Anyone trying out Silent Assassin after having been introduced to the Hitman series with the World of Assassination games will find themselves running smackdab into a double-thick early '00s sim/old-school stealth game brick wall. Silent Assassin plays like a spy novel reads: methodically, and with an obsessive attitude towards procedure. A huge amount of Silent Assassin's gameplay involves tensely walking someplace, while NPCs eye you suspiciously from across the room.

The game's sandbox levels are small, but they're also intense, and many of them have an immediately appreciable high concept: a Yakuza office with a private chef serving fugu fish, a meeting of Russian diplomats in perfect view of a sniper's nest, a hacker operating in the dark of a server farm in the basement of a major corporation's headquarters, etc. If Silent Assassin's mission parameters are straightforward, the path to their completion is not, and the limitations of the technology used often render creative approaches incoherent, as enemy guards have an instantaneous, hivemind-like awareness of what every other guard is thinking and hearing.

Silent Assassin is also a product of a post-9/11 world; that is to say, it has a Call of Duty-esque politics, a preferencing of American ideological positions that naturally lead to it backfilling some of its minor antagonists as crude ethnic stereotypes, particularly during the Russia and Afghanistan levels. While later Hitman games center their imaginary of 47's targets almost exclusively around class warfare, Silent Assassin primarily tasks 47 with defending the sanctity of the US security state. This is the closest to Tom Clancy Hitman ever gets.

Silent Assassin is clunkier than the later games, but this is really the only Hitman game that's just straight up a hitman simulator. The literal nature of its design combined with its radically open-ended levels makes it feel a little obtuse, and its got some of the worst levels in the series in it (the Japan levels in particular are infamously bad), but the smaller, more realistic scale makes this game rewarding in a way that's distinct from the other Hitman games.

An incredible improvement over Codename 47. Levels are larger and you usually have more than one way to achieve your objective. 47 no longer has a health bar made of glass, and the ability to view a map of the levels with the real-time movements of NPCs made it much more convenient to plan your approach. The much-needed inclusion of saves is probably the biggest change from the first entry of this series.

Not taking Codename 47 into account, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin is a solid game on its own, with a pretty good story, satsifying stealth gameplay and a beautiful soundtrack by Jesper Kyd. Although it takes some tinkering to get the game running and looking well, and even though detection by enemies is pretty dang wonky (which could be easily remedied by the sneak-sprint exploit), I had a ton of fun with this one.

Después del desastre que fue la primera entrega de la saga, esta pulió muchísimo más de las ideas que el estudio tenía y se obtuvo una experiencia mucho más pulida en todos los aspectos (menos en lo gráfico quizá), una historia mucho más interesante y 47 se siente mucho mejor como personaje, en cuanto a historia quizá el final sea menos interesante que el de la anterior entrega pero en cuanto a jugabilidad es el momento perfecto para usar todos los recursos que el juego te da.
Por otro lado, la IA sigue con problemas, los gráficos envejecieron algo mal (incluso para esa fecha) y la jugabilidad varía, a veces se siente fluido y a veces terrible.

The very first Hitman game I saw gameplay of yet not the first one I've played.

A better improvement than the sequel, has interesting levels and 47 Makes a Decision is an amazing soundtrack.

Although, often plays like a coin toss when simply just walking through the guards. Sometimes your cover is blown and sometimes it isn't. For that reason alone the gameplay is exploited by RNG making your playthroughs non-consistent.

Yet still due to its nostalgic nature, I love this game even if it suffers from many issues.

Despite aging pretty rough and having some pretty questionable gameplay design decisions, H2 Silent Assassin is still a pretty sweet and short stealth game. Enjoyable most of the time when it sticks to the compact, multi-choice, multi-path sandboxes, and really frustrating when slogging through cover barren landmasses with enemies that sniff you out no matter the disguise (looking at you Japan and Afghanistan). You can really see this is where Io-I is starting to find their footing with where they want to take this franchise. Despite its faults, the best parts of this game are guaranteed to have you coming back to see every outcome.

