In what must have been 2002, I played a demo for a kind of game I'd never played before and was bemused at it being a sequel. "How can there be a Hitman 2: Silent Assassin when there was no Hitman?" I thought, like a fool.
These days, I'm far more aware of the existence of the PC, and other gaming platforms that don't come from Sony, and I know that it was Hitman: Agent 47 that was the start to the series. But it wasn't the first Hitman game for an awful lot of Hitman fans.
Silent Assassin was my first Hitman game, a game of stealth, unlike any other. Hiding in plain sight was the aim of this game, and only the bald-headed, barcoded Agent 47 had big enough balls to get away with it.
I've not played it for a long time now. How much can I remember?
Fun Times
I no longer have the PlayStation 2 port I once owned and completed, but I do have a PC release that doesn't appear to completely work on modern systems. Nice.
It runs, thankfully, but I'm not sure what, if anything, I missed amongst all those black screens. There might have been some setting up of the plot before this scene, for example, where Agent 47 appears to be a groundskeeper for a church.
The story follows on from the first game, where 47 has called it quits as an assassin and is atoning for his sins. Can such a man leave such a job cleanly?
No, of course not.
A kidnapped priest and demands for $500k. That's one way to get a man back into his... shed... that was a little weird. And delivered with such seriousness by David Bateson, too. It's an iconic voice these days and for a good reason. 47 as a character might be a bit over the top - a cloned super-assassin grown for one purpose - but as an attitude... yeah, he's got some swagger. Calm under pressure, capable of changing plans on the fly, working alone against the odds...
An overly dramatic and ridiculously dark video of 47 in his shed introduces us to the voice of Diana, his handler, with news of some jobs that our skillset seems to suit. Speaking of suits...
We are in Sicily, outside a villa familiar to a whole generation of console gamers. This was the demo level available in the days where demos were valued, and I spent a whole lot of time playing around this area.
I've only ever played it with a controller, but it has been so long that I've completely forgotten how it played with one, so this keyboard set up might be a bit of a learning curve on top of remembering how the level goes. The default keys make sense, and we've gone through a tutorial in the churchyard to tweak them if needed. We're ready. Let's get our first change of clothing.
Levels are open, and there are multiple ways through. Ideally, you'd play it like an assassin, ghosting your way in and out without alerting anyone, but I can tell you now that it won't go down like that. I'll try, but it won't.
Two methods of entry to this villa are hinted at in the open cinematic - delivering food at one end of the villa, or delivering the post at the other. Both require us to find a way to incapacitate someone, swap out our clothes for theirs, and waltz past the armed guards without their knowledge of me being an assassin, be it through the kitchens or straight through the front door.
But I don't like those methods. I prefer waiting for this guard to take a piss outside this door, where I can strangle him to death, take his stuff, and drag his lifeless ragdoll of a body into the shadows, out of sight.
The door leads to a garage, out of sight of the guards, where there happens to be a sniper rifle. Taking it and legging it back to the start of the level gives us a great vantage point to see - and deal with - our target, a Mafia boss of some sort, I'd imagine.
Excellently done... except that he has some keys that I need to pick up, so I'll have to go back in and grab them.
My third kill - I probably shouldn't have that many by now, if I were a professional - goes so well that the body hides itself better than I ever could have done. There aren't any boxes or lockers to stuff corpses into in this game. You'll just have to hope that you've done a good enough job. I hear a maid screaming in the distance. Did she hear the silenced gunshot? Did she see the blood splatter on the wall? I've no idea. I hope it's unrelated and I move onwards - and upwards.
Frustrations
I deal with a fourth problem in some style, leaning out from behind cover and popping him in the head, but as soon as I go to the body to loot it of car keys and weaponry, the shit hits the fan, and I get shot at from below. Who saw me? I've no idea, and now I've got to deal with not dying.
While not advised, going in guns blazing is actually somewhat effective. You'd have thought a game about being a silent assassin - nae, a game called Silent Assassin - would frown upon shooting like a maniac harder, but it doesn't. It is a viable strategy.
It's viable because if you're caught, everyone descends on your position.
