The genesis of what would be the wide-spanning Hitman franchise, Codename 47 walked so its sequels could run. Being a bit on the older side, the game is a bit irregular in how it plays 23 years later. Most older games are clunky in movement, organization, or precise aiming. Hitman is meritoriously free of these issues. Where it does stumble is in its enemy AI, damage numbers, and its excruciating propensity to get you stuck on random geometry like foliage. The enemies must be trained by John Wick himself with how pinpoint accurate they often are, further helped by a very small player health pool that will have you watch Agent 47 collapse dramatically 4-5 times a mission on the low end. And for some reason, enemy aggro frequently persists even after retries, making restarts a necessity at times. Though sometimes even that’s not required, as some enemies will just shoot you on sight through no provocation. It makes for a tedious time when evading is regularly incentivized over openly disguising yourself or having fun with the missions.

Least counterable of all and most aggravating personally, Agent 47 loves nothing more than to find himself stuck on an errant polygon, doomed to strand me forever as I frantically move my mouse to free my foolish compatriot. The free-camera “camera mode” worked half the time to unstuck me, but a sizable portion of runs were completely ruined by this problem. Predictably, that would be the final nail in the coffin for me. After getting stuck for the umpteenth time I decided to cut my losses and quit the game after the jungle mission. Codename 47 is inextricably a part of gaming history, but there’s really no reason to play it over its subsequent titles.

Highly disappointed in my first ever visit to the Hitman series, though I am aware future titles are much better.

Terrible controls though they can be remapped, horrible camera, constant bugs and crashing, though the crashing may be due to Windows 10 compatibility.

Biggest issue with this game though is the very annoying trial and error style of game play, which wouldn't be such an issue if this game wasn't secretly linear.

I mean this game is secretly linear because they give you these open levels where it seems like a sandbox and you can do whatever you want, yet every mission is made with a highly specific method of performing the mission in mind. If you stray off this course, you shall suffer. This leads to the type of game that makes you want to have a walk through with you at all times, and I personally hate games like that.

The music and aesthetics are pretty banging though, and the idea is still very novel and cool. I just wish everything, and I mean everything, was done better.

Wow, I can't believe one of my favorite trilogies, World of Assassination was created from this mess of a game. I honestly don't know where to begin with how truly disappointing Hitman: Codename 47 is. Almost everything about this game is just bad.

Right from the start the game throws you into the tutorial without really being helpful, and it felt like they never really fully explained the fundamentals of the gameplay. They never even walked me through on how to drag the bodies. I had to look up the directions on how to do it because Eidos was too lazy to include it into their tutorial. Not to mention I kept failing because the game never told me to switch disguises during the "training" mission.

The actual gameplay is just pure frustration because the game gives off the impression that it's stealth game when it is not. It's an action game, but an extremely unfair one. Even on easy mode and with a Kevlar suit, enemies' bullets eat through your health quickly and there's no healing items at all in this game. Trying to switch to a weapon during combat is a nightmare because chances are you're going to die before you even get a chance to defend yourself, and there is no melee combat, so you have to use a weapon of some type like a sword or gun.

It also seems like every enemy in the game is hyper aware of everything you do. For example, if you're right behind enemy and you pull out a knife to take him down silently, he automatically hears you and alerts the guards in the area which pretty much guarantees you're dead. You can't pull out your fiber wire around enemies because if you do than you're dead, but somehow you can get past a metal detector with it though. Nothing in this game except for switching out disguises, has stealth elements.

There was one level, after going through a series of objectives you get a vial of poison to take out your target. I put on my disguise, poisoned the food and brought it out for them to eat. I was like "Finally, I get to do something that feels like how Hitman should!". Sadly, instead of just killing my target and completing my mission, the game decides that it's the perfect time to turn what would have been a really cool moment into a stupid cheesy action scene and threw a bunch of enemies at me which forced me into this chaotic shoot off.

I suppose now would be a great time to mention that if you die in this game, and you almost certainly will, you'll have to restart the entire level all over again. No joke. This game only saves in between missions and has no manual saves whatsoever. Even more annoying, not all the cut scenes can be skipped, so be prepared to hear some of the same dialogue over and over again. I'd like to tell you that because you get checkpoints on easy and normal that it might make it more fun to play and lessen some of the frustration, but it honestly makes it far worse. If you happened to die on either easy or normal than the game spawns you at an awkward checkpoint and all the enemies that killed you will still be alerted and will attack on sight making the checkpoint system worthless.

