Hitman 2: Silent Assassin is a game I decided to replay because I had somewhat fond memories of it. But after replaying, I can say for certain that this is an absolute mess. IO Interactive clearly didn't have a solid grasp of the concept they were working with for this one. Sure, it's significantly better than Codename 47, but it's still among the weakest entries.

The AI is absolutely broken in this game, and the reasoning is a mixture of what I'd say is mistakes in the coding as well as just dumb decisions. Enemies going insane on you over something as simple as running is one of the dumbest things I've experienced in a stealth game ever. I understand Hitman is a strategy-based series and so it's much less about sneaking like most stealth games, but that isn't really an excuse. Especially when later games fixed the AI making it more fun to play around with.

Basically most of my negativity from this game comes from technical issues and the AI. As said, you can really tell IOI didn't have a solid grasp of the concept yet.

I respect this game first and foremost for not babying you -- it drops you (literally) into zombie shopping mall hell and says, "figure it out." All of the mechanics I uncovered in the hours I played were quite cool -- holding books to increase stats; levelling up with survivor rescues and photography; unlockable special moves; the way game-time is woven into progression; etc... And the actual meat of the gameplay -- the dispatching of countless undead through comically varied means, including lawnmowers and umbrellas and mannequins and whatever else you can find -- is awesome. You can tell it's fine-tuned to feel exceptionally hefty. Every swing of a baseball bat, or pole, or dismembered hand feels consequential and releases sweet, sweet brain chemicals.

Where the game falters is fairly obvious. The "boss battles" (for example, the second encounter with Carlito) are embarrasments of design. Much of the world traversal feels too slow for a game that relies so heavily on it. Many of the coolest weapons are made far too difficult to uncover in the early game -- a needless roping off of fun. Finally, as many, many others have mentioned, the entire thing is a rickety tower of escort missions with the stupidest AI imaginable.

But, you know, at the end of the day I think there's still plenty of fun to be had here. There's a ton of genuinely great ideas to mull over, there's that miniature-open-world gamefeel that I personally love, and then of course there's Frank West -- a surprisingly delightful protagonist.

Recommended in spite of its flaws.

It's rare that I love the first 15-20 hours of a game and then come to actively dislike it by the end, but unfortunately that’s what happened when I finished my 60 hour playthrough of Dragon's Dogma 2. What starts as a seemingly rich open world of interesting exploration and engaging friction turns into a repetitive chore of lifeless quests, copy and paste encounters, shallow combat, endless time wasting, and a terribly boring main story.

There is so much happening in this game and it's really hard to gather my thoughts into one cohesive review (that isn't 30 paragraphs long) so I'm gonna try my best to keep it as brief as possible.

In short, I loved that initial feeling of exploration, where the game prompts you to go out and hunt for secrets and new encounters. Looking at a precarious spot and saying "Hmm, I bet there's a token there" was fun, and led me to always attempt dangerous jumps or risky climbs. Seeking out all the nooks and crannies in the environment was initially a blast too, as the vast landscape is visually engaging, and has lots of layers (both figuratively and literally.) Watching your idiot pawns dive off cliffs unprompted, is both frustrating and funny, but usually worth it for the entertainment. And since fast travel is scarce, choosing your route wisely and having to find spots to make campfires felt like a nice way to extend your journeys, at the cost of using a camping resource of course. Only… that's not what happens. Because you have infinite camps, which means that camping is actively just more effective than returning to a town most of the time, since it's free and allows you to buff your character. Then you start to realize that while it's fun to collect those tokens, the rewards aren't great, and your final reward for collecting 220 (TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY) is total useless dog ass. Then while exploring you realize you're only ever gonna fight the same 3-5 enemy types over and over, with the occasional mini-boss (of which there are only about 3-5 types as well). And your rewards are mostly just crafting materials, with the rare item find usually being a worthless ring, or something I already had. And if you're like me, by this point you might say "Hmm this exploration is losing its luster, I should go check out more quests.” And when you do, you'll be treated to some extremely lame game design where you; walk to a character, talk to them, walk across the map to other characters, talk to them, walk back across the map to the first character, talk to them again, the end. Repeat endlessly for probably 2/3rds of all quests. And because there is so little gameplay interaction, it never feels like I'm actually involved either, I just feel like an errand boy. It also doesn’t help that many of these quests are not very interesting narratively, especially because you have extremely little input/decision making. And even when the quests are interesting, the game has no idea how to raise tension or bring something to a climax, usually stopping before any actual gameplay occurs, going into a short cutscene, and then the quest is over. There is a moment where the Captain gives you a speech about how “You need to wear a special getup to do this quest, but beware, this is a point of no return, so prepare yourself! We make for the ceremony!”, only for the game to enter a 30 second cutscene, have a small issue occur with your pawn, and then the Captain says “Guess we can’t attend now, sorry”, and then you get spat back out to run more errands.

