Hitman Episode 1 Review – Welcome Back 47

In a world of remakes and remasters, Hitman comes out swinging to bring back former glory to the series. Is the contract worth taking? Or should you avoid the hit all together? Check out our honest game review of Hitman Episode 1 to help make your choice!

Hitman Episode 1 Review

You play as Agent 47, a decorated Hitman with a great ability to blend in anywhere, even with a bar code on the back of his head. You will play two training missions to get you used to the game and then you are onto the Paris Showstopper level. There are two targets here, Viktor and Dalia. They are the leaders of IAGO, a spy organization that sells international secrets to the highest bidders. Your job is to infiltrate the auction and take out the targets before the info is sold.

After you pick your loadout, you are tossed in the mission and given the freedom to kill the targets however you see fit. You can go in guns-a-blazing like this is Call of Duty or you can put on a disguise and play it like a Hitman. You can kill the targets in various ways, the game doesn’t restrict you to specific weapons or techniques which is nice. There are challenges that kind of nudge you in the right direction for kills, but they are not required. Guns, knives, poison, drowning, accidents and explosions are all options during the first episode.

It plays just like a you would expect a Hitman game to play. You follow the target, learn their paths and pick a kill spot. Both of the targets have body guards and separating them is the real hard part to the kills. You will get more points if you don’t kill anyone but the targets and additional points if you escape without the bodies being found. That’s not to say you can’t beat the missions if they find the bodies or if you kill a body-guard or two, it’s just more Hitmanish to do it without anyone suspecting anything. Also, if they find a body of a target, the other target will be aware and start changing things up.

Outside of the main missions you will also have side contracts you can take on. These involve you killing random targets in the level in various ways. Normally they will want you to wear specific outfit and kill them with a certain weapon. It’s alright the first couple times but not nearly as interesting as the main mission. You can also do escalation missions that get more difficult as you progress. Only problem here is the fact that you need to reload the mission every time you advance and the loading times aren’t great.

The game looks great and plays very well. I am really impressed by the sheer amount of people on the screen at once. There are easily 50+ people in some of these rooms all doing their own thing. This is mainly talking, looking at phones or drinking but still it is a lot of people with no huge frame drops or anything. There isn’t much music in the game but the voice acting is pretty good. The cut scenes look really good and the characters you are introduced to seem like scum of the earth type people you want to kill.

Couple things I have to knock it for though. This game is always online and to be brutally honest, Square-Enix hasn’t figured out how to work that properly yet. Day one I couldn’t connect, and a week later I am still having issues with the servers for this game. If you aren’t online, you don’t get a score and you don’t get experience. I get that everyone is going to the whole “everyone connected” BS but it has to work properly first. There is also no safe house for you to test gear and weapons which is a huge deal to me. I’m going in with things that I need to use to kill my targets but I have no idea how they work until I test them in-game, huge miss on this one.

For $10 Hitman offers you a lot of quality content to go through. On the other hand for 60$ you will be left feeling bitter because of the lack of content currently. I’d say give it a go at the $10 price point and if you like it buy the season pass for the rest of the missions.