every unconscious NPC

• Hide all the now-dead NPCs in bathrooms (this takes some time)

• Difficult part: find one of the syndicate leader candidates, kill them stealthily and hope they drop a burner phone 

• Repeat until you get a phone

• Draw the candidates to the Cassidy house by activating the burner phone in the kitchen

• Wait for their arrival by standing near the fumigator

• Apply frog when appropriate

• Win

• Collect silenced assassin pistols from the candidates’ bodyguards because I consistently equip and then lose them

• Go and wait for the bus while dressed as THE HAMMER

Now, the Freelancer speedrun version of Whittleton Creek is like this:

• Take silenced pistol, silenced sniper rifle and a crowbar

• Stand in the middle of the street

• Snipe a fire extinguisher, panic all the suspects

• Snipe all the suspects as they run to the exit, win showdown

• Crowbar up a manhole cover and do a runner

While it’s obvious which approach is the most efficient, I’d argue mine carries far less risk despite the amount of fences you have to clamber over. But what’s true for both is that disdain for Hitman professionalism. The mode actively encourages wild, chaotic play. Of course there’s the professional pride in adhering to Silent Assassin standards (plus the mode’s formal promotion of it for extra goodies), but really the mode only cares about completion and survival, be that messy as hell or clean as a whistle. For the wild improvisers like me, it’s a pretty fun ride and it’s nice that there’s the affordance of eight contracts for each segment’s kick-off, each with different map lists. This means you can be quite selective about which locales you want to visit, and can generally bank on getting ones you like. I’ll avoid sprawls like Morocco and Mumbai like the plague because I kick off too many security massacres just trying to get to a target. However I will happily dive into notorious hell-holes like Colorado because you can often bump off your targets by hiding in the dormitory toilet and shooting everyone who tries to come in. In these cases, cheesing the AI into queuing up for pot-shots brings its own demand for discipline lest you be overwhelmed and fail, ruining hours of work. The gun needs to be reloaded with adroit timing to avoid vulnerable delays, plus you need to manoeuvre instinctively. You’ll need to harvest ammo from the ever-increasing pile of bodies, which needs a surprisingly wise sense of timing. Sure the AI blindly lines up at your chokepoint but if you’re too close and one of them initiates the hand-to-hand QTE, fifteen other guards will take advantage of your slow-mo disablement and fill 47 with bullets. It also takes skill to know when to break away; the magic dormitory toilet in Colorado has a window that the AI never uses, so you can dash out and run up to the roof if overwhelmed (the rooftop access being another fine AI chokepoint). Post-massacre, there’s the macabre luxury of wandering through the pile of bodies you’ve created, picking out the best weapons and costumes for further explorations, the scene thankfully far too preposterous to be taken as real. For Colorado in particular, the security zone boundaries aren’t too far apart, so you can stroll a little, let off some shots and draw remaining guards back into your awful slaughter toilet. It should be noted that Hitman has always made toilets the prime defensible fortress for any belligerent 47. It’s a series staple. Writing about the phenomenon when Sapienza was the hot new download, I remarked on how Paris managed to have wardrobes within toilets, which practically amounts to omnipotence when it comes to clearing out dangers.

The game’s tolerance for chaos is a real hallmark of its quality, of how it presents itself as very much a puzzle to be solved, and for which random slaughter is absolutely a successful method. Hitman has always made its puzzley nature explicit; this is no hero fantasy, nor some simulation of real life. It’s steadfastly artificial and in its modern form, it outright celebrates how consciously ridiculous it is - particularly in its more outlandish and audacious scripted kills. It’s wonderful that Io maintains the series’ essential symmetry: it asks you to become a cog in its mechanisms to get your job done, but always leaves enough room, just enough freedom, for different drummers to go bonkers. Now, I do genuinely feel bad about killing hundreds of generally innocent security guards. I feel even worse if I kill an innocent, but Hitman has always frowned at kill-happy infants and, of course, you know there’s always a far more professional and less blood-soaked way to go about things. There is excellence to aspire to.

