Hitman: Codename 47

aka: Hitman: Pagato per Uccidere, Hitman: Tueur à gages
Moby ID: 2797
Note: We may earn an affiliate commission on purchases made via eBay or Amazon links (prices updated 3/28 8:36 PM )

Description official descriptions

A third-person shooter that emphasizes stealth and tactical thinking, Hitman: Codename 47 is a mixture of action and puzzle gaming.

You play the mysterious, nameless Hitman, whose perfectly lean body and UPC-stamped head indicate a somewhat unnatural childhood. Waking up one day in a cell, you escape your imprisonment and are shortly contacted by the Agency, an organization as mysterious as yourself. Offering a job in what you do best (delivering death), you embark on a career as an assassin. But the shadow of your past creeps up on you...and the last thing an assassin needs is something creeping on him.

A 3D game done nearly entirely from the third person (first person is used for aiming certain weapons), Hitman may initially draw comparisons to the Tomb Raider series. Although you can play in such a mode, there is also another mode where the mouse is more free to roam. Reflections, muzzle flashes, bodies that obey physics and slump and fall when necessary, and impressive shadows attempt to make the world feel realistic.

A wide array of weaponry are available, from knives and piano wire to silenced pistols to sub-machine guns and even heavy machine guns. Although such weapons are available, stealth will be your friend. The A.I. reacts to shouts, gunfire, and other odd occurrences, sometimes even getting suspicious if you're running around and so silence and sneakiness are your two best allies. Take down lone guards, hide their bodies and steal their uniforms. Then move in closer to your kill. Multiple methods of completing most of the levels are available, although one or two are the most efficient and therefore earn you the most money.

Spellings

  • Hitman: Агент 47 - Russian spelling
  • 终极刺客: 代号47 - Simplified Chinese spelling

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Videos

See any errors or missing info for this game?

You can submit a correction, contribute trivia, add to a game group, add a related site or alternate title.

Credits (Windows version)

110 People (98 developers, 12 thanks) · View all

Product Marketing Lead
Product Manager
Creative Manager
PR
Localisation Manager
QA-Manager
Tester
Translation
Special Thanks
  • Aloha Hermann! Thanks for your support!
Programming
Additional Programming
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 78% (based on 47 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 108 ratings with 10 reviews)

Excellent ideas but badly executed

The Good
The idea of being a hit man, assassin, murderer. Somewhy people tend to like being the bad guy. Here you are about as bad as you can get. You have absolutely no way to justify the acts you do in the game. You just kill for money and that's it. Althought how gruesome and wrong this might feel, it still, quite scarily, is FUN.

Most of the time you are playing this game as a puzzle game. This is emphasized with the lack of saved games. When you are committing a murder, there is no such thing as luck. Every single step, shot, crouch, door-opening, kill, at least should be planned before.

The game content, graphics and sound, are well done. They are not ground-breaking or superior to other games, but they get the job done. Special mention to the very life-like (yeah, right) bodies. And the camera work in in-game cinematics is just breathtaking. These guys should be making movies.

The Bad
The game's controls are awful. You have separate button for running, and it feels bad. Why didn't they do it in the standard way? Selecting your weapon and action is done like in Operation Flashpoint, with a little menu to select what you want to do. Unfortunately, you'll have to open the menu to see what you can do. And you must select an action before the menu closes and the menu is located in the middle of the screen, making all firing and aiming impossible. To make things even worse, I could not assign the mouse wheel to handle the menu, so it is even harder to get the right choice.

Also the lack of saving games in the middle of a mission is a bad mistake in a game like this. Althought it adds into the atmosphere of the game, it also makes it very hard even on the easiest difficulty setting.

While the camera works great in the cinematic sequences, your own head obscures the view in the game sometimes, further fustrating you.

The Bottom Line
This game starts off very promising and contains a lot of good ideas and excellent camera work, but is very flawed due to the bad controls and the lack of saving.

It is very hard to recommend this game, but I am sure that many people will love it. Just try before you buy.

