Hitman 2 for GameCube
Fun, challenging, and well designed from top to bottom. A class act.
Tags: Hitman 2 Categories: Game Cube Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Harold Foundary on Aug 22nd, 2003
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Hitman 2 (title page) | |||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
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Well, it’s about time the GameCube got some decent games that weren’t made by Nintendo. Hitman 2 is a solid title that will add a great deal of playtime to your cube. The basics of the game– garotting, sneaking, and disguising yourself– are made all the more enjoyable by the many options they create for beating a mission.
This game is not easy. But that’s a good thing. To make up for the obvious short comings of modern gaming’s ability to create realistic worlds, Hitman opts to make its world just about as difficult to navigate and succeed in as the real world would be.
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The maps are laid out like gaming levels, rather than real world locations, but this does not detract from the gameplay in any way. If fact, it allowed the designers to make their missions that much more versatile.
In the first mission, alone, you can choose between all manner of tactics and strategies for sneaking into the house of a mafia don: you can chloroform the mailman, steal his clothes, hide your guns and walk through the front gate. Of course, when the mailman wakes up, he’ll go running to the guards and tell them what happened. And if you didn’t hide your guns in the bushes, those same guards would discover you’re weapons as they frisked you going in. But wait! There’s more! You can shoot the guy guarding the side door and take his clothes, thusly turning yourself into a guard and allowing yourself free roaming of the estate grounds. Once inside, you can either sneak into the Don’s office as one of his guards, or crawl along the window ledge from another room and quietly throttle the don with your piano wire.
Oh, and on Normal difficulty, you can always run through every level with your guns ablazing.
There is a sparse world here – only a smattering of non-combat characters in any given level, and rooms tend to be decorated rather spartanly. While this doesn’t take away from gameplay, it does tend to pull you out of the fantasy world your mind will enter once you’ve played for a while.
There’s even a bit of Pokemon in here: when you finish a level, you get to keep whatever weapons you carry through the exit. Thus, you’ll find yourself trying to catch them all!
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And that fantasy is just about perfect. When #47 (that’s your hitman) creeps up on a guy, he really creeps! Get low and slow on them and they’ll never hear or see you coming. After you’ve dropped that guard, drag his body behind a tree and take his clothes. Other guards won’t notice you’re not really Ralph as long as you walk calmly amongst them: running attracts suspicion and can blow your cover.
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All around, this is an excellently executed game. It’s nice to see Eidos still has some tricks up its sleeves. If you run through this game properly, each mission should take you around an hour to complete. And that’s the mark of a realistic stealthy shooter.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
| Stealth, excellent degree of difficulty, cool arsenal. | 8.5 |
| What Doesn't | |
| Environments are a bit sparse. Controls are a bit shadey. | |
| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| A very good buy if you've only got a GameCube. | |
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Tags: Hitman 2
Posted by Harold Foundary on Aug 22nd, 2003 and is filed under Game Cube Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