Hitman is ultimately about elegance, and working towards it. The post-reboot Hitman may offer more signposting than is ideal, where it tends to favour following its rules than defying the odds, but at least working through a bunch of kill paths grants you invaluable knowledge for those crazier dashes. And it’s in those crazy dashes where real elegance gets to shine. Not in the borrowed, performative sense of the scripted solutions, but in pulling off an SA speedrun without glitches. There’s some incredible finesse to be deployed there. Do you remember the buzz around a suit-only SA for Blood Money’s A New Life? The runner was incredibly audacious, ducking into hiding spaces with single-digit frame windows before detection. A ludicrous dance between the AI’s cogs and teeth, the runner finding all the right spaces between exposure and patrolling security. In the best sense, a good speedrun shows off what’s actually possible, where the real limits lie. That in itself is a valuable asset, for letting us mortals understand where we can improve, what new ideas we can incorporate. I’ll never be decent enough to pull off such a feat, but I like being somewhat adjacent in my Freelancer approach. Oddly, I couldn’t give a toss about the house you can assemble above you. I can’t even be bothered to go up there for free wrenches and the like. This is because it’s just dressing, ultimately a meaningless waste of time. Hitman isn’t about building 47’s lifestyle according to depressingly narrow décor styles, it’s about being in those Faberge egg maps and vying with their complex machineries, compliant to the scripts or otherwise.

It’s the superfluous dressing that frustrates most in Freelancer mode, the long delays between dying and restarting, the needless walking between various tables of great importance when a couple of menu clicks is all that’s actually needed. I don’t see this as atmospheric theatre, or world-building ambience. I see it as some attempt to add unnecessary ‘value’ when really, new maps would be far more welcome. It’s weird that Freelancer doesn’t include Hawke’s Bay, and I suppose Ambrose Island is fairly recent but there’s always that hunger for more locales, more Bond-like assassin tourism. The gear economy and its brutally strict consequences for dying are an annoyance. It drastically limits play for me, as even if I was playing with utmost stealth I’d be so wary of potential loss that those walls of equipment are essentially an ornamental collection. But fundamentally, Freelancer Mode does offer yet another valuable and really fun way to play through all those familiar places, if only to wonder once again at the sheer quality of their construction. Hitman’s three modern entries are an embarrassment of riches, and we’re blessed to have them. And after seeing the speedrun, I’m definitely going back. With Io’s James Bond title and some utterly inexplicable fantasy MMO in the works, I fear it’ll be a while before we get some new shoes for 47 and the possibility of a Hitman 4. I actually hope they reboot it again and name it Hitman™™. And I really cannot wait to see the toilets.

[21]

1. GDQ is brilliant, if somewhat marred by a Nintendo-heavy US monoculture. Instead of yet another fucking blindfold toes-only speedrun of Metroid, why not watch this lovely Peggle run?

Or this absolutely wonderful run of Final Fight 3?

