This has a weird place in my gaming history. I did not have enough money to own several consoles, so this title was not in my possession.
I had a good friend though and he had them all. So many gaming titles have been played at his house whenever he had time for me and he was not playing himself. Because even though he had several consoles, he only had 1 TV.

I started this game up so many times but never got far because holy moly a fear it struck in me. I had never tried that before. The mix of this slow paced game, with enticing puzzles intreagued me immensely. But the constraints of the stationary camera, the small inventory and then these freaky zombies trying to kill me, just set off bursts of adrenalin in my body. Fight or flight. I do not flee but my fine motor skills are hugely impacted negatively.

I played many times, but no matter what, getting past my first Hunter would only be successful many years later on a PC.

Many games has done the same for me. Silent Hill, Alone in the Dark, Half-Life etc.
But this game just had the right mix for me to back to it time and again, and it introduced a weird ambivalent love for horror, that spread to movies also.

This is the first horror game that I completed. And I have played many horror games. I am just freakeshly inept at executing these games 😂 but I still love the sensation.
I do not do well with fast-paced horror games especially if you have to flee to survive as my brain can't seem to compute that. I need to kill and survive, not flee and hide.

Since completing this I also forced myself through Silent Hill 2, RE2remake because that sensation of fear and adrenalin is something else.

*Played as part of the Master Chief Collection

I actually played this game before on my cousin's 360 one night during a sleepover. I didn't really like it and thought the story was interesting but didn't get the hype for Halo as a franchise off this one experience.

Coming back to it now, fresh off the back of the rest of the MCC, and particularly Reach, I don't think my thoughts have changed much, to be honest. The story is interesting, particularly Cortana's rampancy (also they made her hella sexy for some reason? Like during the 4 year time gap in the story she just developed a gyatt?) and you can see that 343 is setting up a new storyline for the franchise, which is the most interesting part of the game for someone who is newly invested in the Halo lore like I am. The downside is that everything else in the game is just kinda mid.
The new enemy designs (and redesigns of the old enemies) are just lacking and for the redesigns, downright ugly. The gunplay doesn't feel as good or as visceral as it used to. Headshotting enemies in the previous games (or popping a grunt's little backpack thing) used to be so much fun, but now it all feels kinda limp. I can't even explain it properly, it's like a mixture of the guns not having enough oomph, and the enemy's dying animations being lacklustre.
Even the introduction of a dedicated sprint doesn't do enough to make the game feel fun to play. The level design is also noticeably worse, especially in the back half of the game.

It's a very mixed-bag experience overall, but I am tentatively interested in checking out where this story goes from here.
I'm kinda torn if I should wait around for an announcement of 5 coming to PC, or just check out Infinite? Would appreciate some suggestions from fans of the franchise.

I just rate it as a 7 due to the story, cause the gameplay sucks.

The ambience for a 2007 game is fantastic, the songs are ok and the story cativated me the most, BUT

It's ubisoft. They have the money, they have qualified people, but they always make a mediocre gameplay. First game of the saga is basically: go there and "investigate" (what it means you have to do the same missions 9 times to discover where your targets are).

I don't remember much stuff about the other ones, but in AC1 the guards literally wanna kill me for any reason. "Oh, you gave me a little bump while you were walking, I'm gonna call 15 guards to gang bang you." The combat is pretty much the same and kinda boring. If you wanna run away, good luck trying. If you're doing parkour, they'll throw ROCKS at you and you'll fall. When you're almost in the hiding spot, they'll find you <3

All I said + tons of bugs and freezings from a 2007 GAME IN A PC THAT RUNS GTA V

Just buy it if you wanna play all of them

I really, really did not enjoy this game.

As someone who's currently playing the entire series from the beginning, I already knew that this game is considered to be the black sheep of the family. And hey, I love me some linear 3rd person action games. How bad could it really be? But oh man, every second of this game was just pain for me. I rushed through this game because I just couldn't bear it, and also because I knew that there was a bright light at the end of the tunnel, HITMAN 2016.

The story is utter crapola. Like, so so so so bad. The Hitman games have always been light on the story. Sure, maybe a cutscene here or there, but they always happened between the missions. The narrative of the series has also always had a certain element of mystery. We didn't really know much about 47's employer. We didn't really know or care about who we had to kill. 47 is simply a man who gets paid to kill people. But this story injects so many unlikeable characters and godawful dialogue. The general plot is extremely generic. The game takes itself too seriously, and genuinely made me cringe during cutscenes. The gross, over saturated colour palette of the cutscenes makes me feel like I'm watching a Michael Bay film from 2007 or something. And don't even get me started on how they made 47 into a plot device that conveniently loses for some bad guy exposition. 47 is supposed to be almost superhuman, and no one knows what he looks like because he's so dang good at his job. But throughout the game we see posters with his face on them, FROM PAST GAMES! Were they trying to make him canonically inept at his job? This whole story just shouldn't be canon, and quite frankly, I don't even know if it is.

The classic large open-ended levels are completely scrapped. The devs were clearly trying to push Hitman into the mainstream by simulating stuff like Max Payne, and so that comes with really linear level design. Sure, there are a few levels where you are given a target and various opportunities to kill them, but the map is usually tiny and you can explore everything in like 20 minutes. The majority of the game consists of sneaking past guards in linear sections, and getting spotted, which will happen to you quite a lot, would result in reloading to your last checkpoint. Checkpoints suck. Every time you reload, if you have targets, they reset their loop completely. Every time you reload, you have to wait a certain amount of time for guards to move so you can sneak right past, all the while listening to the same dialogue over and over again. The game sometimes devolves into a waiting game, simply because you don't have the ability to manually save.

As for the gameplay itself, well, it's not bad. Animations are smooth, disguises are cool, and throwing stuff as distractions, the cover system and being able to subdue people with your hands are neat new mechanics. The instinct system is pretty annoying with everyone being able to see through your disguise if they have the same one on, but it's easy to understand and works to some extent. The infamous 'see through walls' feature was clearly popular enough to become a regular feature in the newer games. Shooting feels great, with the addition of an ability that allows you to tag your enemies for a chain kill. There is a wide variety of really cool weapons. But if you are a sensible person, you will at least try to play this game stealthily, which pretty much defeats the purpose of this cool stuff. And once you have unlocked that weapon, disguise, or DLC that you really wanna try out, the small and linear levels don't allow for that much fun. Although there aren't many, there are some parts that basically force you to go in guns blazing, which is really annoying. There's also plenty of challenges to do, but once again, the small and mostly linear levels make these rather tedious.

One last thing, the game's Contracts mode, which included community-created contracts with different targets and opportunities, and from what I've heard was really great, is totally defunct now. Basically, one half of the game isn't even functional anymore.

In summary, there is absolutely no reason for you to get this game other than if you just wanna play the whole series, or if you don't care about the Hitman series and you just want a one-time linear experience. I'm really happy that the devs acknowledge how much of a mistake this game was, and I couldn't be more happy about the way the Hitman franchise has risen out of its grave to produce one of the best stealth games of all time with HITMAN 2016.