Review: HITMAN 3 Is Gorgeous Stealth Fun
Hitman 3 came out last week to conclude the World of Assassination trilogy from IO Interactive. You play as Agent 47 and kill a bunch of people in a stealth game. The game is available to play on Nintendo Switch (via cloud gaming), PC (via Epic Games Store), PS4 (including PSVR), PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. IO Interactive and Stadia were kind enough to supply me a code on Stadia and a code to our reviewer Daniel Black on PS4. I enjoyed the game more and will be sharing my thoughts, but I wanted Daniel to share his thoughts of how the game runs on a PS4 and on PSVR:
With new consoles and the ever growing power of PCs, I didn't expect Hitman 3 to run that well on the PlayStation 4. But I was pleasantly surprised by its performance. The graphics all looked great, loading times are pretty good and there are only a few minor bugs and hiccups here and there. It’ll clearly run better on a PC or PlayStation 5, but it still runs perfectly well on the PS4. The Hitman VR aspect functions fine, but it can get very finicky and isn't that intuitive. As much fun as it is to strangle somebody in VR, it felt clunky and somewhat disorienting. Don’t expect a great VR game, but it is something to try out and play around with once in a while. The PlayStation 4 version of Hitman 3 is a great way to experience the franchise as long as you're not banking on a masterful VR showcase.
The rest of the review will focus on my experience playing the game on Google Stadia. I will also disclose that I have been given a subscription to Stadia Pro, and so I do have access to Hitman and Hitman 2 and will very briefly touch on them here since Hitman 3 does provide upgraded versions if you own them. In short, the previous games look great. Hitman 3 is my first foray into the franchise, so I can’t really compare the old versions to the new ones, but I had no problems with them (except one small thing I’ll get to later). You can check out the video below for a graphics comparison of the first game.
Hitman 3 is absolutely gorgeous. The lighting is fantastic, the people look gorgeous, and even the hair looks pretty dang good. I can really get lost in the world as I play just by looking around. The reflections are also really good. This is just a beautiful game. The audio is also top-notch and I have no complaints. The foley team, the sound designer, the voice actors, they all deserve a round of applause for the work.
As I mentioned earlier, this is my first Hitman game, so I’m not really familiar with the story. That being said, the cinematics and narration do help get you up to speed more or less. Yes, you probably should play the other two games first, but you can put the surface level pieces together for the story if for some reason you can only get the third game. Honestly, if you can, just get all three and then play the first two through Hitman 3 for the improved graphics. All your gear and stuff will progress with you. The story is interesting and you can easily get sucked into it, but if you don’t care about story, it’s not hard to skip cinematics and just get to the gameplay.
I will warn you that there are not very many missions. There are only six. However, there is a lot of replay value in each mission, so I’m not deducting any points for this particular point.
I really like this game. The closest thing that I’d really ever gotten to a good stealth game before was the Assassin’s Creed series. However, I felt like it was always either too easy to mess up the stealth, or the game wouldn’t let you do the stealth approach on targets no matter how hard I tried. I started to play Hitman 3 though, and I finally saw what all the fuss was about with stealth games. They’re incredible when done right. Something that I wish someone would’ve explained to me is that a stealth game is really just a puzzle game. Each level is a different puzzle that you have to solve. You have to move pieces in certain ways to get to the target, and it’s a lot of fun. Also, while playing, I kept getting that adrenaline rush of, “Oh crap, I’m going to screw up!” which was surprisingly fun. I’m definitely going to be playing through the entire series now and replaying Hitman 3, especially with all of the replayability with different item loadouts, starting points, approaches to accomplishing the goal(s) of each mission, and finding all of the permanent shortcuts that change up what you can do.
Playing this game, I have only had two problems. First, it has you connect to the Hitman servers to play a single-player game. I just get frustrated when single-player games by default have you connect to servers. Second, after the guided tutorial, it kept disconnecting me from the Hitman servers and I’d have to retry my connection. It really wasn’t too big of an issue as I could’ve gone offline and it kept reconnecting when I told it to, but it’s just something that was consistent enough (I did the guided tutorial twice and it happened both times) that it was a little annoying to be taken out of the game for that 30 seconds.
The missions can feel very challenging, and I did start to get frustrated, but it was still fun to try a multitude of ways to do them. If you’re new to stealth games, you may want to start with the Casual difficulty unlike me.
If you like stealth games, what are you doing if you don’t already have Hitman 3? This game is gorgeous and so much fun. As an added bonus, since this game brought State Share to Stadia, I’ve gone ahead and decided to create a State in the first Hitman game for you to try out. I don’t think it’ll be particularly challenging, but it should be fun. Have you played Hitman 3 yet?
