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.