Usually, this the part where I'm like "Well, the game kind of blows, but the art style is cool though". This one of the few times where I can't say that. This game's art style is ugly and off putting like the loading screens or cutscenes. Granted some of the assets weren't that bad like some of the trees and such, but a lot of the assets were just repetitive to the point all it did was make the levels look bland and boring afterwhile. Then again, the almost all of levels themselves are unnecessarily large and half the time were just empty, like Columbia which is one of the worst levels in this game. I hated that mission, a mixture between Tomb Raider and Scar Face. Not a whole lot of originality in that level.

As for the story, there's not really much there. You find out a little about the targets you're supposed to assassinate and 47's backstory, but other than that the game's plot is about as deep as a puddle. There is no environmental storytelling that helps elevate this either and personally I found it to be boring.

Overall:

While I'm glad I had the opportunity to play this game, I can't honestly say it was a pleasant experience. Hitman: Codename 47 has got to be one of the worst games I have ever played, and I had to use cheats about three levels in to finish the game and I still didn't enjoy it. If you have to use cheats to finish a game and yet it still feels miserable to play than I think there's a major problem. I highly doubt that I'm going to play this again.

Pro:
+ some of the songs on the soundtrack are good
+ cheats

Cons:
-boring story
-awful combat
-poor level design
-no manual saves
-various glitches and bugs
-awkward controls
-ugly art style

A bunch of ambitious ideas and concepts that the developers simply didn't quite have the chops to bring to fruition. There is a seed here of what this franchise would become down the line, but it's buried under a veritable mountain of broken systems and janky gameplay.

So what's worthy of admiration here? Well, one can see that the developers had some cool notions regarding level design - there is an attempt (albeit unsuccessful) to give the levels a degree of openness and density that would eventually become a hallmark of the series. And the fundamental idea of leaving the player character to explore the level and devise their own way to achieve the objective is present in a few of the scenarios (the game would've been much better off had the developers fully committed to this ideal; the mandatory combat encounters here are both contrary to the spirit of the series and, not coincidentally, incredibly awful).

Alas, the strong foundational ideas sadly do not define the majority of the game's playtime. My personal play experience, for instance, was largely defined by a sense of bewilderment. A big part of this derives from the game's completely busted AI. The number of instances in which guards attacked 47 for seemingly no reason or ignored him as he strolled out of a room full of corpses was beyond counting. The failed attempt to develop dense levels also plays a role - these levels are labyrinthine, alright, but they are also hollow and redundant. Empty rooms, hallways leading to nowhere, and other forms of insanely inefficient architectural design are the primary features of the indoor spaces. Moving the action outdoors presents the opposite problem - there are hardly any noticeable visual indicators to follow, so it just feels like a giant field with the same model of a tropical tree repeatedly rendered ad nauseam. These design flaws make the sort of tense yet deliberative social stealth that Hitman thrives on effectively impossible to sustain.

As someone who is not above indulging in the sort of B-movie humor and Eurojank that this game trades in, I was able to push through this despite being frequently being lost and unsure of what to do next. If those features don't hold some degree of charm for you, then this will likely end up being a bit of joyless death march. Certainly, no one could be blamed for skipping to the more worthwhile sequels.

Hitman: Codename 47 é mais um game que entra facilmente na lista de jogos que envelheceram muito mal e que hoje em dia realmente não valem tanto o seu estresse e esforço diário para passar as demais fases que é garantido de dor de cabeça para os corajosos de plantão, em que, apesar desse game contar uma história legal que é sim, até que relevante para toda a franquia Hitman por explorar um pouco da origem do Agente 47 (de quem o criou e de toda a organização por trás disso), não é bem uma trama que por si só faça uma grande diferença nos próximos jogos da franquia e que se desenvolve por completo, já que, a história desse jogo foi resumida com o final desse bem no início do Hitman: Contracts que com isso dá para deixar de lado toda essa terrível experiência que você iria ter com esse Hitman: Codename 47.

São tantos problemas que chega até a ser difícil citar todos aqui, mas para começar não posso deixar de esquecer da sua dificuldade que mesmo para uma época ao qual os jogos normalmente eram difíceis esse aqui espanta de tão grotesco em determinadas fases, onde certamente você terá que rezar o pai nosso e ainda implorar para que você sequer consiga a luz para encontrar o objetivo da missão, em que se você ao menos falhar e for descoberto, nem que tenha chegado bem perto do final, já era, você terá que começar tudo de novo. (vale destaque nas fases mais difíceis do jogo que são as demais fases na Colômbia, a que é em um píer onde você tem que entrar em um navio e principalmente a última fase do jogo que não tenho nem comentários para aqui-lo), fora isso, temos uma mecânica que hoje em dia é insustentável por ser totalmente travada e tenebrosa até para os mais tolerantes nesse aspecto em que seus controles são confusos fazendo com que certamente você tenha que configurá-los manualmente nas opções do jogo e para aqueles que desejam jogar em 1080p terão que baixar um Patch que é disponibilizado na internet pelos próprios fãs do game que fará com que o Hud do mesmo fique minúsculo e que você sinta que tá jogando um simulador de miopia, fora que esse é um daqueles jogos que devido a sua época demora bastante para mudar o mapa de verdade mudando apenas alguns prédios e modelos, em que tudo carrega literalmente na sua frente (Draw Distance curto), mais ou menos semelhante ao que era nos famosos jogos de Playstation 1 onde quanto mais você andava mais coisas apareciam dado o hardware obsoleto da época, que convenhamos apesar disso não atrapalhar muito na jogatina incomoda demais o jogador para sequer saber onde é para ir ou o que pode ter á sua frente no game e como a ideia do jogo não favorece esse fator, fica realmente bem irritante.

