Review

Hitman Summer Bonus Missions

Just when you thought you were done traversing Marrakesh, IO sends us back via Hitman’s summer bonus mission!

This review is solely based on the bonus missions of the current episodic Hitman title. So if you wish to hear more in depth about gameplay or how this installment fits into the series, you can use the link here to take you back to my review of episode 1. 

So far I’ve written nothing but great things about Hitman. No matter how repetitive or time consuming it maybe to actually complete each mission, I’ve found them all to be entertaining. Still, that’s not to say that things couldn’t be better (even for the episode 3, which got a perfect score). As I continue to play and replay each mission, I am starting to realize that unless the game is on hard, you can essentially walk through unscathed. These bonus missions are probably a prime example of that!

The first mission, “The Icon”, takes place in Sapienza. Our target is shooting a movie – the village has been turned into a movie set, complete with a 110ft robot in the middle of the town square. It’s really cool how different this location feels on your second visit. And there are plenty of funny moments to be had given the set up; there are pyrotechnics and NPCs dressed as robots, you do the math. However, making your way through the cast and crew to dispatch the target isn’t that difficult. It’s easy to stay out of sight and pick them off before moseying away. Utilizing the set pieces makes it even easier as you don’t have to stay in the open to complete the hit; normally this would be tough because you’d have to get into a tough spot within the environment. Not so much here…

The second mission, “A House Built on Sand”, sends us back to Marrakesh at night. Most of the places we were able to maneuver through before are now blocked off. Like before though, there are still two targets that need to be killed before the mission is complete. One has some confidential information in which he is planning to sell to our second target. We here to take down both the targets and retrieve the information before they meet one another, which seemed like it a more difficult task than it actually was.

Now, I have been doing my initial walkthrough on normal and then playing it again on a harder difficulty. The differences between the two are so huge that it makes the normal difficulty seem insulting. A perfect example, for the entire mission I just walked behind the first target around the entire plaza. I stood directly next to him as he made phone calls and such; anyone would pick up on the fact that a quiet, bald dude is following them around for so long. That’s not normal, so why is that able to be done on the normal difficulty? The only true challenge is making sure nobody sees you subduing a character or finishing your hit.

Not only does the AI not seem to make sense on normal when it comes to you following someone, but it also fails in the distraction department. For example, there is a point where I ran into two NPCs chatting on a rooftop. It’s clearly nobody there but the two of them. However, when I threw a coin out to get an action out of them, only one person responded to it. When a person that you just had a conversation with leaves to check on a noise and fails to return, most people would notice their absence. The female npc was completely unbothered by the sudden disappearance of a man that only stepped behind the rug they were conversing in front of before I arrived.

To make matters worse, this was nothing more than the targets doing an endless loop the entire mission. There was no penalty to me just walking around and doing whatever I wanted to throughout the map. At least in previous missions, if I waited too long, I would miss an opportunity for a certain kind of hit. I understand it’s a bonus mission, but it was probably the worst time I have had playing this game. This is especially true given how the ending to the third main mission was so exciting; I was bored in comparison.

Now to be fair, one of the reasons things were so much easier for me was because I’ve been playing Hitman games for years. Not only that, it’s possible that because there was so much more content in the main episodes that I didn’t notice bad AI. It was more realistic for someone to come up missing in a large group for instance. Lastly, these are bonus missions. As a bonus, one can forgive the more mundane happenings. On that same note though, these missions just felt like something to hold us over until episode 4 is released!