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.
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.
Secuela solida pero hay misiones con diseño de nivel muy cuestionable que me sobran
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.
While this game is better then Codename 47 it does still suffer from terrible controls. It does have a better story, animations and physics. Nothing groundbreaking but the improvements over 47 are good and take the series in a good direction.
TLDR: Guns go pew pew. Play the game.
TLDR: Guns go pew pew. Play the game.
Alright so first and most obvious things out of the ways, firstly, this game has some bugs and they can sometimes severely hurt the experience; secondly, this game is pretty hard even without the bugs, but in my personal opinion, once you learn how the game works, its a mostly enjoyable experience, although drastically different than what i'm used to with this franchise.
It added a rating system that the previous game lacked, and every future game used a variation of, you get a hideaway you return to after every major mission where any collected weapons appear (which even comes into play in the story, so collect all you can!) and we get the ability to knock out NPCs with an anesthetic, all making this play much more in line with the future games than what the first game did.
The biggest difference here though, is how the disguises work. simply wearing a disguise doesn't make you blend in with whatever you are disguised as, you need to act the part as well, and there are far, far more NPCs able to see through your disguises than what people are likely comfortable with. Take the first mission (second in the game but the first is a prologue), you need to kill some guy, take a key from his body, get in his basement, then escape. You have multiple ways of doing this, so naturally you would assume that wearing a bodyguard disguise would get you inside the building right? Well, yes, it would, but also the bodyguards and their bosses would recognize their own. You might be able to fool them from a distance, but if you get too close, if you run or if you do anything a bodyguard wouldn't normally be doing, it looks pretty suspicious and they might investigate, or worse, shoot on sight.
I feel like this does add some tedium to the missions, so i can understand why there are plenty of reviews and discussion about how you need a lot of patience with this game because simply running can get you shot to death, but to me, it simply added to the experience. Its not an easy game, but i don't think it was supposed to be. I think you were supposed to put yourself in 47's shoes and do what he would do in that instance. You can't see through walls, you don't have a minimap, you don't have regenerating health, you can't blend in somewhere you already stick out like a sore thumb (One of the missions even acknowledges this and states that the locals are jumpy at the sight of a foreigner holding a weapon due to events of the previous mission, so no disguise will help you hold a weapon in front of civilians in that stage!)
It's difficult, sometimes even stressful with how a bug can ruin a stage, but its very clear that this is a true stealth game through and through, and for anyone who's a fan of the other games and willing to put up with it, I highly recommend it.
It added a rating system that the previous game lacked, and every future game used a variation of, you get a hideaway you return to after every major mission where any collected weapons appear (which even comes into play in the story, so collect all you can!) and we get the ability to knock out NPCs with an anesthetic, all making this play much more in line with the future games than what the first game did.
The biggest difference here though, is how the disguises work. simply wearing a disguise doesn't make you blend in with whatever you are disguised as, you need to act the part as well, and there are far, far more NPCs able to see through your disguises than what people are likely comfortable with. Take the first mission (second in the game but the first is a prologue), you need to kill some guy, take a key from his body, get in his basement, then escape. You have multiple ways of doing this, so naturally you would assume that wearing a bodyguard disguise would get you inside the building right? Well, yes, it would, but also the bodyguards and their bosses would recognize their own. You might be able to fool them from a distance, but if you get too close, if you run or if you do anything a bodyguard wouldn't normally be doing, it looks pretty suspicious and they might investigate, or worse, shoot on sight.
I feel like this does add some tedium to the missions, so i can understand why there are plenty of reviews and discussion about how you need a lot of patience with this game because simply running can get you shot to death, but to me, it simply added to the experience. Its not an easy game, but i don't think it was supposed to be. I think you were supposed to put yourself in 47's shoes and do what he would do in that instance. You can't see through walls, you don't have a minimap, you don't have regenerating health, you can't blend in somewhere you already stick out like a sore thumb (One of the missions even acknowledges this and states that the locals are jumpy at the sight of a foreigner holding a weapon due to events of the previous mission, so no disguise will help you hold a weapon in front of civilians in that stage!)
It's difficult, sometimes even stressful with how a bug can ruin a stage, but its very clear that this is a true stealth game through and through, and for anyone who's a fan of the other games and willing to put up with it, I highly recommend it.
Decent Hitman but very rudimentary.