50 Years of Video Games: Hitman: Codename 47 (PC)
While the stealth genre has had titles throughout the history of gaming, it was the turn of the century when the genre really began to pick up. 3D spaces allowed for more complex action that truly gave the player the tools to effectively avoid detection, and games like 1998’s Metal Gear Solid propelled the genre into popular knowledge. As the year 2000 hit there were a fair few stealth games, but one of the big names of the genre was about to get its start on home computers. The Hitman franchise would soon become one of the biggest names within its small genre, with Hitman: Codename 47 being the first time IO Interactive attempted the concept. However, while time and experience would help them mold this series into one worthy of acclaim, Hitman: Codename 47 was the first game they ever made and there were many things they’d have to learn from how this first game succeeded and how it failed.
Hitman: Codename 47 is a game about assassination, the game starring a bald contract killer referred to as Agent 47 and dehumanized to the point he even has a barcode on the back of his neck. Despite his serious and somewhat distinctive appearance, Agent 47 is an exceptional killer who can blend in almost anywhere, only needing a swap of outfits to convince people he’s anything from a chaffeur to a security guard to even a high ranking member of a gang, and while sometimes he is posing as someone who should be of a certain ethnicity due to where he’s working, he maintains his usual demeanor and behavior and avoids stepping into the somewhat unfortunate stereotypes many of the characters in this game exhibit. Agent 47 takes contracts from a specialized global agency whose primary targets are people with ties to criminal activities, and while you are in the business of killing, the agency’s professionalism penalizes you if you do go outside the realm of the mission. While you can kill any underlings of a target with impunity, killing innocent civilians or police will count against you when it comes time to reward you for your work. While the missions at first seem somewhat disconnected, you begin to pick up clues that not only is there a greater conspiracy tying your targets together but Agent 47 himself and his origins are tied to it in some manner, giving it a decent through line that culminates with an appropriate climax that ties all of the details together.
When you begin a mission you are often given a screen where you are allowed to purchase the tools you’d like to use for an upcoming hit. You are given a set of details about what to expect in the coming level and sometimes eliminating a target is one of many missions, some requiring you to also find important objects or interact with certain characters. However, giving you a flat map of the area you’ll be entering with only a few indicators on where important mission zones are or where possible weapon pickups can be found doesn’t quite prepare the player for a game where many levels are rather unforgiving. Fairly early on the player needs to learn that they won’t be pulling off the kill on their first try and your first run through a level is probably best spent learning the layout, character routines, and identifying areas that can be useful when you’re actually ready to attempt the job for real. There is thankfully no punishment for losing levels and the game allows you to swap equipment on retries, but there are a few ideas holding this setup back. There is no saving in the middle of the mission, even in the much longer stages where a lot of things need to go right if you’re aiming for a stealthy and professional kill. If you are killed levels give you a certain amount of revives where the level will be in the state you left it before death, although enemies can sometimes still be alert and ready to hunt you down after so a revive might not even set things into a state where you can be expected to get back to work easily.
The equipment buying screen before a mission also has a few ideas swirling around it and a variety of hit and miss concepts tied to it. The amount of money you earn from a mission can be diminished by civilian kills, potentially limiting your weapons for later missions… in theory. As the game goes on there are more levels that are actually one long mission split into smaller chunks where you carry over items from the previous stage and some levels will put something near the start to disarm you of certain weapon types so you can’t get as much use out of this even if you do play cautiously to earn the maximum amount. There are some things like body armor and a compass that can help in ways outside of being pure killing tools and you can usually slip in at least the piano wire or knife that are good for stealthy takedowns, but if you want your silenced guns or something heavier if things do go south you’ll find that you’ll need to procure those on-site and your cash is left burning a hole on the menu screen.
The actual missions range in quality as well. The idea behind many levels is a stealthy approach is the best option, the player needing to find ways to subtly eliminate targets or else multiple gunmen will begin to pursue and try to kill you or the target might become spooked and even flee the area. However, if you have good equipment you can sometimes go for a far more brazen approach of running in guns blazing to take out the target and any goons who might come to his defense, still able to complete the mission provided you completed all objectives. In fact, if the stealth does end up failing you, scurrying off and defending yourself as best as you can as you head to your getaway is a viable option provided you still got the job done. Depending on the area layout and resources available some levels are probably better completed with a more direct approach, to the point a few missions outright require full-on gunfights as you are automatically detected for entering certain vital areas. The shooting in HItman: Codename 47 is serviceable when you’re trying to snipe someone from far away or pop them in the head while hiding around a corner, but in a straight gunfight it can be a bit unwieldy as the agent is often stiff, needs to rise up a little to adjust his aim even when crouching behind cover, and the inaccuracy of your regular bullets can make an attempted headshot hit their shoulder while multiple AI guards have no problem filling you with lead as you took that shot. It’s a sound way of discouraging brainless battle approaches but including required firefights with such rough designs leads to frustration when they pop up as they can lead to a jarring change if you were otherwise doing the stealth sections superbly.
