Hitman 2: Silent Assassin

Moby ID: 7369
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Description official descriptions

The perfect hitman, Agent 47, tries to distance himself from his violent past and becomes a humble church gardener. But he is tricked into returning to his trade when his friend, a priest, gets kidnapped by an Italian mafioso. Hitman 2: Silent Assassin is a third-person stealth game. As a titular hitman, you have to complete a number of missions all over the world. Each mission generally involves assassinating someone and possibly fulfilling a couple of other objectives.

Typically, your target will be protected by numerous guards. While there's a large arsenal of weapons available to you - ranging from stealthy weapons such as a garrote or a silenced pistol, up to machine guns and sniper rifles - your main weapon will be stealth. Agent 47 can sneak around to remain undetected, and he can disguise himself in clothes from killed or stunned guards.

The guards aren't completely stupid, however, as they will investigate suspicious noises, and they'll react if they see you waving around a gun. They'll get suspicious if they see you running around, raise alarm upon finding a corpse, and if you hang in a disguise around them too long, they'll eventually realize you're not one of their buddies.

Hitman 2: Silent Assassin brings something new to the series: depending on your stealthiness, you are given a rating upon completing a mission. Going trigger-happy on everyone will result in being called a "Mass Murderer", while only the most patient and skilled players will manage to receive the "Silent Assassin" rating, which generally involves stealthily eliminating the target without raising any suspicion.

Spellings

  • Hitman 2: Бесшумный убийца - Russian spelling
  • 终极刺客2:沉默杀手 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

211 People (190 developers, 21 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 84% (based on 65 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 145 ratings with 5 reviews)

Ups the ante on first (or third) person sneakers...excellent!

The Good
I never played the first Hitman, having read somewhere that it was an ambitious, though heavily flawed, game. Hitman 2, I can happily report, seems to have fixed the problems that apparently plagued the prequel, because this is an excellent, tightly-woven first (or third) person sneaker.

You play the titular character, also known as Agent 47, who at the start of the game is in seclusion at a monastery in Italy. From there, you become embroiled in a lengthy adventure requiring you to assassinate a variety of shady characters, including mafia bosses, Russian generals and Japanese yakuza.

The beauty of the game is its open-ended design. Although every level has preset objectives that MUST be met, how you meet them is entirely up to you. There are usually many different ways you can hit your target, from stealthy sneaking to Full Metal Jacket-style firefights. Your performance is rated at the end of each mission, letting you know what the game thinks of your style. On one mission, for example, you have to guide 47 to a tunnel entrance. Between you and your objective lies a huge, snowy field, dotted with trees and numerous ninja guards with itchy trigger fingers. Should this prove too daunting, climb down an access ladder into the subterranean transport tunnel, which can take you to your objective...if you can bypass the guards and checkpoints, that is. I died numerous times trying to navigate aboveground. Finding this unrewarding, I sent 47 down in the tunnel and reached the end point, but only after slaughtering numerous ninjas in a hail of automatic gunfire. The game called me a "mass murderer." Humph. Not satisfied, I reloaded the level, took a more stealthy approach, and wound up as a "shadow." Not too shabby, I thought.

Another bright spot in Hitman 2 is the AI, which is usually so disappointing in these games (Metal Gear Solid 2 immediately springs to mind). The guards in this game, while usually predictable, are no dummies. They'll spot you from a long distance, especially if you aren't disguised, and they'll do their damnedest to plug a few new holes in you. For that reason, you have to carefully plan out your route to your target.

You can go about your business in either first- or third-person view, which I appreciated. Additionally, the weapons and items selection is diverse and interesting, and the game always seems to throw a new toy or two at you in each new mission. Finally, I liked the fact that Italians speak Italian, Japanese speak Japanese, and so on. This breaks the cycle of ridiculous cultural imperialism that usually plagues electronic entertainment.

The Bad
If you choose to play on "professional" difficulty, be prepared for a REALLY difficult game. Patient (and skilled) players will count this as an asset, however, as it provides for a very rewarding experience when you finally complete a level.

The Bottom Line
Take Metal Gear Solid 2, throw out the whiny protagonist and stupid plot, mix in creamy deliciousness and pepper with nearly insane difficulty and you get Hitman 2.

PlayStation 2 · by Lucas Schippers (57) · 2003

A really fun and exciting game, but with a few very annoying flaws.

The Good
You begin the game in a monistary in an attempt to redeem yourself of your sins from the first game. The acting and in-game cinemetography are really great, and quite convincing that Mr. 47 truly wishes to change his ways. The first level provides a good tutorial to begin, as well.