Windows · by Aapo Koivuniemi (41) · 2002

Bitchin'!

The Good
Though it isn't perfect it is a great game! The array of weapons is nice, many different "killing toys" to choose from. The reality of the sniper scope is... well... realistic. The scope bobs up and down, it doesn't stay perfectly still, this not only makes the feel more real but adds to the difficulty. The story behind the game plays out very nicely and ties in very well once you complete the game. Hitman is very addictive, i began my game and played for a while... four hours later i decided it was wise to take a break (it seemed like an hour passed at best). The graphics are sweet, as one reviewer noted, on high res mode you can nearly read the numbers tattooed on the back of his head, sweet! Another reviewer was complaining about the separate run button... why? The separate button makes it very convenient to change from running to sneaking up on a dude and cuttin' his throat. i found that assigning the 0 / Ins key on the numpad makes it very easy to toggle between the two.

The Bad
The AI can be too smart at times, it seems that if one guard knows i'm "not on the level" then nearly all of them do.... but it doesn't happen that way every time. The cut scenes aren't half bad but i find myself cranking the volume up to hear what the hell they say and most of the time i can't understand them anyway due to the foreign accents. The voice overs are... "without enthusiasm" a bit of feeling would have improved this aspect but it's not that big of a deal. Again with the AI, sometimes enemies will walk through doors or they will be near a wall, i'll fire away and they'll fall through the wall. The game runs smoothly... until loads of guards etc., hunt you down or the area you are in becomes cluttered w/ crap, the game slows badly and gets quite annoying. However don't let this all discourage you, it's still a killer game!

The Bottom Line
Being 4 years old now you can probably pick this one up very cheap, by all means grab it!

Windows · by MrSuperGod (54) · 2004

Close, but no cigar

The Good
A garrote may not be the best way to a man's heart, but at least it's clean and quiet.

The Bad
How do I save this thing? Oh, wait... I don't.

The Bottom Line
Hitman: Codename 47 is a game that created a bit of a controversy when it first arrived on the scene. While the idea of killing people had been part of the computer game experience for a very long time, HC47 went a step further than your average man-shooter. Here was a game where you weren't just killing people because they were your enemies, in kill or be killed scenarios. No, you were performing carefully planned assassinations because that was your job. It was a distinction that struck a chord with some gamers.

I'm not about to start arguing whether this was indeed a step too far in the wrong direction, but I am going to say that, personally, I don't have any moral qualms regarding this game. Partly it's because I simply don't let works of fiction, regardless of the medium they're in, get to me in such a way. More importantly, it's because, as far as I recall, the game doesn't actually reward you for killing civilians or police officers. In fact it penalizes you for it. What's more, your targets are very much of the criminal variety.

The missions you're presented with as 47, the titular character, aren't just individual set-pieces that you have to figure out and then perform to a certain degree of excellence in order to succeed in killing your target. They also form a narrative that slowly unfolds, shedding light on 47's mysterious past and origins. Without spoiling anything, it's enough to say that, while the story isn't terribly original, it proves to be mildly satisfying. And, hey, you get to visit quite a few countries not often portrayed in games.

Speaking of visiting... while good for the time, the graphics haven't exactly aged well. However I find that this to be true for most 3D games of this era, late 90s - early 00s, so you can't really fault the game for being a product of its era. The sound design is pretty good overall, though the voice acting is pretty insipid.

The levels themselves are well thought out, for the most part, and present all sorts of challenges for you to overcome. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately... more on this below) most levels aren't exactly long. As you might expect, as a hitman, it's best to kill your targets as quietly as possible, so the gameplay rewards being able to accomplish the task with as few "incidents" as possible. Any sort of extended firefight is counterproductive in this game.

The AI is good: civilians alert guards if they see something suspicious, enemies react to gunshots or to dead bodies, they call for backup etc. The game combines scripted sequences with reactive elements quite well. In it's day the AI would've been all the more impressive.

