"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)
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)