On CTT Day 1, I spent seventeen hours playing Freelancer, the longest time I’ve ever spent in any Hitman game consistently.
To start off, the gameplay loop to me didn’t seem at all that tedious, despite suffering from burnout of specific maps when I played them too much. Everything honestly just worked for me, and the idea that anything you do doesn’t matter, whether it was SA or killing everyone felt kinda like what I expected from Absolution, so it was cool to see it in play here.
Suppliers are amazing. I enjoy the notion that they don’t sell you gear you already own, which makes my current item hunt a lot easier. I love how if you’re a few merces short, and there’s a safe/courier on the map, they force me to go exploring the map further to try and afford an item. And a really cool detail I picked up on was they pretend to do random tasks if another NPC is nearby (at least the maid in the Dartmoor bedroom closet area and the waitress in the Paris cellar).
Safes are cool. The gameplay design doesn’t shine its hardest here, but I think that’s the point? Safes can be opened via clue-searching. When I did my first safe, I was a little confused about how it worked, but it was very basic so I picked up the clue search idea almost instantly. Not bad, but definitely not a highlight of any kind.
Couriers can be cool, but they need some serious reworking. On H3 maps, it’s not as much of an issue. But on H1/H2 maps where bananas aren’t on the map and you have the Silent Assassin prestige activated, it complicates everything. Most couriers are found directly in public with little chance to actually silently KO them without KOing five other people in the process.
Prestiges are weird. I like the prestige system, being rewarded for playing Silent Assassin or for doing creative kills seems like an honest true-to-form depiction of Hitman. But my only problem with it is that the prestiges don’t feel tailored for a specific person (such as suggesting an Icepick kill prestige when I don’t own an icepick), which doesn’t make full sense if they’re tailored for the map and situation.
Crates are kinda pointless. They did make the mode feel more like Ghost Mode, (which to IO’s credit, I did enjoy) but the lack of anything actually worth getting from the crates (on top of which you can’t bring back anything you get from them, except merces) deterred me from wanting to scour the map for every possible crate. I don’t want them to just instantly give you legendary-level stuff or anything, but I’d prefer there was a chance, albeit a small chance, to get items that were both available to bring back to the safehouse and potentially have a high rarity rating.
Assassins and lookouts on paper sound like really cool things, and sometimes they’re cool applied in the game. The gameplay loop definitely needed a spice-up from just the base enforcers, and there’s nothing spicier than bodyguards who can end you in seconds and added enforcers who, when you’re spotted, tell every suspect to GTFO. My problem is with the lookouts: my opinion of them shattered when I found they react the same way a Colorado target does when they compromise you, I was half expecting a quick phone animation or something that you could interrupt the lookout before sending the map into a giant frenzy to give me a chance in case of emergency. Also, the assassin gun looks and feels awesome to use.
(it’d also be cool if someone explained to me what it means when I haven’t done anything illegal and the ‘Assassin Alerted’ thing pops up)
Leader showdowns are meh. I think, like lookouts, having a bunch of suspects that you have to whittle down to find one sounds cool on paper. It’s not, especially when all the suspects are on different sides of a big map, you have to go back and forwards. However, I do enjoy the meetings and phones. While obviously not a giant conspiracy that involves itself heavily with the lore, I do enjoy listening to the dialogue of meeting members and having that sense of improvised eavesdropping.
To me, it’s fun. It does what it wants to do, which is to be engaging while maintaining a strong sense of replayability. The mode is one big Sisyphus’ Myth, where nothing you’ll do will ever matter to anyone or anything but you. It’s just one big skill improvement simulator. Very cool.
(Added notes: mastery track says Safehouse bedroom opens at Level 24, but it says it’s locked until Level 31, and you can hipfire a shotgun in the safehouse, if you want to open locked doors, but there is an invisible barricade in the doorway)
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