Hitman 3 is, undoubtedly, the best of the series. Not many changes have been made to the gameplay from Hitman 2, but to be honest, I'm fine with that. Hitman 2 was pretty spot-on, there weren't many issues to fix. The changes that have been made, however, are great, the most notable of which is Agent 47's brand-new hacker-camera, which can hack electronic locks among other things (such as taking photos, duh). Now, let me talk about the locations. In short, they're absolutely amazing. I often found myself replaying a mission four or five times in order to explore every location and complete every challenge, as much as I did with the previous two games. Now the story: Hitman 2016 had a very basic story that felt more like an excuse to string together the assassinations than anything else, Hitman 2's story was more complicated and had several cool twists but still felt a little forced, however Hitman 3 delivers an absolutely brilliant story in my opinion. I was actually engaged in the cutscenes for once! If you felt that the previous two games were somewhat limp in that department, you don't have to concern yourself with that for Hitman 3. I won't dish out any spoilers, but let's just say you won't be expecting that final mission. Now let's talk about the mission stories. In the previous games there were quite a few mission stories, maybe six or seven per mission? In Hitman 3 it's a bit different. Most locations have only three, but some have none at all (such as the final mission. I won't tell you why though, because that would be a spoiler!). In some missions I find this quite annoying, because it feels like IO are being stingy, but in other cases I can fully understand why there are only three. Take the one at Thornbridge Manor, for example, where you pose as a detective and solve a murder, before actually committing one yourself. That mission story was super detailed, and probably lasted me a good forty minutes. So in the case of that missiom, I get why there are only three mission stories. But in other missions, like the ones in Mendoza or Chongqing, where the mission stories are no longer than the ones in either Hitman 1 or 2, I felt a little disappointed. Speaking of, you can actually play both those games within Hitman 3, with all the graphical upgrades and gameplay changes, if you've purchased them and downloaded the legacy packs, which is great. There's also the added VR mode, but it's honestly not that good. It doesn't support the PlayStation Move controllers and it's also pretty glitchy, nowhere near as clean as what was shown in the official "Sandbox VR" video about a month back. If you have PSVR and want to give it a go, I'd highly recommend playing all the missions normally before doing them in VR, because that's the best way to experience them. It has potential, but it needs a lot of improvement. Another awesome thing about this game is the soundtrack - it's brilliant, way better than the other games, and it creates a ton of atmosphere. Lastly, there are plenty of community-made contracts to do once you've finished the main story, not to mention that the main story missions are very replayable anyway, so don't worry about Hitman 3 being too short for the full price (it's not). So to conclude, Hitman 3 is an amazing game. If you enjoyed the first two, then you'll absolutely love this one. The only downside is that, like the last two games, you can't complete challenges or earn XP while offline, which completely sucks, because it means you can't unlock any new weapons, gadgets or suits, and you're stuck with the default loadout for the whole game. Oh, and also you don't get many escalation missions with just the standard edition, but to be honest it's not such a big deal seeing how much else there is to do, and I think IO are planning to release more content time. But besides all that, Hitman 3 is an absolute blast. Would 100% recommend.
Review of Hitman III
