Hitman - Paris: The Definitive Review

Yes, more.

I’ve had this awful Hitman monodiet for about two months now, with it being the only game I’m really concentrating on. It’s reached the point where the repetition has gone past offensiveness and become wonderful. Shoot someone in the face ten times and it’s boring. A hundred times and it’s hilarious. I’m extremely content to work through all the challenges and unlocks in a leisurely fashion, while also indulging my own little metagames and personal vices. Since rediscovering the arcade mode, I’ve been ticking off all the elusive targets I previously missed and alongside escalations and community contracts, this all represents an astonishingly large amount of content. You can criticise IO for relying too much on recycling locations but the more sage view, and to my mind the utterly correct one, is that IO is simply making excellent use of the sumptuously detailed assets. These obviously came at great expense; nearly every map is huge and dizzyingly complex, filled with multi-layered NPC cycles, boasting various spectra of branching paths and possibilities. They are awe-inspiring bodies of work, feeling much like real, living spaces than artificial sets. Hitman’s post-Absolution reboot was precisely the generational leap the game deserved, but its somewhat tortured episodic release and eventual bid for independence tells a tale that seems spectacularly unique. At the same time, Hitman serves as a possible portent for any developer whose singular and utterly central IP is dependent on publishers for survival, and IO’s ethic of continual re-use looks to a new future for AAA quality maps beyond the confines of the AAA single-story narrative arc.

What stands out with Hitman is how the modern map can be repurposed, repeatedly, to provide further entertainment. In the context of the rest of AAA, this is almost a revolutionary act. It defies the status quo, makes a mockery of its excesses. As far back as the early Modern Warfare titles, I remember a magazine writer relaying a tale from a mapper who felt sad that the building they slaved for months to perfect was onscreen for no more than ten seconds, and what a waste of time it felt like. Even back then, I was struck with the sheer decadence of this, the hubris. The willingness to piss human effort up the wall for a shlocky chase sequence’s backdrop, where you couldn’t even guarantee anyone actually noticed the scenery. The anecdote reminded me of all the environments I’d blown through in a hurry. With more modern eyes, I look back on the vast swathes of landscape and environment that we simply forget about as a matter of course, treating it precisely as disposable fluff, as if trivially generated by AI instead of forged by hand over thousands of human hours.

With Hitman you can understand a particular economic necessity at play. I remember rinsing Paris again and again and again while waiting for Sapienza to arrive, cursing the delays but understanding that if this is how things must be for IO and Hitman to survive, then so be it. It was like watching Rogue One and willingly diving into the (admittedly facile) fanservice like some parched wanderer diving into a desert oasis. I saw it after Last Jedi, so despite its obvious flaws, Rogue One felt magnificently bold and wholesome after the creative timidity, conceptual idiocy and indecipherable decisions of episodes 7 and 8.  When the Hitman beta proved we were getting the ‘proper’ Hitman back, I nearly cried. I drank so deeply because Absolution was such a wasteful, ludicrous corruption of the Hitman ethos. It was the Hitman title where you did casually breeze past months of work, because the game wanted you to leap a gap to avoid a police helicopter or descend some stupid spiral cave to get to a secret lab, with no urge or desire to ever retread those indulgent and unnecessary one-way paths. It sets up a whole bar full of people and then charges you with simply making it to a barman. And this bar is insanely detailed. Huge amounts of work for a desperately uninspiring trudge, a barely taxing puzzle, just to have a cutscene. Those few stages in Absolution that did offer something of the true Hitman spirit were hardly inspiring, nor do they find themselves ranking highly in the Hitman pantheon. I think I liked the gun shop the most. The Chinatown market was OK, I guess. But they are easily outshone by the signature stages of Blood Money, Contracts et al. So it was a colossal relief that the World of Assassination maps are so beautifully made. When the environment is that good, there’s no shame in re-using the sets to tell different stories and provide novel puzzles. It’s not as if the modern Hitman was the first in the series to do it. The very first Hitman, Codename 47, re-uses a street map of Hong Kong for the first chapter of missions. These include blowing up a limo, an incredibly taut puzzle in a fish restaurant and it ends with the very first of the series’ expansive and wonderfully detailed buildings; the Emperor’s Garden. You also meet Carlton Smith for the first time in that sprawling restaurant’s dungeons.

There’s also a beautiful thematic repetition that plays out across the series, where the contemporary titles follow archetypal locales. The Himmapan in Thailand mirrors the fiendish hotels of Codename 47 and Contracts’ Traditions of the Trade. Thornbridge manor and its secret doors and tunnels is a sister of the similarly-equipped Beldingford manor, also from Contracts. The GAMA hospital of Situs Inversus is a twin to the hospital, target and even means of killing from Hitman 2’s Terminal Hospitality mission, but also bears kinship with the rehab facility in Blood Money. You can find more; A New Life and Another Life, A Vintage Year and The Farewell. The Meat King’s Party and Apex Predator. It’s a shame that other games haven’t taken on this asset-based parsimony. I look at the astonishingly detailed Night City of Cyberpunk 2077 and lament that Phantom Liberty will be the only campaign DLC. The space offers such potential, such a profusion of possibilities. Could an errant AI ever chop up the code so we could set up our own Hitman contracts amongst Cyberpunk’s dayglow denizens? What could we have had from an earnest simulation of city life and city lives instead of the game’s hokey main plot? Likewise for Ubisoft’s forgotten cities, those toytown miniatures of Chicago, San Francisco and London from Watch Dogs. With a bolder vision, they wouldn’t be home to those uninspiring tales of wildly overpowered hackers vs corpo-governmental interests, with their half-implemented character generators and cringe-inducing sops to agitator subcultures. Instead, they could be thriving metropolises of challenging, fun challenges for ingenious cyberburglars and agit-prop provocateurs. GTA is perhaps the greatest offender, being a game that touts the substance of its cities with such swagger and confidence despite constantly delivering cardboard movie sets filled with adolescent drama, where frustration seems to be a key virtue. Rockstar regularly offers scant use of the opulent environments it spends so much money and humanity on creating, although perhaps it’s unfair to ignore GTA Online. But does that really offer anything much? I mean, other than tawdry criminality and consumerist avarice? I remember writing a piece about the BMX in GTA V, of how its playfulness lays open so many paths to utilising the city and its countryside for more wholesome entertainment, how the places are there to build a fantastic leisure simulator, yet Rockstar simply doesn’t care. The world seems entirely wasted on petty desires and pastiche narratives. For contrast, what about Sega’s Kamorocho? If you’re a seasoned Yakuza/Like A Dragon player, how many times have you wandered those same streets? For me, whenever I’m set free at the beginning of a Kamorocho stint, I’ll always head to Shellac for a whiskey. It’s my own little tradition, a mark of returning to this warmly familiar place and revelling in its beautiful sense of compacted but very real urban complexity. While it’s not the same as Hitman’s re-threading of new challenges through old environments, it’s spiritually analogous. Sega revels in the familiarity, it makes a point of staying in this place, because it has so much to offer. Those streets haven’t been exhausted and handled correctly, they never will. Just like a real city, if you’re tired of Kamorocho, then perhaps you’re just tired of life.

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