I've lost count of how many guards I've killed at this point. Perhaps it was all of them, I don't know. Despite getting hit a few times, and always being caught mid-reload, 47 seems to be tanking these hits. I'm playing on Normal because 'Expert' and 'Professional' modes are for the insane, but it does seem like the balance is off.
This is a Hitman game before the formula was perfected, I suppose, and it's going to have its issues. Let's just get on with the mission and free our captive priest.
Well, he's not here, and we end the level with 11 more dead bodies than we really should have. It wasn't a pretty run through the level, but it was effective. I'm still alive, after all. The test will be whether I can carry it through to a level I don't have as much of a memory for as this first one.
Heading to St. Petersburg, we're tasked with eliminating a general having a meeting, presumably in that room of that building. How shall we deal with that? Sniper rifle from across the street, says the game.
That's ok with me, but you can't really hide a sniper rifle in Silent Assassin. You just carry it under your arm and hope nobody pays too much attention. That doesn't always happen...
If a civilian sees you acting suspiciously (like having a sniper rifle under your arm), they'll run off to alert the guards. The guards are armed with AK assault rifles and zero tolerance for bald men with sniper rifles.
Long story short, I start this level by hastily killing a guard in the subway and taking his clothing. Hopefully, that'll mean an easier time navigating the snowy streets. I'll be able to pass myself off as a loyal guardsman and get into places that I otherwise wouldn't be able to. They'll overlook me having a sniper rifle instead of an AK - they'll have to, I can't carry both at once.
That went well. Daring to start jogging alerted one guard, and that one guard was on orders to shoot first and ask questions later, and even running away didn't solve my problem, as other guards just had some kind of omniscience concerning my actual reason for being here, and they shot at me too.
The alert stages in this game seem to be 'Fine' and 'Very not fine', with no grey area in between. I am most definitely not doing this as the developers intended, surely.
Not knowing where I was heading, I completely missed my opportunity to kill the target during the meeting, but the level is still a living, breathing level. Pausing to look at the map doesn't give you the safety of infinite planning time, as guards will still patrol the streets, potentially knowing that you're out on them with ill-intentions.
Still, I have a plan. If 47 is so good at taking hits, I can just rush the room and get the job done the dirty, bloody way.
Wrong target...
The second attempt at the mission went a lot better, until the escape. I got caught by a locked door and shot in the back while picking it open. Thus ends 47's illustrious career as a 'silent' assassin.
Final Word
Most of that write up was put under 'Frustration', but I wasn't outright frustrated with Silent Assassin. The problem I have with it is that it isn't quite the free-roaming stealth game that we wanted it to be. We can do an awful lot as 47, and approach the levels in numerous ways, but some problems can get in the way from time to time.
If you have an excellent idea for an approach, you can likely take it, but just a single civilian or guard has the potential to trigger an alert state the likes of which you've never seen. There really isn't a grey area for your actions. You either get away with something, or you definitely do not, and from some videos I've seen, it's almost random as to what the guards take offence to, causing you to restart the mission, or reload one of your limited number of mid-mission saves.
Where running past someone in later Hitman titles raises eyebrows and turns heads, maybe even gets someone to ready a weapon, running here causes everyone in range to open fire without pause. And yet when a level goes right, it feels like you've cracked the puzzle and gotten away with murder. Funny that...
Silent Assassin is an ambitious game that isn't without its faults, but with such stellar entries into the series in later years, is it worth going back to? I'd have to say yes, because it is this game that brought so many eyeballs to the series, and it's this kind of experience that players wanted more of when the series went off the rails a little in the middle.
It's aged a bit, and I hear that the best way to play is the Xbox version, but I had a good time revisiting it more than a decade and a half since I last played. Somehow I completed it back in the day. I don't know how. I don't even remember most of it. Maybe I finished a different Hitman. Ugh, I'm going to have to play some of them now. I still need to play the series' reboot.
Might just try to get out of St. Petersburg alive, first...
Fun Facts
There are non-lethal methods of dealing with guards. You can knock them unconscious with anaesthetic, for example. A minute later they'll wake up and alert every guard, and know it was you that did it no matter where you are and what you're wearing, but at least it won't count as a kill.
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, developed by IO Interactive, first released in 2002.
Version played: PlayStation 2, 2002, via teenage memory.
PC, 2002.