Por esses motivos, eu certamente não recomendaria nem para o meu maior inimigo jogar esse jogo, mas se esses motivos não lhe convenceram de que é melhor deixar de lado essa experiência na minha visão frustrante, então realmente eu lhe desejo uma boa sorte…

"A Hilariously Broken Stealth Game"

As the first entry to the franchise, "Hitman: Codename 47" is really rough around the edges. It's not a particularly good-looking game, with its poor antialiasing and reduced color palette making the game look even more aged than it already is. Its default control scheme is terrible, and adjustment is an absolute necessity in order to properly interact with the game. The dialogue is painstakingly bad and has some blatant racial stereotyping at many points. However, the title starts to form the groundwork for the creative "Hitman" series, despite being unable to properly implement many of its mechanics in this first mess of an entry…

Upon booting up the game, many settings and tweaks to game files need to be made in order to actually get it properly working. Once that mess is figured out, the opening tutorial starts… and man was this thing awful. The default controls were incoherent (resulting in even more tweaking of settings), and the introductory mission was just so broken and misguided. Voice lines would interrupt each other, objectives would fail to trigger properly, and there was no real, well, TUTORIAL. I had to pull up the control schemes multiple times to even get a gauge of how to make Agent 47 function, and by the time the first few levels were presented I was already at a disadvantage due to the sloppy introduction to the game.

The next few missions proceed to just throw you into procedurally larger areas and give you the objective of assassinating a target and occasionally completing side objectives. The first sniper mission is terrible and really doesn’t explain much of the mechanics. The next mission is a bit more interesting in that you have to take out multiple targets, but the real meat of the experience doesn’t happen until the third mission. This is where the first act starts to ramp up, and in doing so the gameplay starts to become more layered than I had originally believed it to be…

The third mission definitely gives some more interesting mechanics to think about. Hiding bodies was already introduced, but disguises and enemy pathing are very important here. The goal is to frame an assassination of the police chief on one of two gangs you are tasked with starting a war between, which is a really cool idea! However, it’s a bit janky though - you basically have to follow a very specific path to victory here, and it feels less like a feeling that there is creativity on the player’s part and more like a simple act of solving a puzzle. Much different from later games, but it is the first time in the game where a challenge is presented.

The fourth mission is where the game really starts to show how the “Hitman” franchise started to find its own identity, but it's also the mission which made me quit the game. You’re thrown into a much larger and more sprawling map than prior missions, but are given very little direction to work off of. There’s a lot of blind exploration, trial-and-error, and luck involved with these tasks, and while it builds up a really cool mission where you must interact with different characters and objectives, it feels super janky as you play more and more of it. The confusing map doesn’t help either, and it feels more like a really well-done experimental demo than a finished level for a game.

By this time a player might notice the poor presentation of the game. The graphical quality is just not very good, and both environments and character models look lesser in quality than one might expect. There’s a lack of smoothing on edges around the world, causing a jaggy look to lots of assets. This game’s budget wasn’t the highest, so there were likely some limitations on what could be accomplished in the visuals department when looking at the relatively unique style of game this one tried to become. The voice acting is also really bad. At times it appears to be really offensively racist, especially for Asian characters. I couldn’t help but laugh at the mixture of bad voice work and cringey dialogue, and it made the experience memorably bad. Not a good look overall, though it might be funny to you if you choose to “experience” it.

While the creativity of the series was starting to show itself, it didn’t mean that the game wasn’t unfun or extremely punishing in difficulty. Stealth is super broken here, and enemies are able to see and hear just about anything. There are no clean angles, and you have to start abusing the AI and weird “stealth mode” in order to clear some guards from certain areas. Then, there are strangely placed objectives (that are randomized each time for some reason!) as well as a weird escort mission with a…well…escort. It’s just a really lame cycle that repeats itself each time you fail, and you see the strings of the game’s AI being pulled left and right. I’m not saying the game has to be “easy” to be a fun stealth game, but the game offers creative kills and then doesn’t allow them to go unnoticed. Really disappointing, and I quit without completing this mission.

