Hitman: Contracts

aka: Hitman 3, Hitman: Contracts - Profession Tueur à Gages, Hitman: Kontrakty
Moby ID: 12998
PlayStation 2 Specs
Note: We may earn an affiliate commission on purchases made via eBay or Amazon links (prices updated 3/18 2:27 PM )

Description official descriptions

Hitman: Contracts is a third-person stealth game. Players take the role of "47", a hitman who is unlucky enough to get shot, and falls to the floor dying. The whole game takes place in "flashbacks", where 47 is reminiscing about past missions, some of which were previously seen in Hitman: Codename 47, the first game from the Hitman series.

Gameplay in Hitman: Contracts is similar to the previous installments. Your job will be to complete several missions which involve assassinating targets all over the world. You can sneak around in disguise to avoid the suspicious guards, or you can instead open fire on everyone you see. When you complete your mission, you're given a rating - from "Mass Murderer" up to the coveted "Silent Assassin". If you manage to complete a mission with a "Silent Assassin" rating, you receive a reward: a special weapon (such as dual sawed-off shotguns), and you can try playing a previously completed mission using one of the special weapons.

Spellings

  • Hitman: Контракты - Russian 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 (PlayStation 2 version)

130 People · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 78% (based on 43 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 98 ratings with 2 reviews)

Be a bald mass murderer!!!

The Good
Changing into other people's clothing for disguises was excellent. Of course, in any case, you're still bald! Being a hotel bellboy, walking into a room, and pumping some shells into the head bad guy with his prostitute is just good fun.

Gunning down a bunch of Le Chapelier Frenchies in their SWAT outfits was great as well.

The wide selection of weaponry.

Controls were a little tricky at first, but eventually got used to them.

Game is fairly challenging, but not to where you'll be banging your head against the wall. Can be won with moderate preserverance.

The Bad
Actually, pretty much nothing. If there was something wrong, I would say the lack of cohesion in the story. All of the hits you go on seem pretty unrelated, and I don't really understand the backstory that it tries to show with its flashbacks. Of course, that's probably because I never played the first two games! Best I can tell is you're some kind of cloned dude specifically designed for assassination (the first level is riddled with dead bodies of guys who look just like you).

The Bottom Line
Basically, you're a hitman (duh!) who is hired out by various clients to knock off various people around the world. You never meet these clients, however, and all the deals are done through an intermediary, a British woman who is never identified.

An extremely fun game. Has the look and feel of a Grand Theft Auto type game, but with a hint of seriousness. I played the whole game not realizing that 'Silent Assassin' was the rank to aspire to for each level, and I wound up getting the rank 'Mass Murderer' all the time. But I didn't care, it was awesome! Just machine gunning down 50+ people and dominating the entire level was the way I went. No witnesses!!

If you achieve the Silent Assassin rank on a level (ie. you meet a certain amount of stealth requirements), then you receive a bonus special weapon to use in future levels. Plus, you can go back to get secret weapons on earlier levels that you couldn't originally access (like the minigun on level 1).

I've grown tired of 3rd person shooters in recent memory, but this one was actually real good. Definitely worth picking up for $20!

Xbox · by lado (25) · 2005

There's nothing quite like a perfect hit, and this game is filled with opportunities to pull them off

The Good
The Hitman series has proven itself to be a delight over the years. Sometimes impossibly hard, oftentimes impossibly gratifying, the games have pretty much carved out their own genre. The tall pale man with the bar code on the back of his head is a character you learn to respect even as he performs his deadly tasks of assassination and subterfuge. 47 is the same killing machine as in the previous games, and that's a very good thing.

The graphics have improved from the previous games quite a bit, and with all of the graphical options on, it's a delight for the eyes. The game is just a treat visually, and the developers made very good, subtle use of the fact that these are missions going on in 47's head, and as such could make sometimes eerie changes to the original missions. An interesting design touch is that it's raining in all of the missions, and considering that the game consists of flashback missions, it's a suitable ambiance.

