I have a whole thing where every year, at around this time of year, I suddenly find myself seized by the urge to assassinate wealthy, traitorous assholes (or you know, just random ne'er-do-wells, they are not always wealthy) and thus turn to the soothing balm of the Hitman franchise to do so. These days, obviously, I turn to Hitman 3.
I mean it is hardly a secret that IOI's 2016 soft reset of Hitman and its two follow-ups in the World of Assassination trilogy are like, maybe the best fucking things I or anyone have ever been fortunate enough to bear witness to. I am even among the sickos who think the final train level in Hitman 3 is good, actually, even if the level before it is better by several orders of magnitude in terms of offering options. Plus, if you happen to have been into the whole Stadia thing, you got just the most atrocious looking outfit (and it rules).
So the game is gorgeous, and I do love booting it up on PC and tracing as many rays as is possible because it can look fucking gorgeous, like Oh My God gorgeous, and that's something I really appreciate. But okay, let's dig a little deeper on this while we contemplate the neon lights bouncing off of 47's big ol' wet skull.
It probably has been said like a billion times at this point, but really if Hitman did not take its Loony-Toon-ass logic with a deadly seriousness I don't think it would work as well as it does. Agent 47 is stoic, even when he is sitting at a drumset and playing an expert drum solo, or stone-facedly imitating a clown, or solving a murder mystery by playing the role of a famous investigator who is, in fact, unconscious in some bushes because that's where I put him. He blows people up by dropping nitro in a shot glass. He sits and listens to a guy talk about his bad relationship with his mother and smothers him with a pillow. You can get other people to kill for you: taking the time to fix a fellow assassin's uncalibrated sniper scope so he can better shoot the guy you need dead without having to raise a finger.
You can dress up as a pirate and kill people with a cutlass. The world is your fucking oyster! And the whole time you are running around setting all this shit up, people are wandering around having absolutely inane conversations about getting the blu-ray they loaned their buddy back, or bitching about their shitty boss, or just trying to figure out why exactly someone insists on listening to DnB music loudly at all hours. Everyone is carrying out routines that are on a loop, and it is so obviously a clockwork world, the incidental writing makes it all feel alive in a way that I, at least, find immensely relaxing. Or at least relaxing enough that I've sunk a solid 200 hours into the game over three different platforms (yes, I know, I have a sickness, buying Hitman 3 on PC, XBox, and Stadia was extremely silly (in my defense, however, the Stadia thing was free for a while and playing Hitman on my phone is still fantastic and will never get old for me (RIP Stadia, I will miss your hideous suit most of all, and also the sunburst exploding duck))).
Every time I boot the damn thing up I find a new way to approach a mission, and even places I've played millions of time still have weird interactions or conversations I haven't heard. There's just so much stuff in the damn games, is what it is, and the best part is that you don't need all that stuff to have a good time, but you can get it anyway. I am super excited for the Freelancer mode coming in January, if only because it will add yet another wrinkle to the hit-manning, what with its whole "hey what if you could buy gear while in the level" and "hey what if you had to work really hard to find your targets by working your way down a list of suspects" deal. It seems extremely fucking interesting, and it makes me even more intrigued at whatever other stuff IOI might get up to (that James Bond game they're working on will probably kick ass, right? It's been said a lot, but a lot of the Hitman levels - especially Sapienza - are more or less James Bond films anyway, complete with slinky spy music).
Also, and perhaps most importantly, the Seven Deadly Sins suits are all fucking incredible, Lust in particular. Just, goddamn. Goddamn.