Unfortunately there is one major downside to this game and it pretty much ruined my enjoyment of the game: there are no saves in this game during missions. Not even checkpoints! You go in, you screw up... you start over. Slowly finding your way through a level, making a mistake near the end and having to repeat the whole thing... that to me is frustrating. I'm sure there are some gamers out there that enjoy this sort of challenge, but to me it quickly becomes an exercise in tediousness and repetitiousness. It's not a good sign when you start hoping that the next level will be a short one (they usually are). Even though this was obviously an intentional design decision, it's hard to forgive a PC game that doesn't have any sort of in world save.

The problem is compounded by the control scheme and the inventory system which often feel like they're forcing mistakes on you. One particular thing that irks me is that the game treats walking and running as two different things; in most games you use a key to alternate between walking and running. In HC47 there are two separate keys for walking/running, so if you're walking and you want to run, you must first release the walk button and then switch to the run button.

Worse than this is the inventory system which uses scrolling exclusively. There are no hotkeys for different weapons/items. This makes access to your inventory both slow and imprecise. You can get used to it, but it's still a bad system in a game where you have to be quick to react to changing situations.

If you can look beyond these problems, there's a good game underneath that can be very rewarding to people with plenty of patience. However, if you can't get past these things or if you're not a patient sort, you'll probably just quickly get frustrated with the game.

Windows · by Giu's Brain (503) · 2014

[ View all 10 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Guards' room in "Traditions of the Trade"? Daniel Saner (3503) Feb 15, 2013
Music in Windows Vista Daniel Saner (3503) Oct 2, 2008

Trivia

BPjS/BPjM index

On April 28, 2001, Hitman: Codename 47 was put on the infamous German index by the BPjS. For more information about what this means and to see a list of games sharing the same fate, take a look here: BPjS/BPjM indexed games.

Trivia originally contributed by Xoleras on 18.12.2005.

References

  • Pablo's line "Say hello to my little friend" is an obvious reference to the movie Scarface.
  • The entire setup of the third mission, "The Massacre at Cheung Chau Fish Restaurant", is extremely similar to a scene of The Godfather, with both the setup (negotiation in a restaurant with gangsters and police), as well as the execution (hiding a gun in the bathroom).

Trivia originally contributed by EboMike on 18.12.2003 and 08.06.2004.

Naked strippers

An earlier beta of the game featured the strippers found in the game with no clothes.

Trivia originally contributed by Zovni on 13.02.2001.

Real-world locations

In an interview with fansite HitmanHQ, lead animator Jens Peter Kurup of Io Interactive stated: "The different locations were either constructed with picture reference or by actually visiting the different places to get the atmosphere right. [...] The Hotel in Budapest actually exists [...], and some of the guys checked it out in details. Then it's modified to fit the gameplay."

The game's Thermal Bath Hotel Gallàrd in Budapest mentioned in the interview, as visited in the mission Traditions of the Trade, is inspired by real-world Danubius Hotel Gellért, also in Budapest.

Analytics

MobyPro Early Access

Upgrade to MobyPro to view research rankings!

Related Games

Hitman: Contracts
Released 2004 on PlayStation 2, Windows, Xbox
Hitman: Ultimate Contract
Released 2009 on Windows
Hitman Trilogy
Released 2007 on Windows, PlayStation 2
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin
Released 2002 on Windows, PlayStation 2, Xbox...
Hitman III
Released 2021 on Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One...
Hitman: Blood Money
Released 2006 on Windows, Xbox, PlayStation 2...
The Hitman Collection
Released 2006 on Windows
Hitman: Absolution
Released 2012 on Windows, Xbox 360, 2014 on Macintosh
Hitman: The Complete First Season
Released 2016 on PlayStation 4

Related Sites +

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 2797
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Ray Soderlund.

Additional contributors: Zovni, Daniel Saner, tarmo888, Sciere, Stratege, CaesarZX.

Game added December 15, 2000. Last modified March 14, 2024.