On Playing Through Hitman Levels. Intro

20 October 2024

I've been fond of the Hitman series for around 10 years now. I played Absolution on my dinky Mac and found it a fun enough experience, and once I got a real Windows laptop I bought Blood Money and sunk hours and hours being impressed by the (good) levels and the sheer amount of detail. Levels like the Vegas casino, the opera house, the parade and even the White House feel impressive for a game released in 2007 and are still impressive now in my opinion.

So when I saw that Hitman: World of Assassination was actually on sale for a reasonable price on PS5 I jumped straight in. I've been hearing mumblings about how cool the WOD trilogy is for almost 10 years now, ever since the Paris episode of Hitman (2016) released, I've always wanted to try those games but never had a console or PC capable enough to play em, so I just gawked from a distance and thought about how cool they looked without being able to play them.

UNTIL NOW HAHAHAHAHAHA

So as a return/"Lets make a neocities original blog series" I wanna take a look at the Hitman: World of Assassination levels as I go through them. I'll try and cover them from three specific angles that I feel make a Hitman level work:

• Does the level make you Feel the place you're infiltrating? Are the aesthetics strong enough to carry the idea that you're in a place?

• Are the assassination methods per target interesting, varied and make you engage with unique elements of the level?

• How difficult is it to get to those assassination methods? Does the game force a particular playstyle?

These won't be ranked or evaluated with a number or whatever. Rather, I wanna try and dissect what makes these levels work now that IO Interactive has the budget and scope to build these grand castles of simulationist mechanics and have them work. And hopefully by the end of this series I get to appreciate how these levels truly click once I'm able to put my feelings in writing.

The first post will be about Paris from Hitman 2016, so I hope you all look forward to it!