Overall, “Hitman: Codename 47” was a very flawed start to the franchise. It had some awful presentation, poor controls, and an unrefined gameplay loop. It contains a bit of the heart and soul of the franchise and where its gameplay would end up going in future installments, but here it was too sloppy to continue playing through. I would Not Recommend trying this one out, especially since a future sequel includes some missions from the first game.

Final Verdict: 3/10 (Poor)

La primera entrega del agente 47 deja ver sus errores rapidamente, tiene una I.A inconsistente la mayoría de los casos, en donde los enemigos te pueden detectar a 20 metros con disfraz y todo, y a veces pasas al lado de ellos como si nada con ropa casual y no te sacan el arma. Los niveles despues del 3ro pueden volverse muy cripticos y enredados, teniendo que realizar acciones en un orden MUY ESPECIFICO para tener exito. Y en general corta el rollo muy rapido, y ese final de mierda tan poco satisfactorio.
Sus secuelas corrigieron todos los problemas, saltencelo y jueguen el contracs mejor.

Man, I love Hitman. I've always been a fan of the Hitman series since I first played them who the hell knows when as a teenager when I first picked up Blood Money. The experience was clunky, a bit confusing, and obtuse as hell in many ways, but goddamn was that some of the most fun I ever had. Years went by and until I really grew up I didn't visit the series in full but now that I have, lemmie tell you, this first one is skung as shit. Hitman Codename 47 is a jank ass experience that often feels incredibly stilted, obtuse, and downright wild in so many aspects of its core gameplay design. Yet all the same, much like Blood Money and every title after it, the world it sets up and the sandbox it puts you in are amazing right from the get go. So many sets in it are actually incredibly impressive for the time and even today look pretty good. The amount of ways to kill people is not nearly as diverse as later titles sure, but the experience is also a fundamental building block the series would go on to use. The story is, well, it exists and is fine but also it's goofy as absolute shit, which I like, so I'm a bit biased here. Overall I still highly recommend smoking it today, there's a lot of heart on display here.

Very promising but flawed start to a great series. You can see the developers experimenting here, not every level encourages stealth and sometimes it basically requires glitching the game to avoid killing a bunch of people. It's quite fun figuring out the ideal path, though. Highlight missions are "Lee Hong Assassination" and "Traditions of the Trade", the latter of which is set in a hotel and offers several ways to approach the target. Hitman games, I feel, operate best in public spaces where you can walk around in a suit and consider your way forward. These early installments still force you to navigate heavily guarded military locations, which are inevitably inferior experiences. Still, there's only 13 missions and the game does not overstay its welcome.

Results:
- finished twice on Hard difficulty

Playing the very first game in a series like Hitman feels like marking the rings in a tree. This game plays a bit clunky, with guard detection states not feeling consistent and stealth tools feeling lacking, but it's a total charm to play. It feels like a spitball of an idea of what Hitman should be.

You really are encouraged to meet the game at its terms, with levels playing out more puzzle-like than later entries. You aren't quite encouraged to roam around looking for the best disguise, rather you follow the steps and procedures of a hitman in the way the game sees most efficient. What those steps are is up to you to figure out.

It's an interesting approach to level design that's satisfying to figure out, but one that left me saying "damn okay what DO you want me to do" more than once. This combined with the bizarre "continue" system that spawns you back at a checkpoint with the exact same alert state you died with makes for a frequently frustrating experience.

It's worth a shot if you're stubborn enough to play through it!

When this game is good, it's extremely good. Huge open levels with dynamic actors and events playing out in real time. Stealthy gameplay revolving around both sneaking and hiding in plain site through disguises. A few short and intense gunfights. But the lack of any quicksave or checkpoint system really makes this frustrating.

Each level involves a lot of trial and error, and the game forces you to restart from the beginning every time. There are a limited number of continues after you die, but the guard alert status is not reset, so you're basically screwed.

Codename 47 was damn impressive when it was released, especially for a first title from a new studio, sporting the first use of advanced (for the time) ragdoll and cloth physics for instance. Especially for a first release from the newly formed IO Interactive.

Nowadays with 8 mainline Hitman titles Codename 47 didn't age well at all, it feels like a relic, an experimental prototype of what was to come. From that angle it's incredibly interesting, you can easily see all the foundations that would make Hitman truly unique, but in its very infancy, completely unrefined.

It's a nice trip down memory lane for diehard fans of the series but a hard pass for anyone unprepared for the jank it has to offer.