Ah, the life of the assassin. Thousands of years of beautiful tradition, from the guys that whacked Julius Caesar, passing through the guy that killed Archduke Ferdinand, Jack Ruby, Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas.
They travel to exotic locations all over the world in order to shuffle key individuals off their mortal coils in exchange for cold, hard cash...
sure beats staying home on the weekends, glued to the tube watching NASCAR. Of course, there's the whole matter of checking your morality at the door, dealing constantly with unsavory characters and eventually becoming a pathetic shadow of a human being with no chance of redemption. But then again, watching NASCAR means essentially the same thing.
Decisions, decisions... the world is not black and white, people. You have to take the good with the bad, you gotta do what you gotta do, and other obscure and meaningless catchphrases.
Which — somehow — brings me to Hitman: Contracts. It's the third installment of the series, so why not just call it
"Hitman 3?" you may ask. The answer lies at the heart of much debate. There are
some that maintain it should've been called "Hitman: Arena", even though they acknowledge how silly it sounds.
Others, perhaps the more moderate and well-adjusted, state that it can't be called
"Hitman 3" because, technically, it's not much of sequel. During most of the game you are replaying missions from the previous games. Revamped, reshuffled and prettied-up missions, yes, but in the end you do get that
"Hey, I've been shot in this room before" feeling. And of course you have the conspiracists that believe it wasn't called
"Hitman 3" because either Eidos or IO wanted to defeat '"The Curse of the 3," in an allusion to how all the third installments of any franchise seem to range from
"crap" to "crap on the rocks and make it a double." The truth lies somewhere in between.
So let's get things out of the way first. Is most of the game really spent replaying missions from previous games? Yes. Does it really matter? Depends. It didn't matter to me simply because I'm a sucker for well-done, tight mission building. So any chance for me to replay good missions from the past — regardless of the game, really — will be welcome.
On the other hand, many people might have been waiting to play new ones. And rightly so.
Sure, some people — the kind of people that love making ornate and inconsequential observations,
who start these observations with the word
"technically" (For example, "Technically, Champagne is only Champagne if it comes from the province of Champagne in France. Otherwise it's just sparkly wine") — would say
"Well, technically, the missions are different because there are
different ways to achieve the objectives now. Or even more ways. The only things
that stay the same are the locales."
Well, whoop-de-doo, I say. However, let's not beat around the bush, folks. The structure of the missions may have changed, the way to approach the objectives and the resources available to you may have changed, but you're still going after the same targets of old in the same locales of old. Whether it makes or breaks the game, I leave that up to you.
It didn't bother me, and while many people might have been expecting something new on the platter, there
are also lots of Hitman vets and fans that will be glad to replay the revamped golden oldie missions.
