In Hitman Freelancer, developer IO Interactive turns its hit game franchise into a the first roguelike that has managed to surprise me in a while, delivering a fresh slice of assassination shenanigans with a version of Hitman that feels nearly unlimited.
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I’m not really used to being surprised by Hitman. While Hitman 3 released in 2020, it was a technical upgrade to game concepts laid out in the 2016 Hitman reboot. Learn to play one of that trilogy and you could play them all, both because the mechanics were so similar but also because all of the content from previous games is ported into each successive entry. You could literally go through the identical levels from earlier games with the new bells and whistles.
In Hitman Freelancer, all of your agency support is taken away and you’re dropped into different maps from the game with just the items that you’ve got with you. Die and you’ll lose all the gear you’re carrying and half of your cash. Live, and you’ll get most – not all – of the items you brought out with you, losing a lot of the novelty items but keeping your guns, useful items and the occasional rare melee weapon.
It’s harder than Hitman by a long way. You can’t save-scum and reload an earlier save after things have gone to shit, and starting big firefights, though fun, often leads to you getting shot or your target getting away.
Your contacts, and the conditions by which you should kill them, are randomly generated and culminate in several boss levels of a sort where you have to actually identify your targets from a series of clues given to you. These missions are the toughest, and also the most high-stakes. If you fail one of these you fail your entire run. They’re also populated with undercover lookouts who will warn your targets, and undercover assassins (with a scary high-damage silenced pistol you can get for yourself if you take them out) that will try and pop you when you’re on an approach.
Add into this tight gear limits and the fact you don’t know who your targets will be, where they are or even where you’ll spawn in advance and it’s total chaos, with you having to wade in to try and get yourself the right disguise, the right weapon and work out how in the world you’re going to poison your target when he’s stood in the middle of a bank in front of four armed guards.
It feels like this is the best Hitman has ever been, and the fact that it’s slipped in at the end of IO’s World of Assassination experiment provides an instant reason for people to come on back and have another go. It feels like a great use of muscle memory – remembering where an exit is, the best place to get your hand on some explosives in a pinch, the nearest spot to hide a body – most players have built up through years of playing this. All of the tiny little details that you file away as you have been pulling at threads, finally finding a use.
It’s more flexible, too. Killing anyone who isn’t your target is still a bad thing, but there’s not really a push for Silent Assassin now if you don’t want to do it, and because death has real weight now, every now and again things will get awkward and you’ll have to work out what you’re going to do with a corridor full of bodies. These sorts of moments have always been part of the Hitman experience, but now you can’t merely get out of trouble by dying or loading a save. If you make a mistake here, you’re just going to have to live with it. The complications and consequences of this combine to make something sublime.
So hey, if you’ve ever played Hitman or you haven’t given it a go yet, it’s time to dive in. Hitman Freelancer is IO’s masterpiece, and it’s time to go freelance.
Hitman 3 is available on Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch and PC.