Iterative perfection of assassination techniques.
QUEST LOG #1: HITMAN: FREELANCER
How often would you quit a game and reopen it within a few seconds? Not often, unless by mistake. Clicking the wrong button is not the reason when it comes to Hitman’s Freelancer mode. Frustration kicks in after hours of meticulous planning and careful murder, when a lapse in concentration has a crowd of armed guards gunning you down just a mission or two away from completing a successful campaign. You die, and you lose everything you have on you, a sizeable chuck of money, and all your progress and freelancer tools. Like I said, frustrating. You can see why closing the game might be an appropriate response to poor Agent 47 being killed in a clown outfit. Restarting the game a moment later might seem peculiar then, you might think you’d want to resume the next day, but no. Click that launch button and load back into your beautiful and secluded mansion. Tap the space bar to interrupt 47 from his whitewashing, or fishing, or whatever else he has been up to in your absence. Guide him down into the depths of his subterranean base and approach the world map. Pick yourself a new dossier and embark once again on a global jaunt to creatively murder as many members of the Syndicate as you can.
Missions start out quite simple, targets are few in number and security is rather lax. However, as you complete each phase and take out the leaders, the difficulty increases and so do the stakes. Before you jet off to one of the locations featured in the previous titles, you are given a crate of goodies to open. Pick an item and add it to your box of tricks. Items in the game are split into three groups. Firstly, you have Freelancer tools, these can be grenades, decoys, poisons, lockpicks, and other useful tools to help you navigate the map and take out your targets. These only remain in your collection so long as you are alive. Some are disposable, some aren’t, but if you die, all is lost. The next group of items are those you find on location and are considered common. These might be headphones you could garrotte someone with, a brick you toss at someone’s head, or a fire extinguisher you create a distraction with. These can’t be kept and are only of use while on mission. The last set of items are graded by rarity, and if brought back to the mansion will be added to your collection – which is delightfully displayed in glass cabinets in your bunker. These weapons range from small blades to sniper rifles. All can be taken with you, and all can be lost upon death. You will want to be careful about what you choose to take with you from your collection, as losing a silenced pistol or an ornate dagger from your wall of weapons will sting. You can add to this armoury by picking up rare items on location, purchasing them from dealers in the world, or as rewards from crates upon successful elimination of syndicates.
You pick out your reward, having completed another string of missions, and embark once more. Perhaps you’ll set out on your journey in a hearse you’ve unlocked, or perhaps a helicopter that sits within a clearing in the scenic grounds that surround your home. You arrive, scope out the map with 47’s instincts and begin to plan your path to success. You take down a target or two and then it happens again. You die. You’ve lost your legendary Silverballer pistol, a lovely concealable blade, and a large wad of cash. Restart, pick a new dossier, and jet off once more. Long moments crouching in a bush are likely to await you in whatever exotic location you arrive at next, and you will love it. You’ll have hated it at first, you might have hated it a few hours in, and perhaps you hate it now…
Eventually however, the game will click. You’ll be murdering like the professional that 47 is, and you’ll be building up your collection of deadly weapons, filling the shelves in your mansion with trophies, and unlocking new rooms in your mansion to personalise with each level you accrue. You’ll be living the assassin’s life, and you’ll be loving it. You’ll breeze through your campaign, reach the penultimate mission, and slip up once more. You’ll miss a vital shot, become hunted, and be gunned down. You’ll slam escape, quit the game and gaze despondently at your desktop, mourning the loss of everything you had taken with you. The seconds will pass, and an itch in your brain will rather inexplicably make you relaunch the game. You’ll do this over and over, and you’ll have eventually spent a hundred hours playing the side show to a trilogy of games that, at least on paper you should be playing instead. You might never play the story missions and quite frankly, you probably don’t need to.
Each run in Freelancer mode feels fresh, and converting a game like Hitman into a roguelike was a stroke of genius by IO Interactive. Replayability in the base game is encouraged, but eventually it wears thin. Freelancer mode does it right and adds untold value to a set of games that already give so much.
1: I managed to get the 3rd instalment of the game (which includes Freelancer mode) at a pretty decent price - which might have influenced my opinion of the value of the mode. Either way - I’d recommend picking it up in a sale if you’re lucky enough to find it in one.
2: If you read my previous post about having too little time to play games, you’ll have realised that in writing this, I have clearly played the game a lot. And while I have yet to drain every drop of blood from this title (far from it), I have played for over 50 hours so far… Perhaps it’s the way the game is cut up. The dossiers set out achievable goals and it seems it’s that which keeps bringing me back to Hitman’s reality, rather than to those open worlds I have yet to finish. Either way, seems you can make time for a game if it hooks you sufficiently. If you haven’t yet read that post, you can check it out below!
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