The gameplay has only been improved since the first game. It's essentially the same as it was before, but better. Disguises are a lot more logical this time around - throwing a cap on your head and a jacket over your back isn't going to convince the bad guys you're part of the family. There is a LOT of freedom to do your job how you want to.

Almost every level has three or more ways to complete the mission without raising a ruckus. The freedom to choose your path in the level is really great. Need to get accross a well-guarded area? Try and secretly kill a guard and steal his clothes. Or knock out the power and try and make it to the other side in the dark. Or crawl through the mucky sewers and hope you make it out in a better place. OR...just take out your ballers and blow everyone away. The choice is yours.

On normal difficulty, you're allowed seven saves. This is a much better feature than the first game's "two deaths" thing.

My favorite part of the game is undoubtedly the way the bodies interact with objects. Unlike...every other 3D game, gravity and objects affect the bodies. You're not going to find a guy just hanging out in mid-air because a pixel from the cliff is touching his foot. If you drag a guy too close to an edge and he slips off, you'll lose your grip and he'll fall. If too much of his body is hanging over the slide, he'll slowly slide off. It's the most realistic thing I've seen in a game.

No more having to purchase equipment before every mission. You carry your weapons along with you between missions, picking up what you can find.

In Hitman 1, you assassinated only about six people out of around twelve levels. In Hitman 2, you assassinate someone in every single level of the game, except for one, I think. Huzzah!

Your actions affect your rating. It ranges from "Silent Assassin", which is hard, to "Mass Murderer", which is, well, needless to say, messy. You don't have to kill anyone but the target in any level, but it's extremely difficult to do so.

I tried to go for the more stealthy ratings, but I wasn't able to get "Silent Assassin" on any levels, though I came close on one. It was fun to go back and replay levels - only this time around, blow everyone away!

The Bad
Most of the time, disguises are too useless. Now, I can understand that posing as a guard isn't going to get you very far, especially if the guards all know each other. But, say on one particular level where there are a bunch of bald guys in robes. I don't care if you've lived with these bald-headed cult members all your life, you're not going to be able to spot a phony fifty yards away when he looks exactly like you. Also, there are some levels where the guards are just damn psychic. I was wearing a completely-concealing disguise, covering my body and my face, and somehow the guards all knew I was a fake.

You can't run anywhere, especially not while disguised. The Russian soldiers seem to have a very strict "no running" policy. If you run, you die, simple as that. I can see how if you go running down the hallway with a gun in your hand, the guards might be suspicious. But if they saw you on the other side of the street running, why would their first instinct be "OPEN FIRE!!!!" ?

Your ballers are uh...rediculously powerful. Two simultanious shots at close range will, literally, send the enemy soaring. This is fun when you just want to go blasting everyone away, but when you want to play a realistic assassination game, it's just silly. I remember one incident, where I wanted to assassinate my target from the top of a tower. I crept up to the top silently, and decided to kill the sniper up there. I foolishly took out my ballers and fired. The guy flew right out the tower, landed in the middle of the guard's patrol route and quickly alerted them of my presense. It was humerous, but annoying.

Some friends of mine claimed to experience desktop-crashes quite often in the game. In my entire time, I've experienced maybe three or four. That's not much for me...but maybe I'm lucky.

The fiber wire is almost completely useless in nonlinear missions. You can only use it right if you sneak up on enemies, but the only times you're ever able to correctly sneak up on an enemy is if you're meant to. Like, if the target is taking a piss or something. Any other guard has patrol routes or will see you.

I don't like how Mr. 47 is a friggin invincible God most of the time. There most guys go down in one or two hits, Mr. 47 can take a damn tank shell at close range without flinching. Raising the difficulty might fix this, but it also reduces your save games greatly, which, I think is too much a sacrifice to balance the gameplay.

In the last level, you have only your fiber wire to start with. What gives? It's the hardest level in the game, for Pete's sake! And haven't I seen this level/situation somewhere before...?

The music used in the commercials is done by a really dumb band. Heh.

The Bottom Line
Definitely worth buying. It's fun to play "Silent Assassin", and it's fun to go on a mass-murder spree. But there are some bugs in it that really need to be addressed.

Windows · by kbmb (415) · 2002

Behold the future of adventure games: A bald dude with two guns!

The Good
In short Hitman 2 takes the original over-ambitious and critically flawed assassin simulator and revamps it by pretty much fixing everything that was wrong with it and generally increasing the attention to detail in level design, balance and features.