The atmosphere is often exceptional. From fierce snowstorms at a submarine base-turned-bomb-factory to energetic raves in meatpacking plants, eerie music in important rooms and fitting music in others, the levels are varied and filled with life. The actual process of assassination is still the same through it all, and the hits are all the better because of it.

Finally, the Glacier engine is still kicking ass. All of the elements are strengthened in Contracts. The AI has continued to be perfected, the 3D renderer optimized while adding more eye candy, and the sounds are ever more convincing, the physics more immersive. There are still flaws, but they are steadily disappearing, much like actual glaciers today.

The Bad
Hitman: Contracts is basically the first game redux. The missions are prettier by far, they're more fleshed out, and in a lot of ways they're perfected, and feel as new as the actual new missions in Contracts. But without having played the first game in the series, there is essentially no storyline as to why you're doing the missions. While there are a few paragraphs explaining the story, you don't really get a great sense for why you're doing the hits. They feel disjointed, even when you HAVE played the first game in the series.

One of the most enjoyable features of the previous two games has been in weapons management. With the first game's monetary pre-mission purchasing menu, and the second game's continuous gun-collection method, the third game abandons both ideas. This is mainly in part because the game is taking part in flashbacks, and in general sets it up so you don't need more than the same set of weapons common between all of the missions. Ideally, you won't need to touch any of the big guns you find in the mission anyway, since if you're going for stealth you'll never need to fire a single bullet. This is still an area where both of the previous games outdo Contracts, however.

A couple of the remade missions have lost their focus in this transition. Nothing that is too distracting, but when you merge two missions from the first game together to form one mission, you'll lose elements from both, even when it results in a good mission in the end. Some of the cleanest ways to end those individual missions return in the resultant mission, and some don't, but in the end, the missions proceed smoothly.

Finally, the game is still all about trial and error. In the quest to achieve the 'perfect hit', you'll stumble around the missions for a while looking for the right combinations in order to achieve that Silent Assassin rating. This has been the weak point of the Hitman series all along, at least in my view, but it's a small weak point. When you do hit the right combination of events, luck, and planning, it's as sweet as gaming gets.

The Bottom Line
In every new version of Hitman, the game mechanics and flow just keep getting better and better. The first game was a refreshing new experience, and pulling off a perfect hit just felt great. The second game refined every aspect of the first game. Contracts, the third game in the series, seems like a transition from the second to the fourth games in the series, providing just enough story to serve as a tantalizing preview and mental motivation for the upcoming Blood Money game.

Contracts is extremely enjoyable, especially if you've played the first game and enjoyed the missions there. Even if you haven't, Contracts provides a solid single-player gaming experience by itself. The missions chosen to be remade were arguably the best of the series, and the new missions accentuate the design style that the developers decided to run with in this game. Simply put, assassination never had it this good.

Windows · by Bet (473) · 2005

Trivia

Levels

A large majority of the levels in Hitman: Contracts are simply remakes of the levels from Hitman: Codename 47. Almost all of the major missions from the original game have been remade in Contracts, the only major levels that weren't remade were the Columbia mission where you assassinate Pablo Ochoa, and the deathmatch-style final confrontation in the Asylum (both of these levels were very action-oriented, and were probably deemed inappropriate given the Hitman series later focused on more crafty, less rambo-ish gameplay).

Analytics

MobyPro Early Access

Upgrade to MobyPro to view research rankings!

Related Games

Hitman: Ultimate Contract
Released 2009 on Windows
Hitman Trilogy
Released 2007 on Windows, PlayStation 2
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: Codename 47
Released 2000 on Windows
Hitman: Absolution
Released 2012 on Windows, Xbox 360, 2014 on Macintosh
Hitman: The Complete First Season
Released 2016 on PlayStation 4
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin
Released 2002 on Windows, PlayStation 2, Xbox...

Related Sites +

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 12998
  • [ 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 JPaterson.

PlayStation 3 added by CaidKean.

Additional contributors: Alan Chan, Dae, jean-louis, COBRA-COBRETTI, Stratege, DreinIX, Patrick Bregger.

Game added April 25, 2004. Last modified January 29, 2024.