To top it all off, the main story is incredibly uninteresting. It feeds you new details at a snail's pace, constantly repeating the same shit over and over, only for the endings of the game to disregard all of it without so much as a single cutscene to wrap it up. The entire game I was doing countless errands, running everywhere to gather enough “evidence” to weed out the evil plot and basically lead a coup to retake the throne for myself, and yet the game just ignores all of that shit. There is no coup, there is no comeuppance or explanation for the evil queen or the false ruler she had in place, no resolution for her son or anyone else in the palace, nothing. The game just simply shows you taking the throne and completely skips over all of what the game was building towards. It’s a pretty embarrassing attempt at storytelling.

Due to how bland the main story/quests are, it makes it clear that the focus was really on the world and the different systems at your disposal. But if the main focus is on me exploring, then why does every mission just retread lots of the same map space? If you send me on a mission across the map, I'm gonna explore that region until I reach my destination. But then when you send me back across that space MANY times later in the game… the fuck do you want me to do? The area is already explored, I'm not re-exploring it. So now it just feels like a bit of a chore to constantly travel back and forth across the map (even with fast travel). Which also makes me question what the fuck they were doing if they thought that 3-5 enemy types (3 during the day, 2 more at night) was gonna be enough for this bigass 40+ hour game. I'm not re-fighting the same goblins or lizards to get a few hundred XP when I can just run to the mission marker and get 50 times that. The main combat itself is also a bit too simple, as you can kinda just get in a rhythm of spamming the same shit over and over, but I’m not gonna lie and say it’s bad combat, just a bit too simple. Also doesn’t help that several of the classes are just significantly worse than others, meaning you really only have like 2 viable options that don’t suck ass.

Idk now i'm just rambling and this ended up being much longer than I wanted it to be, but this game is just all over the place. It was always gonna be a bit of a mess (even those who love it will agree) but it just sucks that even after all the time it took for them to essentially re-make the first game, this still feels like the first draft of a much better product buried deep inside. It is by no means a bad game, but it is an unbelievably mixed bag of a game that I certainly can't recommend if you care at all about storytelling. If you're more interested in exploration and systemic gameplay, then I can say the first 20 hours are pretty cool! If you don't mind paying $70 for that, then maybe it's worth it. For everyone else, best to wait on it. Also might give them the chance to make it not run like total dogshit (unlikely).

Holy shit it has bullet drop.
Loading times and screen tearing (fixed by enabling v-sync via .ini edit) aside, damn this is so cool so far. A tacticool-retro-fps.
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Simple magazine management, mantling, unlockable bullet time, and more cool stuff I won't spoil. Also the HUD can be disabled diegetically, nice touch. There's options to modularly reconfigure the difficulty, and also a toggle for the style of bullet spread you'd like to play with. Crosshairs can also be disabled, and this is the first FPS I've seen to actually pair meaningful Aim-Down-Sights with such an option. Hipfiring and ADS both have a place in your toolset, which is a balance I've been dying to see met in an FPS.
Two chapters in, and it's safe to say I really dig this.
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Nearing the end of the campaign, I maintain my position that this is a well designed game. However I'm starting to run into more consistent crashing. I think the black blob enemy giblets might be overloading the engine. Previously reloading or transitioning between levels would sometimes throw a memory access violation, but no progress was ever lost.
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Artistically the entire production is cast in somber tones. Most of the OST is laced with melancholy, offsetting the extreme brutality on screen as the mangled bodies of the enemy gynoids lay weeping in the aftermath of your firefights.
Excellent game, deserving of a higher score if stability is improved.
I eagerly await the sequel.

That was fucking awesome. Excellent monster catcher. Of course it takes some aspects from Pokemon, namely the creature collection and evolution aspect, but the battle system and its volatility and difficulty feel MUCH more inspired by Megaten, which is even more evident when you realize the story takes many of its beats from games like Persona 3 (there’s literally a character who’s just like Koromaru here). It’s also very pleasing to look at, with a style of chibi sprites roaming around a 3d-rendered overworld, and obviously that’s pretty clearly reminiscient of the graphical style of Pokemon Gens 4 and 5. The open nature of the game scales very well too, and in many ways the map and its grid, and to a degree, the premise, remind me of old handheld Zelda games, particularly the ones on the GameBoy Color and Advance. If any two games inspired narrative aspects here, I feel like it’s a marriage of Link’s Awakening and Persona 3. Does that mean it’s anywhere near as melancholic or existential at times? No, but it has the capability to talk on that. Referring to this as a “Pokemon Clone” is a disservice. It’s a love letter to that series, but it’s also its own thing. As for negatives, the postgame quests are very grindy and repetitive, but the core game is so utterly addictive that it can offset this. Also the game can run a bit oddly. It’ll stutter in some cases to load in the environments. Nothing unplayable, but your immersion can and will be gutted at moments like that. Overall an amazing time.