It is refreshing when a sequel actually tries to improve itself over the original. More often than not, sequels fall into the trap of needing to outdo what came before; bigger spectacle, more outlandish set pieces, more characters, bigger guns, and so on and so forth; but with this need to look more fantastical, the nuance and intimacy of the original project is often lost. I always point to the Alien franchise as a great example of this; Aliens is a great action movie with a heartfelt mother-daughter story at its core, and fantastic special effects and tense action to back it up, but it in no way resembles the first movie's sense of dread. Alien is a movie about an small, intimate cast of unique characters being stalked by a lone alien on one small ship, the smaller budget and scope allow for a much more heightened focus on the smaller details like the characters, environments, and overall horror of it all. In contrast, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin not only offers the bigger spectacle, but also hones in and improves on what made the first game great.

Firstly, by far the biggest improvement from Codename 47 is the level design. CN47’s levels functioned more akin to a series of linear puzzles that had, at most, one or two ways of getting the objectives done, which were often tedious and cryptic. Silent Assassin improves on this by making most of its levels into sandboxes, taking direct inspiration from CN47’s best level, “Traditions of the Trade”. The levels are much bigger in scope and have a complex network of NPC pathfinding and environmental interactions, not exactly to the same scale as future games in the series from what I am aware, but still wholly more ambitious and interesting in comparison to its older sibling. I think my favorite example of this is in the first Malaysia mission “Basement Killing”; the mission takes place in this giant skyscraper with multiple floors and tons of civilians and security walking around, and your objective is to get into the lowest basement level to kill a computer guy. At first it seems neer impossible to get to the basement floor because the elevators are behind metal detectors and tons of guards, but if you do some digging around you will find several different ways to get in: you could take a guards uniform, throw you gear down the laundry chute, and then pick it up when you get down there; you could throw a smoke bomb down that same chute to cause the firefighters to go down to the basement, sneak into the fire department to grab a uniform, and then follow the other fighters so that no one will suspect you while triggering the the metal detectors; or you could just deliver the target a pizza and get him when you deliver it. The range of options presented in these levels is sometimes daunting. As well, I personally love the use of multiple floors and levels in the missions, the missions that take place in St. Petersberg has an incredible use of the sewers for strategically getting around the police patrolled streets, and then subsequently using them to make your escape.

There is still a notable amount of jank present, however, and I think this is a result of going for more nonlinear, open level design. The NPC’s are much more fidgety in this one; if the player looks at them too long, runs in an open area, or even just quickly checks the map, the AI will immediately be suspicious, sometimes even just opening fire on the spot. The game does go out of the way to tell you that running is suspicious, and will tell when certain areas are filled with particularly paranoid enemies, but even then they can be a little much and begin to try even the best players patience. On top of that, the bigger, more complex levels can leave the AI with broken pathfinding, or even broken set pieces; the Japan missions are probably the biggest culprit of this issue. The level “Hidden Valley” has a whole system where Agent 47 must stow away in the back of trucks in order to get past security check points, but in almost every single one of my attempts of this mission, the trucks pathfinding just completely broke, along with all the NPCs at the checkpoint, so I had to forgo my want to stealth and just John Wick my way through the rest of the level. The level's size can be mismanaged too; sometimes they are just too big for their own good, leaving to long sections of just running, only to have to restart because an enemy that you couldn’t see because of the draw distance spotted you. As well, these big open levels, open as in space not choice, are for some reason very cryptic, opting to not give the player any information till they reach a certain point in the mission. Which would be fine if they weren’t so big to the point that it takes nearly an hour of trial and error just to scope out where everything is, because the map isn’t really that helpful, especially on higher difficulties. Thankfully, there are manual mid mission saves that the player can utilize; a feature that was not available in the first game, but that still doesn’t excuse the poor design choices.

That being said though, there are a handful of things that I would like to mention that I believe supplement a lot of what the game does well. The overall presentation of the game has been astronomically improved from the first game; the voice acting is no longer stiff and actually feels like these characters have emotions, Agent 47 particular is elevated from just being a borderline blank slate to someone internally grappling with his place in the world as clone only meant for killing. The soundtrack, performed by the Budapest Symphony Orchestra, gives much more tension and emotion to the big plot points when they occur, like how in the mission “Shogun Showdown” the score gets more grandiose as you progress up the giant tower, coming to a crescendo when you sneak up to behind the titular shogun at the top of the complex. Finally, the UI has been drastically improved and made more user friendly. I played this on a GameCube controller and it still felt intuitive, and not at all clunky like the first game did.

While the AI could have been better, and the bigger levels more concise, Silent Assassin far and away exceeds the precedent set by its precursor, and lays the groundwork for the intricate design and precision that would be put into the series going forward.