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Hitman
Eidos, PS2 (2002-2007)
Stabbing good gaming in the back
What do you expect from
a third-person action
adventure game? Action
and adventure from a third-person
standpoint probably. What you don’t
expect is a game that revolves around
dressing up in different clothes and a
hell of a lot of waiting after that.
While Dante enjoys slicing up
demons, and Kratos revels in ripping
enemies in half, Agent 47 prefers
to steal the pants from young men
and then hide in a toilet for an hour
while he’s waiting for something to
happen. It’s not exactly what you
want from the star of a game and not
really what you expect from a hitman.
When Carlos The Jackal made his
assassination he just knocked on
the door, had the butler lead him to
the target and shot him in the face.
Granted, when he tried to finish off
the job his gun jammed and Carlos
had to make a quick exit as the police
were at the door, and so his target
fortunately lived. Had Agent 47 been
sent on the job, it might have been
more successful, but only after he
had restarted the mission around
20 times.
Why? Well you know the Hitman
games work don’t you? When you
enter a level you know who your
targets are but you spend the next
five attempts trying to find them.
This involves you stumbling into
areas where you’re not supposed to
be and getting shot for trespassing,
which is a little harsh to be honest. So
you’ve got to hunt down someone by
wearing the correct attire and finding
a tranquil spot where you can quietly
off them. This takes about another
five goes until you realise you’ll never
be able to cap them without anyone
else seeing, so you have to restart
and find someone else.
After going through this whole
rigmarole and eventually finding who
you’re going supposed to be killing,
well then you’ve got to follow them
about for a while as well. This is just
so you learn their route through the
level and so you can find the accident
that’s just waiting to take them out
for you.
See, rather than being a cool
hitman who kills people and leaves a
card or a rose so that the authorities
know who did it but can’t catch him,
47 prefers to make everything look
like an accident. Sure that keeps
him well below the radar, but God
is it boring? Waiting and waiting for
your target to pass by the area which
may as well have ‘USE THIS TO KILL
PEOPLE!’ stamped on it is, well it’s
just dull. We wait for things all the
time in real life – buses, supermarket
queues, women and their inability to
use a cash machine quickly and so on
– but waiting in videogames is even
more frustrating. Nobody wants to
play the waiting game and yet that’s
all Hitman has ever been about.
Makes you wonder how that’s going
to be turned into a film – are we going
to have to watch him hide behind bins
and stuff? It better not be over two
hours long!
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