2. Spencer “The Hammer” Green always makes me play Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel in my head. Not so much the obvious chorus, but that weird warbling Peter does in the intro. It’s a haunting aural spectre, in some ways more chilling and alienating than the song’s lyrics of raw sexual obsession expressed via direct euphemism. The warbling is such that my eldest was warbling along to them, meaning the earworm is definitely in. You see, I deliberately expose my children to music by playing them my favourite shit on the school run. Pop hits are a must (both my children were obsessed by Bicycle Song and Take on Me) but the eldest professed the most love for Tears for Fears’ Shout, prompting me to bombard him with Head Over Heels, which was one of the songs I crowbarred into my Cyberpunk 2077 piece. However, I have made recent moves to go fully deep by exposing them both to the towering mastery that is Megabass, namely the 1990 collection of four studio mixing desk montages of contemporary dance pop and underground crossovers. There is no substitute for extoling the sheer broadness of this most kitsch of kitsch pop eras, where the one-time threatening anarchy and deviancy of Acid House had been co-opted and defanged by commercial sensibility. Megabass is like touring a museum, hopping from Kid n Play to Technotronic in a flash, before piling through I’ll House You by the Jungle Brothers to end up at Ride On Time. Hilariously, the YouTube rip I’m using (I HAVE THE ORIGINAL TAPE, OK?) has Italy’s finest copyright-silenced. It’s the only excised tune on the whole compilation, which is bonkers. It’s particularly perverse, given how originally it had sampled the already much-sampled Love Sensation, and I’m very much reminded of Loleatta Holloway’s testimony on (I guess) Dance Energy for Def II. Tearful, she explained how she hadn’t been credited at all, despite the single’s worldwide hit status. The legal industry was only just getting to grips with sampling in Hip Hop by this point, so pursuing a vocals case may have been to big a fish to fry. Where it seems samplers may not actually feature greatly is in the construction of Megabass, which actually bears the hallmarks of deft tape editing rather than digital manipulation. There are some great edits and loops, some fine effects with tape stops and stuttering, but it’s never too showy. More Beatbox than Close To The Edit. It really is worth listening to Megabass, just to capture that snapshot. We’re just on the cusp of in-studio tape mixes being swept away by beatmatched vinyl as the DJ mix arrives in the popular charts, so the Megabass megamixes represent the end of an era. Decent heads might recall the Jack Mix series by Mirage, and you may have heard the DMC’s in-era compilation releases. What’s interesting about them is how they bear direct creative kinship with the cut-and-paste fad from 86-89. From Coldcut’s Doctorin’ the House to Beat Dis to the fin-de-siècle Numero Uno by Starlight, house tunes that felt the need to spray random vocal samples all over a dance backing seemed to be the preserve of people with access to expensive studios. They seemed to take something of a Hip Hop sensibility from Todd Terry, but all absolutely lack the essential talent for creating quality House groove. Yes, even Tim Simenon, and old Simon Harris doesn’t quite pull it off despite catchy entries with Here Comes That Sound and Bass! How Low Can You Go. Simon did, however, produce I’m Riffin’ for MC Duke, which not only matches the Bomb Squad in production quality and funk, but also had a bonus breaks track that Harris donated for the future generations of breakbeat hardcore producers (and demosceners - check Jesus on Es’ soundtrack). The worst of this cut-and-paste house came from producers like Les Adams (RIP) who while legendary for his DJ, soul and funk work, produced the most cynical and infuriating example with L.A. Mix’s Check This Out. Not only does it wholesale steal from Cut 2 Shock’s Put That Record Back On, it’s so desperate to please that every bar ends with some kind of familiar vocal sample. It seems to have session guitar twangs (GUITAR ON A FUCKING HOUSE TRACK? WHAT? YOU’RE NOT MARSHALL FUCKING JEFFERSON). and a brief breakdown reveals a stupidly complex 808 pattern. It’s overloaded with winky in-the-know references that become almost snide at points, and ends with an oh-so-kooky rip off of Coldcut’s plasticman ranter in the form of the Addams Family theme. Because he’s Les Adams, see? Such are the affordances of a decent late-80s recording studio; this was not some Tascam special off two boomboxes and a walkman. I diverge at this point, not sure if I want to ramble about one song that connects The Jungle Brothers to Right Said Fred, or if I want to talk about how The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel isn’t as fun as Lessons 1,2 and 3, or lionise Coldcut for 10,000 words. I decide to recommend everyone listens to Welcome by Gino Latino. It really is a fucking tune, and seems so sonically weird now as it’s almost impossible to assign it a genre. It has the break from Ashley’s Roachclip overlaid with 909 kicks and snares in the same pattern. It has a gorgeous dugga-dugga bassline that’s actually funky. It has catchy horns. And it has Gino. In a croaky voice that may or may not be affected, Gino relates dance-oriented platitudes in a Mediterranean accent that also may or may not be affected (it’s not!). Gino embarks by telling us he’s Gino Latino and issues us with instructions to move and groove and feel bass, because we’re going to win the race. Just before he betrays his love for I’ll House You (I mean, who fucking doesn’t love that tune?) by announcing house music all night long, he repeatedly talks about bodies. And the pronunciation of ‘body’ is eerily similar to being too sexy for one’s body, too sexy for one’s body, the way one is disco dancing. And thus, we can link novel antivaxxer and disappointing contrarian Richard Fairbrass to The Jungle Brothers, with poor Gino and Todd Terry as collateral damage.