Story-wise the game is pretty obscure, starting a while after the original game, we find Mr. 47 living a peaceful life as a gardener in a sicilian monastery. For some reason his best friend the priest is kidnapped, so in order to track him down 47 resumes his connection with "The Agency" and starts taking on contracts in exchange for information. As expected there is a connection between the kidnapping and 47's relationship with the agency, and yes, his clones will show up again along with someone related to his origin. Interesting? Maybe. It's not exactly revolutionary nor exciting, but it provides the right elements for it to connect the many contract hits into some sort of cohesive plot.

And of course, what we all really care about is about performing those hits, right? As the game progresses you take on a variety of 3-mission long campaigns in which you are dropped in a specific location and have to complete the missions in succession before returning home to your monastery and get back in touch with the Agency.

The changes and improvements are evident from the get go and as advertised, fix pretty much everything that was wrong with the original. For starters the run key is now a modifier (THANK GOD!) preventing the misshaps of the original; the inventory is easily accesible from a game-pausing splash screen complete with descriptions; the collision detection between characters has been fixed so as to prevent you from running through an enemy (???) when dashing to stab him or whatever and blowing your cover; the interaction menu is now kept at the top of the screen without cluttering your display and works much better than before; the changing of clothes is now not a magic disguise that makes you invisible to the enemies, and the AI has been upgraded to be much less forgiving and become suspicious much easily than before; finally the shitty macho-man decision to exclude in-game savegames has been replaced with a limited amount of savegames to be used completely at your discretion. Now THAT's how you are supposed to do it!

What's really amazing however, is how the many little fixes and improvements allow the game to flow much better and to fully exploit it's potential as not just another 3D sneak/action game but as the next generation in adventure games. That's right, adventure games! Remember those? The original Hitman included some puzzle aspects into it's missions to help keep things scripted, but the sequel uses even more scripted and puzzle-oriented events to make it a true action/adventure hybrid were you can run around gunning everyone down or instead carefully infiltrate and make a good use of several items and other elements like electricity generators, fire alarms, vents, etc. in your quest to place some poison in a champagne glass, plant a bomb, or lure someone to a trap with a beeper and a cell phone. All without rising the suspicion of the many guards, terrorists, henchmen or the assorted policemen and civilians.

The arsenal is comprised of a mix of exotic and well-known real life firearms and assorted weapons like Katanas and fireaxes. 47 gets to keep the weapons he takes with him from the missions and then puts them in display in his tool shed at the monastery, not only is each one accurately modeled and imposes it's own set of rules but collecting them becomes a nice mini-game not to mention that they will become pretty useful in the final mission. Did you get all the sub machineguns? How about the golf club? Or the Japanese custom sniper rifle?? Gotta catch 'em all!!

The mission design is exceptionally executed and with some small exceptions remains among the best ones ever developed for a 3D action/adventure title smoothly flowing and developing in layers as you examine your surroundings and the possibilities, infiltrate, execute, and then evacuate the premises. As expected the game allows you to pack a considerable amount of heat, so you can take the heavy weapondry and mow your way down to your target, however the missions include a variety of "peaceful" ways (usually related to these puzzle elements I mentioned) that allow you, for instance, to make the call between crashing through the door, shooting that pesky guard and making a ruckus or simply activating the horn in a car in the garage and sneaking past him as he goes to check out what the hell did that noise. Exploration and the use of your head has it's rewards as in every good adventure game, as following the "brainy" path not only is much more satisfactory and efficient, but also increases your rating and rewards you with bonus weapons. However, unlike Adventure games Hitman 2 doesn't force you to follow those paths and allows you to mix it up with gunfire, sneaking and whatever you can come up with, essentially overcoming the "do what the designer wanted you to do" problem that killed the adventure genre, a far more important feat than what it seems. Gamers and developers alike should start to look in the direction of games like Hitman 2, since it's in them that the future of adventure games lies.

As for the technical aspect the game is exceptionally polished, using an upgraded version of the original engine which mantains the clean graphics, superb animations and the ragdoll physics that made the dragging of corpses in the original such a distinct feature. For as good as the graphics are however, they are completely overshadowed by the sound design which combines excellent surround sfx with professional voice acting (another improvement from the original) that keeps the multinational tone of the game by using multi-lingual subtitled dialogues that give the game a class most "international-conflict" games lack when they put Boris the ruskie and Eichi the Jap talking as if they were born-bred L.A. beachbums and also gives the entire package a much higher level of realism and detailed quality.

As for the music, the orchestral soundtrack composed by Jesper Kyd and performed by the Budapest orchestra and choir brings the game to new heights and introduces some of the best orchestrated music ever to hit your monitor using sweeping arrangements and moody chorus that merge with fast-paced tense melodies to compose a distinct Eastern European soundtrack in the same vein Hollywood movies have been doing for a while when placing the action in such places as Prague, Stalingrad, etc.

