🕵️🔪🩸 Hitman 3 | PS5 | Review | 9/10 | "A Fitting End To The World of Assassination Trilogy" 🕵️🔪🩸 @Hitman @IOInteractive

The Hitman series is one that I've played and loved for about 15 years and the 2006 entry Hitman: Blood Money specifically is one of my favourite games of all time.

The series has always been about the creative kills; drop a piano on an unsuspecting criminal, poison the mob boss’ morning gin, dress up as a clown and beat a villain to death with a frying pan at his child's birthday party etc.

It’s a series about creativity, of how cunning or sadistic can you be? My strategy would always be - try to plan something clever. Fail. Panic, ending up with bursting into a room, shooting the target and then hiding in the nearest bin. 

The game is stunning. Running at a very steady 60 fps and at 4k resolution, the game looks gorgeous. The design really captures the locations, the decadence and opulence of a skyscraper in Dubai, the moody, rain-soaked moors of Dartmoor where your target is holed up in a creaky old mansion and - one of my favourite levels – China, which is plastered with neon signs, giving a purple hue that emanates through the dark rainy night, it's all gorgeous.

I've fawned over the visuals but the level designs themselves are the star of the show, I think the level designs in this game are definitely the best of this trilogy and are up there with Hitman: Blood Money, which is high praise indeed. Every level was a joy to explore, the layout, the atmosphere, the design – it was all perfect. I felt the places were lived-in worlds and I could see exactly what the developer was going for in each location. I would gladly replay all of the levels multiple times, again and again, to explore and seek more creative opportunities to assassinate the targets. 

The gameplay is more of the same, if you have played Hitman or Hitman 2, you’ll pretty much know the drill by now. Set up different parameters at the start of the mission (your starting location, any weapons you want, difficulty of the mission etc.) and then you’re off to assassinate the target. You will work through each level finding opportunities to lure out and dispatch your target, you’ll overhear conversations that will provide information that will guide you to specific areas or allow you to learn of possible ways of executing your target. Following this comes time to set up your plan, giving you the opportunity to carefully time everything, making sure it can't fail and then seeing the results - either stealthily sneaking away or running as fast as you can to the nearest exit, as it all went tits-up.

I would say that the game's biggest weakness is the gun play. The guns felt fine while dispatching one or two enemies but when multiple enemies were onscreen, I felt that some of my shots - especially with machine guns - didn’t register, the hit detection just felt slightly off. This wasn’t every time but I did notice it a couple of times. Most players probably won't end up having to gun down massive amounts of enemies as their plans probably worked out better than mine, but it is still a slight mark on the game.

What I have always loved about these games is that a lot of the criminals that agent 47 targets know that he is coming and know what he looks like and yet don’t seem to say to their henchmen, “if you see a man with a bar code tattooed on the back of his head… don’t stand there trying to place him, don’t think “is that John? The guy who sits quietly in the back of the pub?” … Just shoot him.” Having a bar code on the back of your head is such a distinguishing feature, the only way he could be less inconspicuous is if he went around just telling everyone his real name.