When Hitman: Codename 47 is building up longer stealth jobs though, it has some rather good hits. Budapest in particular stands out, Agent 47 needing to infiltrate a hotel to eliminate a target and remove a bomb before it can detonate. Characters normally have little timelines of actions in a level, sometimes just for how they patrol as a guard but other times they are essentially living their life, Budapest asking you to find moments in the more involved routines to make your move to not only kill the target but work your way towards finding the bomb, a task that can involve things like posing as a bellhop, finding ways around metal detectors to keep your lethal tricks, and learning the habits of important people so you can exploit them. Complexity doesn’t always equal quality, the rather large Rotterdam boat mission rather slow to do on retries and packing certain triggers that activate no matter how careful you’re being, but the game does try to sprinkle in a few smaller missions before the big layered jobs. It can also balance out its required action segments a bit by having them sandwiched between levels that value a clever approach. The weak gunplay is easier to brush off as you get to indulge in more interesting kills like trying to poison someone’s food or find a way to sneak a weapon into a negotiation, but the balance never feels quite right in general and sometimes picking up on the potential kill methods for a stage might take too much effort for the small payoff to feel satisfying. Figuring it out is part of the thrill, but in such large maps it can be hard to find out there’s a single useful tool in one of many warehouses where the doors don’t look much different whether they can be opened or not.
To make things a bit rougher, Hitman: Codename 47 definitely has some technical issues holding it back. One of the big ones is the fact that your quiet kill methods are often limited to killing from behind someone, piano wire and a knife to the throat quick and quiet but also harmed by the game sometimes not detecting properly that you’re going for such an attack. With no saves in the middle of a mission it is incredibly disheartening to have all your hard work go up in smoke because the game decides Agent 47 is a touch off and will instead reveal himself with a wild knife swing instead of a professional throat slit. Agent 47 can take the clothes off dead characters to impersonate them which is a sound mechanic that adds to the idea of infiltration, but the body of the person whose clothes you pilfered needs to be hidden to avoid raising alarms. This makes a good deal of sense too but Agent 47 drags bodies in an odd hunched over manner where he grabs them one-handed and lets the body flop around as he drags them while you have limited vision of nearby areas. Trying to place the body somewhere can be a task as well. You can hide them behind things if you are sure no one will go back there, but when options are limited you might need to use something like an open sewer but you can’t just easily drop the body in. If you jump in yourself it might not go in, and if you position yourself to try and let it loose it might not fall down as a limb hits the edge of the opening. Predicting if an AI character will notice what you’re up to can be rough at times; sometimes they’re able to see you from so far away they’ve only barely been able to load in as visible and other times not seeming to care if you’re behaving oddly right in front of them with a weapon in hand. Figuring out a special killing approach should have that feeling of figuring out a puzzle with the available variables, but when some things go awry because of inconsistent enemy behavior or bad physics and detection you’re robbed of that moment and forced to redo everything through little fault of your own.
THE VERDICT: Some moments like the intricate killing job in Budapest really show what Hitman: Codename 47 was going for, the clever and professional Agent 47 really able to strut his stuff in a level built around puzzle solving and its ties to stealth. However, many stages face problems as detection issues can completely sabotage genuinely good play and lead to a frustrating level restart due to the game’s often unforgiving mission design. If you do want to be more brazen and go for a firearms focused approach you’ll find the controls a bit sloppy and the action rather clunky for it, and since the game will force you into it at times it’s unavoidable you’ll run into some of the problems with its firefight design. Conceptually a lot of the contract kills have some neat setups that are satisfying if they go the right way without anything going awry, but the game’s technical problems are a constant saboteur that isn’t accounted for in the game design, those ideas struggling to make their mark in such poor company.
And so, I give Hitman: Codename 47 for PC…
A BAD rating. The totality of Hitman: Codename 47 is a balancing act as the game sometimes can provide you some well realized stages where you are given the tools for interesting and creative kills but other times it fails to warn you that it will be throwing you into a firefight where you’ll likely be underequipped and grappling with your controls to fight off what can sometimes be a cascading level of danger as the required action draws in guards you had to leave alone before. Learning through a bit of failure is a fine idea for this style of game but when you have to do a whole mission restart to do so, some of the slow levels where you need to spend time creeping or blending in really begin to grate and the novelty of the incursion is lost amidst the issues surrounding it. Hitman: Codename 47’s concept is straining against its design, the idea of needing to hide the dead bodies to remain undiscovered a good way of adding tension but not when moving those bodies is so obtuse. Linking together a few missions probably sounded wise in the conceptual phase, but traveling through the jungles of Colombia becomes a drag when you can’t use that cash that is meant to be your motivator to play well to buy things for stages that are a bit underwhelming save for an interesting use of a jaguar that you can get past in multiple ways. The gunplay didn’t need to be excised and it can even be leaned on as the optimal way for a kill, but its aiming is off especially when under fire and it does feel unusual to tack it on after levels focused on more intelligent approaches to executing a hit.
Innovation isn’t always a clean process and Hitman: Codename 47 was trying to execute an idea that was perhaps too big for the fledgling developers to tackle well. The contract killing doesn’t need gunfights to be thrilling and the game shines brightest when it leans more towards the idea of learning the optimal way to quietly complete your work, those moments often hinging on ideas like discovery and working out the logic of how things go together rather than hoping the weak shooting system works out in your favor. Sometimes groundwork does need to be laid down so you can reflect back on what can be improved, polished, or removed, and it’s fortunate the novelty of such a stealth game focused around a hitman’s work resonated well enough that IO Interactive would get to try again and refine the formula. There’s something to be said about not being blind to a product’s true quality simply because it’s breaking new ground, but Hitman: Codename 47, despite being very rough around its edges, got the amount of attention needed to avoid being a historical footnote. If it hadn’t impressed with what it wanted to be, it would never have had the chance to eventually become that in its sequels, the first game definitely a poor attempt but over time Hitman could execute its promised concept properly because people gave that initial entry a chance.