Hitman: Codename 47

The Good
The Hitman game series succeeds on the simple truth that there is nothing quite like a the prospect of killing in cold blood to get the blood pumping. On that front at-least, this game delivers.

The Bad
I am sure you have all heard of the Hit-Man series? Unfortunately, not many people know that the early games in the series are rather unimpressive. So what is it that makes it such a poor game? It's not the graphics, they are acceptable and it's not the physics they are good. It's not even the A.I. because that more than suffices. The sad fact is that the game is impossibly hard, even on the lowest level of difficulty. I never got past the first two levels! The game does have a tutorial, unfortunately this only tells you how to fire a gun and the basics of the movement. For the first mission you are sent to a unknown city block and told to assassinate a gang leader in the Buddhist park there. What you are not told, is how to evade the 30 or so guards, how to avoid the chain gun wielding helicopter and then how to leave without being spotted. The guards are paranoid of anything that moves and the moment you pull out a gun they shoot you to oblivion. Turns-out (I read a walk-through) that you have to climb a unknown elevator somewhere in the area and get to the roof, assassinate the gang leader and then hide before the manic copter sees you.

To be fair to the game, I am sure it appeals to some people, if you are a fan of the genre or just like impossible problems you may enjoy this. Still If you get anything out of this game you have done very well.

The Bottom Line
It's Not: very understandable, fun

It's: Very twisted

The Good
This game has got to be one of the most wished ideas ever developed. After the way movies romanticized the hitman profession in such classics as The Killer, Nikita, The Professional, etc. it remained to be seen if videogames could do the same.... well, let's see!

For starters the game begins on the right track by setting itself apart from the pack with a distinctive style and feel thanks to a streamlined interface and some clever gimmicks (like the almighty hitman's laptop). The game takes you through a completely linear campaign that is subdivided in several open-ended missions. Each mission involves taking out someone, how to do so is entirely up to you (though there is just one or two "correct" ways). Each assignment seems to weave a larger plot-line that will ultimately reveal itself in the latest missions, however each mission is excellently crafted with a great sense of progression, and an open yet defined aproach to each.

There is a pretty large arsenal of weapons to experiment with, and equally, you'll get to experiment those weapons on a pletora of enemies and (get out of the way!) innocent bystanders. But if you are clever enough, you'll find that one of your best weapons is sneaking and infiltrating your enemies. Not only does the game allow you to sneak around and take your enemies clothes, but it also includes a lot of classic adventure touches that make the missions much more than just finding the right way to shoot your target. You'll have to extract information out of deranged sanitarium inmates, bartenders, prostitutes, or some of the other npcs that inhabit the slightly jaded world of Hitman making for a much more varied gameplay experience. Furthermore, Hitman's world is brought to life by a pretty spiffy graphics engine. The folks at IO really managed to create some cool visuals with many smoke and lighting effects as well as coping with an astounding amount of gameworld detail (take your character's tie, or the shadows for instance).

Of course the meat of the game is in the killing aspect of it, and the game deals almost perfectly with it. All of the weapons behave realistically, with great sound effects to go with them, and the enemy animations are incredibly cool when it comes to getting shot, strangled, dragged or even when they roll around trying to avoid your shots.

The Bad
Well, did you like all the nice things I wrote over there? Well don't get too excited, because this game takes all of that incredibly cool premises and shoots itself in the foot with them. There are just so many things wrong in this game that I don't know where to begin first, so I'll just go at it randomly, ok?

The control sucks. Pure and simple. As a previous reviewer noted you have a separate key for running... so what, right? Well, regardless of the fact that this is rather cumbersome and annoying Hitman apparently doesn't like it whenever you press both the running and regular "forward" key at the same time so our baldy friend just stops dead in the middle of a firefight whenever you do that. Cute, isn't it? The game handles using items and equipments via pop-up menues, which has worked before, but stops the game dead, since there isn't a quick way to access your weapons. You have to predict that you will be facing a confrontation and be ready to select your weapon or take a couple of seconds browsing through your equipment menu if you get surprised (or things just don't turn up as you figured)while your enemies chew you up (believe me, that "fast and furious" action will get a LOT more furious after a couple of these incidents). As for handling items, the game only makes available some options the closer you are to them, and always chooses the worst one first (one would think you would want to drag a dead body out of the way and then take his clothes, but what the heck, right??).

As for the enemies themselves they happen to have an incredibly stupid AI. They can be funneled into any corridor you want, and they will actually shoot themselves. And just try to confront someone at hand-to-hand combat for fun!

Something that is particularly offending, and that delivers a completely devastating blow to this game, is the fact that it doesn't take advantage of it's premise. Lots of movies have taken such moraly disgusting professions like the hitman's and cloaked it in an aura of romanticism and adventure while not condoning it completely. Hitman does practically none of these things, so it leaves itself wide open for a moral-bashing of epic proportions. And whose fault is this? Mr. 47 I'm afraid. You see, unlike other hitman characters, 47 doesn't react in any way to what happens around him. The plot revolves around his past, but you don't see him even reacting to that. He could actually be a way-wussier Terminator if you think about it! Blankly going from place to place spouting short and controlled (but terribly voice-acted) phrases, and taking out his guns from time to time. In essence, it is terribly hard to connect in any way with the character, he can't be neither our alter-ego, nor a credible character, since the game presents him to us in a very defined and cinematic way (effectively cutting our freedom of interpretation) but he is a complete Nimrod.

The most grievous flaw in this game however is the lack of a saving option. Lazy coding or over-pretentious game design? ("it adds to the atmosphere, c'mon, only wusses use savegames!!).... you be the judge. The fact of the matter is that most missions start with a slow pacing that requires you to judge everything and move inch-by-inch, and then end in an confrontation. Cool, uh? well, what this translates to WITHOUT a savegame feature, is that you will be wading over-and-over through lots of tedious, meager tasks you have figured out hours ago, only to try and see if you can beat that guy, or find that nuclear bomb before time runs out.... yet again. It's downright cruel, cheap and incredibly frustrating.

The Bottom Line
Whoa... that was a lot wasn't it? Well I'll make this short then. Hitman has a lot of promise and gloss, but after you take a good look at it you find out that this is no Nikita. Heck, it's not even Stallone's Assassins!!

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.