Hitman: Contracts

My first hour with Hitman: Contracts is still lodged in my memory: Agent 47 bleeding out in a Paris hotel room while rain hammers the windows, and the entire game unfolding as a fever-dream of past kills. That framing device is not a gimmick. It gives every mission a woozy, noir-soaked texture that the earlier games in the series never managed, and it makes Contracts feel distinctly its own thing despite being built heavily on recycled bones. The setup is this: twelve missions, roughly half of which are remakes of levels from Hitman: Codename 47, all re-staged at night and in wet weather to match 47's near-death mental state. On paper that sounds like a bargain bin filler release, and critics at launch were right to call it out. In practice, the remade missions benefit enormously from the Silent Assassin-era mechanics grafted onto them: the context-sensitive action button that lets you peek through keyholes, pick locks, drag bodies, or steal disguises with a single input; a far more reactive AI where guards coordinate in teams and scrutinise your loadout as well as your outfit; and a weapon room that rewards Silent Assassin ratings with unlockable dual-wield and silenced variants of handguns, SMGs, shotguns, and assault rifles. The six original missions carry the real creative weight, though. A fetish club in Rotterdam, a deranged manor straight out of a horror film, a sauna kill that requires nothing more than patience and a locked door, these are the levels that show IO Interactive thinking sideways about what a stealth sandbox can be. The approach options are genuinely inventive. Poison a target's tea. Suffocate a sleeping man with a pillow. Engineer a heat-stroke in the sauna. Shoot, strangle, or just walk out the front door in a stolen uniform. The rating system, which grades you from Silent Assassin at the top down to Mass Murderer at the bottom, keeps multiple playthroughs honest, if you want the best weapons unlocked, brute-forcing your way through levels does not get you there. That said, the normal difficulty is forgiving enough that a patient player will rarely feel stuck. The AI, while improved over Hitman 2, still has the old Glacier engine quirks: guards spotting you through geometry, civilians running in panicked loops, the ever-questionable logic of a six-foot bald man passing as a hotel waiter. You either accept that as genre convention or you bounce off the whole thing. The short runtime is the honest downside. Six to eight hours for a first playthrough is lean, and the story wrapping those memories together is thin even by early-2000s action game standards. The Jesper Kyd soundtrack, though, is remarkable, dark electronic textures laced with industrial percussion, and it won a BAFTA for good reason. It does more narrative heavy lifting than any of the dialogue. PC players should note that the game needed some patching to reach Steam in 2014 due to licensing complications, and modern resolutions may require a trip to PCGamingWiki before everything sits right on a contemporary system. Who is this for? Anyone who wants to understand how Blood Money got so good, stealth players who enjoy replaying small maps for cleaner ratings, or classic-Hitman fans who find the World of Assassination trilogy too hand-holdy. Come in expecting a tight, dark, mechanically satisfying six-hour run and you will leave satisfied. Come in expecting the scope or polish of a full sequel and you will feel the corners that were cut.

Alex · Scout Team

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