The fervor around the upcoming Metal Gear Solid 3 remake is a great reminder that once upon a time, we were drowning in iconic stealth franchises. Over the years, some series have dwindled or transformed into whole other things, but one of them has kept kicking and found even greater success as of late, and that’s the most recent Hitman games.
Beginning in 2016, IO Interactive released what would become a trilogy of Hitman titles comprising the World of Assassination. The first game, which released new levels episodically, struggled to find its footing, perhaps due in part to this new experimental delivery model, and eventually its publisher, Square Enix, parted ways with IO Interactive and the series. Hitman 2, taking some lessons from the first, released as one whole game to much more immediate success, though it still didn’t light the world on fire. Eventually though, IO struck gold with the third and final installment in the trilogy, which absorbed the content of the first two and polished things up a bit.
Now, you can get the entirety of the acclaimed Hitman trilogy for just shy of $30 on PlayStation. Considering that it typically goes for $70, and the deluxe edition with every bit of DLC goes for $100, that’s the steal of a generation.
I’ve never played the first of the trilogy despite owning it for some time now, but anecdotally, I’ve always heard that it’s a game that ramps up in quality. The first level, set in the midst of a Paris fashion show, sounds like it sets the stage for three games full of wildly immersive and interactive environments to manipulate in order to take out your target. Beyond that, the Sapienza is often talked about as one of the best levels of any game that decade, as well as Miami in Hitman 2, and the train mission in Hitman 3. Over the run of three games, IO seems to constantly challenge and one-up itself.
In case you’re new here, the fun of Hitman isn’t just getting a clean kill, it’s how big you can go on its sprawling maps. You can equip and use remarkably different loadouts to try and tackle the game in both messy and stealthy ways. If you want to be a marksman, there’s a way forward. If you want to use an explosive golf ball or rubber duck, that’s also valid. Want to be up close and deadly with a garotte wire? Knock yourself out. Want to go virtually undetected and never even see the target? That’s also probably doable via some well-placed rat poison.
There are even substories that the player can discover across levels, which culminate in flashy and hilarious alternative methods to complete the objective. In one playthrough, I managed to track a target to an underground experimental weapons facility and reprogram the robot they were field testing to fire on them. My personal favorite occurred in Mumbai, where I found signs of another assassin in the immediate area, and somehow got them to take out some of my targets for me. While these stories are meant to give you linear paths to feel out the extent of Hitman’s systems, the sky’s honestly the limit. If you can conceive of it and have the tools, you can pull off some seriously absurd hijinx in these games.
You are going to want to do as many tricks as you possibly can. I’m not one to replay games or levels all that much, but Hitman 2 is one of the handful of games that stoked some kind of obsession from me. It doesn’t help that the series’ locales are so expansive and delightful to explore. Spanning the globe, the trilogy takes you to places like the Italian countryside, an English manor that hosts a Knives Out-style murder mystery dinner, the crowded city streets of Mumbai, a skyscraper in Dubai, a suburb in Vermont, and a race track in Miami among so many others. You can even pick up the DLC maps and missions for both Hitman 2 and 3 for another $21 as part of the Hitman World of Assassination Deluxe Pack on PlayStation.
Miraculously, that isn’t all that’s on offer. Hitman 3 is still being supported as a live-service title, and receives special missions called Elusive Targets pretty regularly. These are limited-time missions that challenge players to kill the target in one attempt. Unless they restart the mission, a win or a failure will become the permanent state of the mission, though IO has reactivated some of these in the past to give players a second chance.
And that still isn’t all! Last year, IO added a roguelike mode called Freelancer. In it, you can deck out Agent 47’s safehouse and take contracts to wipe out a series of targets in randomly picked locations from across the series 20+ maps. The goal is to lure out the big bad on every run by effectively taking out their lieutenants, but if you die, you take your XP gains, invest in more tools, and start a run again.
More or less, Hitman has become an incredible offer over the years with more than enough replayable content to merit the asking price. Rather than rest on its laurels, the developers have spent the subsequent years honing it into one of the sharpest and best titles of the generation. I can’t imagine not picking up all three of the games for this abominably low price.