Hitman 2

Nick delivers the verdict on this massively popular stealth shooter.

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One area the developers have not skimped upon is sound. Grasping upon a happy side effect of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc - namely the large number of suddenly unemployed and over skilled orchestral musicians - IO hired the entire Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra to do the score. The music is of an exceptional quality, and does much to give the game an epic feel. Rousing Soviet themes provide an electrifying atmosphere when you're perched on top of a building in St Petersberg with a number of Russian generals in your sniper scope. Equally, Arabian music achieves a similar effect when your missions take you to the Middle East. Other developers should take note - a game's score can be an enormous help in creating immersion. It seems like an obvious point, yet so few developers take an active interest in the score.

One of the features of Hitman 2 that IO were keen to promote was the fact that the game was designed to be played in which ever way the gamer most enjoys. Essentially this means that each level is designed with multiple solutions, ranging from stealth to subterfuge to all guns blazing. Stealth is not forced upon you - indeed the easiest way to play the game by far is to take the direct approach and shoot anything that moves. The game does, however, encourage you to attempt stealth by means of a rating system that measures stealth and aggression, and gives a title according to the relative proportions of both. My first run at the game saw me pick up a raft of "mass murderer" tags, and upon my second attempt at the game I made it a point of principle to take a more subtle approach. Both are equally satisfying. Bodies fly through the air after taking a shotgun to the chest, and slump realistically on whatever surface they're on - be it flat or not - and the game as a whole plays very well simply as a straight shooter. Equally, the stealthier methods are just as rewarding, and it's a real pleasure to work out the furtive schemes the designers left in place for you. For instance, one level involves killing a hacker entrenched in the guarded building of an office block. You can simply shoot your way through, but one of the stealth options involves dropping your weapons down the laundry chute to avoid the metal detectors, stealing a pizza delivery outfit and walking brazenly past all the guards. This commitment to player choice is a testament to the success of games like Deus Ex and GTA3, and it works just as well here. Every single level in the game has choices attached to it, and the wise addition of a finite (but adequate) number of saves means that players feel able to experiment more. The game also includes a fairly well written story that threads through all the missions, bringing some continuity to what otherwise may have been a disconnected series of hits. This story unfolds through both in-mission updates and a large number of cut-scenes, which are both interesting and not overly lengthy.

Regular readers of mine should note that if there is one thing that annoys me, in a not-catastrophic-but-why-the-buggering-hell-did-you-do-that kind of way, it is when a developer creates an excellent game idea, implements three-quarters of it in a professional manner, and then falls asleep at the wheel and omits some really basic things. So then, here come the bad bits...

Firstly, and most basically, Hitman 2 does not save control or sound preferences. Is there any good reason for this, when the Xbox has a hard drive? It sounds minor, and I'm not normally one to moan (I swear), but when I have to wade through menus and submenus every time I start the game just to change from normal to inverted control my patience is tested. Hitman 2 does display this kind of lack of development common sense from time to time. Another example of this is the control system. For those of you who never played the original, it had a horrible control method involving the middle mouse button and a pop-up scrolling menu for both weapon selection and context-sensitive actions. The bones of this unwieldy system are still in place here, but the problem is compounded by the fact that we have moved from a flexible mouse and keyboard to the inflexible and infamous Xbox controller. One button brings up the weapon scroll menu, another produces the context-sensitive actions menu, and choices are made with the D-pad and by pressing the A button. This might not sound too daunting, but what it actually means is that it is impossible to perform any action unless you are standing still - and that includes changing weapons, which is highly annoying if you're in the gung-ho school of assassination.