Hitman is a series I have always been more interested in than actually played. I am not sure why as it seems right up my alley but I have never really played the games terribly much over the years but kept up with the storyline. After seeing a presentation and getting hands on with the new game at E3, however, I think I might have to change my ways.

The gameplay video we were shown didn’t really reveal a lot of the story and just focused on a portion of the game where Agent 47 has to take out three different targets. The team members running the demo revealed that 47 as turned on ICA and is being hunted by both his old employers and the police but that was about it in terms of story. The story wasn’t really the focus of the segment we saw, however, and it mostly showed off the sandbox aspects of the game with all of the various options for carrying out contracts that you have open to you.

The level shown was mostly around a auto garage in a small town and was apparently representative of how mission structure is set up throughout the game. You aren’t generally going to have just one objective or hit to carry out and there are multiple paths to accomplish your goals open to you. If you want to walk straight in, guns blazing that is an option but the likelihood of completing your objectives goes down considerably. Instead, stealth is the way to go either by distraction, sneaking or wearing disguises (or even better, all of the above). There are plenty of options available in terms of how to create distractions as most of the objects in the world can be manipulated and the enemy AI allows for intelligent reactions to those manipulations.

These movements are aided by ‘Instinct mode’ that operates a lot like Batman’s radar which allows 47 to track target movements through walls and get a feel for where everyone is at any given time. Coupled with the ability to paint targets and then execute them and you have a system not dissimilar to recent Splinter Cell games. As mentioned, however, that is not the only way to go about taking out opponents. In fact, gun play looks to be somewhat discouraged as the point tracking system that awards a score to the player for pretty much everything he or she does weights stealth kills and deaths that look like accident much higher than more obvious or brazen kills. This does not mean that you can’t shoot someone and then hide the body somewhere else where an ‘accident’ is going to happen though as we saw on the demo. 47 killed a target then dumped the body by some explosive barrels while in the overalls of a mechanic  and then tossed some C4 onto the barrels while walking out and detonating the whole place from a distance. This kind of kill flow was shown throughout the demo and really highlighted all the choice you have available to you.

As far as the graphics and technical aspects are concerned, the game looks great with a lot of detail in the textures and environments, even if some of that detail included two dogs having sex at one point. With all of the options open to the player, this kind of attention to detail is pretty necessary because there is really no use in having options on different ways to kill if your objects are limited. I am not certain what hardware they were running the game on but whatever it was looked very clean and ran very smoothly.

Getting hands on with the game, I can report that it feels good to play as well. The controls are easy to use and while I died fairly quickly, it was less because of the controls and more because I executed a political figure in front of a crowd of people. This is a very bad strategy and I do not recommend it. Setting aside my bad decision making, the game flowed smoothly and the controls were responsive.

With the game coming out in November, there is still some time for the game to grow or change but if the rest of the game plays like what they showed at E3 it should turn out pretty well. It has definitely piqued my interest and that is not something I have been able to say about past iterations, at least as far as actually playing them goes. I am pretty optimistic on this one.