Everything that made Hitman interesting was butchered. Disguises, the most iconic mechanic in the game, are useless here, since whoever wears the same suit as you will immediately know you’re an impostor, even if the suit carries a helmet that covers your entire head. All for the sake of a generic stealth gameplay based in hiding behind cover. In other games the MC has objects and skills that make sneaking in like that fun, but not here, so all that’s left is an experience where you hide behind a desk, wait for the enemy to move (sometimes can take up to a minute) and then move to the next desk, repeat process. Boring.

There are no contracts, most missions are moving from point A to B, which is probably the reason why the devs made disguises useless, since if they worked like in older titles, more than half the game would bee moving in a straight line with your disguise, but since they barely do anything, you’re forced to cover behind objects.

They removed the aesthetic inventory from Contracts and Blood Money to replace it with something more akin to Minecraft. The map was removed, alongside the ability to sneak your eye through locks to replace it with “instinct”, a wallhack mechanic. I find it funny how in the tutorial the game tries to justify this superpower by saying 47 has a developed instinct from training. Yeah so alpha, but this ability is also used to play stupid when you’re disguised, making you lower your head or scratch your scalp, and it RUNS OUT. Very cool superman xray 47 has got but appearently keeping his head down for more than a few seconds is too demanding.

When it comes to killing targets, most of the time there aren’t interesting ways to go about it (hardly ever there are, and you will likely miss them because you’re constantly battling against the scenarios so those damn white “ya busted!!!” marks don’t appear in your face), since the solution is usually at plain sight, and the games even tells you the routes the targets are going to take. “Hmmm the game is telling me this smoking guy is going to walk to that interactable gas station, I know, I’m gonna drop some gas and he will be set in fire, I’m a genius!”, it’s so lame that it’s not satisfactory. I have to say however that the game does NOT want you to explore at your pace, which means you won’t be able to learn patterns and stuff, so it makes sense that they are so handholding at executing targets.

Shooting mechanics were improved, obviously, they are what you would expect from a 2012 game, nothing extraordinary. Now you have mark&execute from Splinter Cell which is alright, I guess. Should note that first person mode was removed.

Saving system is one of the worst I’ve ever seen. You can no longer save whenever and wherever you want. Now you have to search for these symbols on the floor (adding to the idea that this is a linear game). What’s bizarre is that if you load from said symbol, everything you did prior to that in the same level will be reset. Enemies will resurrect and patrolling routes will start from the beginning as well as conversations. It’s similar to when you use Dark Soul’s bonfire. It’s stupid and it shouldn’t work like that.

When it comes to the story, being very linear and connected, the targets instead of being some criminals with status that you killed for a profit, are instead people that simply get in your way. The reasons to kill them tend to be pretty dumb. As a matter of fact the targets themselves are pretty dumb. They are insufferable idiots that behave like cartoons. Why did they put so many characters like that in a story you want us to take seriously? How can I take it seriously when there’s a masochistic sheriff, some cowboy that screams “yeehaa!”, some female assassins that dress like sexualized nuns (not as a disguise, it’s their literal uniform), etc? Not a single character is good. There is a part where you have to kill a scientist that hates pigs and has a lab where he seemingly just bombs (literally) pigs all day, and when he is presented he just bombs a bunch of poor pigs and then shouts an autistic laugh, it’s very cringe (and btw, to kill him you just gotta wait a few seconds for him to come down, you fibre wire him and hide him in a container, that’s his mission, it takes like 40 secs). Also to be completely honest I never cared for the girl, maybe because she has like 3 minutes of dialogue in the 15 hours that more or less take to beat the game, and nothing she ever says is interesting. The only thing about the story that kept me hooked was waiting for the moment when I would 1v1 mexican Great Kahli, after doing so, I just kept going for the sake of finishing the whole thing.

A lot of people say “it’s a good game, but not a good Hitman”, even taking it apart from the franchise and considering it its own thing, in what sense is it a good game? As a stealth game it’s boring and tedious. As a third person shooter it’s nothing noteworthy. As a storydriven game it's terrible since the story is pretty bad and so are the characters. So what makes it a good standalone game?