Graphics and Performance

An assassin with an eye for beauty

Poking around the screenshots you may find that Hitman 2 isn’t quite as up to date on a visual level as UT2k3 or the early screens we’ve seen of Doom 3. What the Hitman 2 screens won’t reveal is how incredibly fluid the game’s visuals actually are. Each of the models in Hitman 2 has literally thousands of frames of animation. As guards patrol they saunter about, stop for pee breaks, smoke breaks, stop and adjust their requisite bad guy sunglasses. Moreover, the models in Hitman 2 benefit from “ragdoll” physics, depending on the pose a fellow is in when you sneak up behind him and strangle him he’ll react in different ways, occasionally reaching up to stop you from choking him, grasping his neck. And don’t forget high caliber weaponry, hit a man with a sniper rifle and send him flying, empty your twin ballers into a random goon and watch as his body recoils from each shot.

Make it quick

So callous

Don't lean too forward

The levels in Hitman are still breath taking, the attention to detail is fantastic and benefits well from a number of technological advancements, the most notable of which is bump mapping support. The locales for the game’s 20 levels are well chosen, ranging from snowy Japanese castles, Sicilian monasteries, Afghani villages, Russian capitals and the basement of the two largest skyscrapers in the world. These locales would be squat without the aforementioned attention to detail. The Japanese setting takes place in dead winter, at an ancient Japanese castle. The snow swirls off of steeple towers at slants with the wind, as you dodge from tree to tree watching for the movements of guards. The graphics in Hitman 2 are not just beautiful, but immersive, as there’s commonly a hundred little details moving at once, and you have to carefully pick out amongst them which is the threat.

Caveat Emptor

Somewhere along the line with all this graphical excellence, someone pushed a few too many buttons. Hitman 2 on the PC is about as stable as a manic depressive ex-girlfriend. Our experience was the first level played through fine, no slowdowns, no crashes, we moved on to the next level and lost our sound randomly, at first just echoes like you were playing a game of phone with tin cans, then lost it all. Then we began to experience crashing every 30 minutes - everything ranging from desktop crashes, to BSODs and total lockups. We tried updating all our various drivers, and it stopped, for about an hour, then caught up to us two levels later where the crashing resumed, then we would randomly lose sound or it would become distorted and echoed. Then it would stop, we tried swapping from D3D to OpenGL and back, disabling EAX, lowering sound channels, sound acceleration and more. We seemed to have reduced the crashing a little bit, but after testing it on four separate systems (On two separate OSes, three chipsets, four videocards and more.) the game still maintains at least a minor (every couple hours) level of crash frequency on three of those machines. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to be the only folks with these issues, as it seems to be common in hundreds of others, with a requisite few who are experiencing nothing. If you do pick up Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, a lot of folks are curing their remedies by turning their sound acceleration down in their DX dialogue, this, however, did not work for us.

Nice shade of red

In darkness he strikes

If I own another dog, it'll be a Deagle

If it were just occasional crash issues we might be able to look over it, but the bugs continue in the actual gameplay as well. For example, one level while attempting to enter into the snowy Japanese castle 47 finds himself going through an underground tunnel network populated by thugs bearing low-light goggles patrolling the roads. Trucks periodically pass through the area, and anyone moving through the area, even other guards are stopped and identified. Now, these trucks are an interesting feature and 47 can climb into the back of them and travel around. However, the guards aren’t so bright, and will meander around in the road and get run over by the trucks occasionally, which not only sets off alarms and alerts other guards to your presence (despite you not being in the truck much less being involved in the killing.) The unnecessary killing then affects your rating on that level, and if you’re an assassin perfectionist you’ll find yourself reloading many a time.

To continue with those bugs, the same guards who check ID are ludicrously stupid about it, they simply saunter over, and say “Show me some ID!” in Japanese. They then go through an animation that they are looking at a wallet and examining it. However, they don’t move and don’t react to movement, and our hero can walk around behind them and knife the elite guards in the back while they are examining his ID, or simply walk away if that’s his inclination and they’ll have no idea where he went. These are the same guards that spot you in absolute darkness while you’re sneaking behind a pillar 50 feet away.

Keep in mind this is but one level, numerous other bugs crop up over the course of 47’s world jaunting experience.