Hitman: Freelancer Review
The rebooted series of Hitman games have once again got a slight rebranding. The trilogy which started with Hitman (2016) and ended with Hitman 3 is now sold as one combined package known as Hitman: World of Assassination.
Along with the rebrand and repackaging comes an additional mode Hitman: Freelancer which is what we will be reviewing today.
If you played any Hitman game before you know the drill, but for the uninitiated, you play as Agent 47 a highly skilled assassin and master of disguise. Each mission starts with you having to infiltrate an area without causing too much suspicion to eliminate a target or multiple targets.
The aim of Hitman: Freelancer is to take out the targets and get out of the area without being spotted, with additional points awarded for being extra stealthy and scoring penalties for any ‘collateral damage’ that may occur during the mission.
To help blend in, Agent 47 can subdue enemies and borrow their clothes. This can fool some enemies into allowing him to waltz into restricted areas without raising suspicion, however, higher-ranked enemies you’ll still have to avoid as they know their stuff pretty well.
Now, what sets Hitman: Freelancer apart from the rest of the World of Assassination series is the fact that it is a roguelike. You start off in your safehouse which slowly unlocks more features as you progress through your missions.
In the safehouse, Agent 47 has a whole wall of weaponry available, that is if you can procure it while in the field and successfully bring it back to base. As you start out, it will be completely empty and it’s quite satisfying to see it filling up as you return from successful missions.
There is a very loose story based around Freelancer and it technically serves as an epilogue for Hitman 3. You are tasked with hunting down members of the syndicate, but this mainly just serves as an excuse to have Agent 47 span the world completing missions.
A successful mission will net you some cash to spend at the shop, allowing for better weapons and gear. As well as the standard missions pay out, Agent 47 can also snag some extra cash for fulling mission-specific side objects such as Killing only the targets, using a specific weapon type or taking no damage. These rewards are often worth more than the main mission pay out and are a fun incentive to try out a weapon or playstyle that you would usually avoid.
Failing a mission will lose your current equipped loadout and you’ll return to the Safehouse where you are free to attempt it again, this time with different weapons or items. This can be tough at first, as Agent 47 is woefully underequipped, but after a few failures, you’ll soon get into the swing of things and start progressing while collecting more weapons etc. It’s quite a nice sense of progression but may seem almost cruel at first, but thankfully, playing on the PS5 loading times were extremely quick and you could jump back into the action quickly.
In terms of level design, each map is pulled from one of the main campaign levels from the trilogy’s story mode. While it’s a shame that new maps were not created, the ones chosen here are great and they have a ton of detail to them. If you haven’t completed the trilogies’ main campaigns, I guess you could consider some of these levels as spoilers so I would recommend completing the core games before playing Freelancer if at all possible, it won’t fully ruin your experience but learning the map layout in the main story is all part of the fun, although the remixed enemy layouts and objectives will keep you on your toes regardless.
Hitman: Freelancer doesn’t hold your hand and you are expected to have at least gone through the tutorials from the main campaigns otherwise I could see how you would feel a little lost as there’s a lot going on in each map along with the controls to master. Also, the type of weapons and gear you want to take with you would vary slightly per map and you could easily lose some cherished items by taking the wrong tools for the job.
To really enjoy Hitman: Freelancer, you would definitely need to complete the main story missions first. While this is not a bad thing, if you don’t find the main games very fun, you’ll not find much here.
Conclusion
Overall, Hitman: Freelancer is fantastic inclusion to an already impressive package. If you are a fan of Hitman and the main campaign, you’ll love what Freelancer has to offer. The short mission length and randomness of weapons and items will keep you coming back for just one more mission, however, Freelancer does sadly suffer a little at times from being procedurally generated and sometimes the missions can be a little boring, or almost impossible to complete.
If you enjoyed the main Hitman games, you owe it to yourself to check out Hitman: Freelancer, it’s essentially unlimited Hitman levels and that’s not a bad thing at all!
8
PlayStation review code kindly provided by IO Interactive