I have thoughts about the new Hitman map, Ambrose Island, and now you have to deal with that.
Honestly that makes them sound more severe than they really are because my thoughts can be boiled nicely down to “kinda mid, y’know?” Ambrose Island is this fairly sprawling pirate haven where there’s some beach front village areas, a central social area, and a series of caves and jungle that link them together and to some more of the traditional Hitman fortress designs. Conceptually, I love it! Even some of the specific area design choices I love!
But that’s kinda where the love ends and the rest of my opinions shift either towards a middling acceptance of to outright distaste. Navigating between areas with the caves and jungle and shallow ocean waters is extremely awkward, with it being extremely easy to get twisted around and looping back on myself without constantly checking the map, mostly because the connecting tissue between the various areas ends up being so visually indistinct. The navigation options presented by these paths are also the least interesting parts of the map. They are inconvenient and often never interesting.
Though the navigation issues don’t really stop there. Ambrose Island offers lots of foliage to hide in, lots of things to take cover behind, lots of ways to climb walls/cliff faces and bypass security checkpoints and frisk zones, places you can quickly drop down to avoid patrols or hide a problematic guard, it’s all the stuff I love about Hitman maps! It’s just they’re executed in some of the most rote ways I can really think of.
A generator is hidden off to the side, its line of sight blocked entirely, out of the way of any NPC pathing despite being in the middle of an area you can nicely conk them on the head with one of the millions of coconuts scattered across the island with. An easy distraction to remove the only NPC who can reliably see you try and turn off a story object to bring a target your way, sure, but it’s so painfully… uninteresting? That’s how a lot of the map feels, really. Story concepts are fun, like being able to get into a slapping contest, or how there are ways to draw both targets together for a meeting, pit them against each other…
But like the jungles and caves and waterways, it’s the connecting tissue of these things that feel so lacking. The limited scope and complexity of the fortress areas means that it’s incredibly easy to stumble across all the things you can use to set things into motion, with the ways you can access the things you want feeling like they have the Hitman equivalent of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus’ mobility upgrade, where you’re just given a new option right next to the other two options you have that leads you to the same place.
I was worried that maybe it was all just because I was so familiar with Hitman’s systems and level design, so I made sure to sleep on this first, but overall I just don’t really enjoy how Ambrose Island plays. It feels like there’s less opportunity to toy with NPCs to get them to path where I want/need them to be, less opportunity for the level of creativity that Hitman has offered to this point, and, worst of all, a lack of the personality that made so many of the other maps sing.
Nothing about Ambrose island carries with it the general feel of a place quite like Chonqing, Berlin, Mendoza, Haven Island, Hokkaido, or even Santa Fortuna did. NPCs talk about their jobs and their lives, sure, but when playing through it it all feels like areas can be described by the names they’re given on the map more than they can be as their presence of places. Nothing feels as distinct as even the garden area in the mansion in Sapienza, or even the Sapienza ruins, the latter of which is a place you don’t even have to go unless you’re aiming for a specific challenge or doing one of the escalation missions.
Everything in Ambrose Island feels like it’s there to serve a very distinct purpose and it makes everything feel less interesting because of it. You could make the argument that the social area with the bars and various huts deviates from this, but the moment you go in to any of those huts you’re either rewarded with loads of Murder Goodies or met with another hint at a story mission, or it feels like it’s there so you can use a scripted sequence to draw a target off to an area where you can get them to set themselves on fire.
It’s by no means a bad map, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like the absolute nightmare that is Colorado, but at the same time it feels like it comes up short of even New York, my second least favourite map. New York felt like a place, it felt like I was rewarded more for being sneaky and planning the timing of my movement, even on first playthroughs, but I’m on my fourth playthrough of Ambrose Island though and I am just not having a Good Time on Treasure Island. And that bums me out a bit! This whole place just feels like they refined what could have been a good map down into a dull experience.