3.5/5 ★ – jdong6's review of HITMAN 3.

An unexpectedly great improvement over the already-good Hitman 2: a much stronger story and interesting twists on the established stealth formula of the previous Hitman titles, a more malleable sandbox, and a touch more theatricality. -- Gameplay Spoilers -- On Top of the World: A pretty standard Hitman level, but fulfilling requests as the Assassin to get close to a target was a lot of fun, and didn't feel much like a tutorial level at all. Death in the Family: One of my favourite missions, and gives you a fun moral dilemma at the end. I wonder how malleable this mission is without acting as the detective, though - and a great showcase of the camera. Not much stealth is actually involved here, but it was a really interesting change of pace and exemplifies the strength of the mission stories, and larping as NPCs. Apex Predator: Another great mission, it had great atmosphere and art direction, and the club felt appropriately muddy. Having the assassins be (pre-selected, I'm sure) randomly selected throughout the map was a fun twist, but it made a few of them too easy. It seems a little more cheaply made than a lot of other missions because of this, so I wonder if there were more solutions that involved gathering the agents to a single point. End of an Era: This has got to be peak art direction for Hitman, but a pretty standard mission. The buildings in Chongqing are great for slipping in and out of, much like the castle in Hitman 2. I felt that the two targets were pretty isolated from each other, which usually pisses me off, and the lab could feel a bit linear in terms of the sandbox. It wasn't really clear to me how each part of the map fed into each other, and is designed extremely similarly to the Dubai mission (an atrium with two halves). It was challenging to sneak into the laboratory, probably similar in level to the Hokkaido mission from Hitman 1, but was just less interesting. The Farewell: Pretty standard Hitman mission, didn't feel very challenging - I liked how much I listened to NPCs on this mission, and did things like dress up as the lawyer for an easy kill, rather than to be told exactly what to do. I'm sure there was a lot of untapped depth to this mission that I missed. Untouchable: Very linear, presenting you with a series of stealth challenges. More interesting thematically than from a gameplay perspective, and liked how you slowly gain in power, not through weapons, but through disguises. I don't think there's much replay value in this one. There isn't much new added to the sandbox except for the camera - not a huge addition, but one that acts in the same way as the scanner does in Metroid Prime and can add to the storytelling. The writing is a hell of a lot better too, giving Agent 47 so many sinister one-liners that really add to his deliberately meagre characterisation. The mission stories felt further de-emphasised from Hitman 1 and 2, and seem to be more woven into the sandbox without explicitly telling you where to go - it seems that a lot of the heavy lifting falls onto collecting intel, and hearing pieces of info from NPCs instead - immersive, but only if the intel is interesting enough to fill the void left by mission stories. I think it does quite well, and is probably the best entry in the series in many respects - especially if you can replay the first two games in the package.