Finally I'd like to personally thank the team at IO for the nice collection of extras that come bundled with the game and which include a collection of early screenshots, bloopers and other bonuses amongst which you have the 3DS Max model for 47 himself!! It's the in-game one unfortunately, and not the high-res model used for the promo artwork and other illustrations, but still it rocks and it's a feature I'd like to see included in other games as well.

The Bad
There are still some things left to bitch about, including the psychic nature of some of the enemies (how the hell can a Japanese guard tell I'm a gaijin when I'm fully covered with a ninja get-up and we are both 50 feet away in the middle of a snowstorm???), or the weird ass reaction of some others (is it customary for russian militia to instantly shoot anything that runs??).

There are also some less than stellar levels including the aforementioned snow-filled treks through Japan's fields or the middle eastern adventures of the amazing bald white dude that can pass by unmolested among a group of Afganistanian terrorists that all look either like Osama or Saddam... Geeez, at least he doesn't get to "mingle" as the whitest, tallest chinese waiter with a funny hat in the world anymore...

Finally there's the issue of 47's uncanny durability when compared to everyone else in the gameworld, the ballers and their mega-hyper-powered force, the sniper views still bob up and down as if you were atop a buoy (this may be nice as a challenge but it's NOT how it's like, trust me) and the meager rewards for attaining Silent Assassin rating, seeing as how you just get 3 bonus weapons (one which can be obtained in the main game) and nothing more.... Oh, and the story could also have been better.

The Bottom Line
Exceptional game that surpasses the original in just about every level imaginable and delivers a tightly-woven package filled with quality entertainment and fully recommended to anyone who enjoys quality gaming.

This is the sort of thing that puts a big smile to anyone's face, IO had a good concept but implemented it poorly. They refined it, acknowledged their mistakes and fixed what was wrong, and the result is nothing short of amazing. Kudos to everyone involved.

Windows · by Zovni (10504) · 2004

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Hitman 2: Silent Assassin appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Advertisement

The TV ads were made by the developers, not by an agency.

Extras

On the CD, you will find some goodies: The Hitman 3D Studio Max model, some early screenshots of the game, which are quite humourus, and some wallpapers.

References

  • In the Shogun Showdown mission, there's a big security workstation on the castle's 3rd floor that monitors the entire stage. On its main screen however, you can see a screenshot of IO's upcoming (at the time anyway) Freedom Fighters! Though if you look carefully (use 1st person view = F1) you can see a few changes in the interface, such as a radar screen added next to the health bars.
  • In the "Jacuzzi Job" mission check out what's on top the small counter in the bedroom... That's right! It's a Dopefish spring-toy! And for further Id related sightings check out the monitors in the previous "Graveyard Shift" mission: most of them are playing Quake III: Arena. Even the sysadm!
  • At the very beginning of the "Graveyard Shift" mission, you can see a video camera pointed at a coffee pot. The camera plays a part in one of the in-game puzzles in that mission. What you might be wondering is why anyone would dedicate a video camera just to watch over a pot of coffee. It's possible the coffee pot camera is a homage to this.
  • On the mission "Shogun Showdown", 47 enters a room with a lot of monitors and a big red button to press. In this same room, there is a bookcase. Looking on the titles of the books, you can find one titled "Vamos Arregaçar". This is Brazilian slang for something like "Let's kick some ass!". It looks like they had a Brazilian guy in the development team...
  • In the first St. Petersburg mission, there is a building called "Zaitsev Building". It was obviously named after the famous soviet sniper Vasily Zaitsev (immortalised in the movie Enemy at the Gates). Quite fitting, if you think about progress of the misson.

Sergei Zavorotko

The game's main villain, Russian arms dealer Sergei Zavorotko, bears a remarkable resemblance to a character in Arnold Schwarzenegger's Eraser movie that introduced us to the joys of railguns.

That character, also named Sergei, was also a Russian arms dealer and a secondary villain who showed up at the end of the film. Both he and the Sergei from Hitman have surprisingly similar appearances. Both have shoulder length hair, a thick moustache, and both wear wool turtlenecks under a red leather coat.

The Sergei from Hitman is balding on top, while the Sergei from Eraser isn't, but otherwise the two characters look almost exactly the same. It's possible the character design for the Hitman Sergei was inspired by the character from the Eraser movie.

Information also contributed by Alan Chan, Carlos Aquino, James1, SGruber and Zovni

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by POMAH.

PlayStation 3 added by CaidKean. GameCube added by Kartanym. OnLive added by firefang9212.

Additional contributors: Felix Knoke, tarmo888, Stratege, CaesarZX, DreinIX, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack.

Game added October 7, 2002. Last modified March 17, 2024.