After completing the Hong Kong missions I was truly eager for more of the same – the locations were all beautifully and convincingly rendered, the quiet yet excellent music and occasional stylish cut scenes lent it a genuine movie-like feel and just playing the game, planning each move and then carefully executing it was downright exciting. So, after successfully taking out one target, what did I have to do next in my role as a stealthy Hitman? Play Rambo.
All of a sudden, after sneaking, garrotting and sniping your way around the excellent Hong Kong missions you're offered a selection of rapid fire weaponry for purchase before the mission and then have to run around a jungle killing drug trafficking criminals as if you're the spiritual successor of Rambo. Stealth is not an option; they will almost always spot you before you spot them and will shoot on sight. Although the lack of a mid-mission save game feature didn't bother me much in any other missions, the final Columbian mission had me screaming for one in spite of the two “continues” that you get per mission. The only way I was able to complete the final Columbian mission was by killing every single inhabitant of the base – sneaking was impossible and impersonating an enemy soldier did little more than get me into the base before I had to give the game away by letting rip with some machine gun blasts. What's worse, the guards could often be impossibly tough, sometimes even taking numerous shots to the head, and the main hit target of that mission took what must've been one hundred or so shots at point blank range before he died. Even after I worked out where the Sniper Rifle and Minigun (yeah, really, a gun powerful enough to cut trees in an assassination game – go figure) it took me almost an entire day of playing the mission over and over and over to finally beat it. What happened when I finished the mission? I was thankfully blessed with another assassination mission with more excellent mission and level design, more garrotting and corpse hiding, and just more of what every mission in should have involved – stealth and assassination. If ever there were a schizophrenic game, this is it. The Columbian missions in Hitman are like the monster bashing ones in Thief: The Dark Project – unnecessary, completely out of place and a highly annoying detriment to an otherwise good game.
The Rambo missions aren't the only down points in Hitman. While the sound is generally excellent, some of the foreign accents are glaringly phoney and often even annoying (the twentieth guard to shout “maniac alarm!” was rewarded with a few clips worth of bullets as I vented my annoyance), and the Hitman himself invariably sounds wooden – his voice is not just unemotional as you might expect, it's practically monotonal. When I tried turning on all the detail settings and running in a higher resolution Hitman also became very unstable indeed, invariably crashing within a few minutes, once even just while I was just on the menu screen. I swear it was a completely different error each time too. I got blue screens, Direct 3D errors, OpenGL errors (when I switched renderer), direct sound errors, kernel32 errors… I was almost impressed by the variety, although I eventually gave up and dropped back to the default settings which largely solved the problem. Even then, after a few hours of play the frame rate could get extremely choppy, presumably because of a memory leak or something similar. The controls could also have been easier to use, although I got used to the odd weapon selection system after the first few missions and I didn't find the controls as glaring a fault as some have. Finally, the endings (both of them) are terrible. I've almost given up on expecting good endings from games, but Hitmans endings stand out as two of the most unsatisfying and predictable endings to a game in recent years.
