With Hitman GO, Square Enix Montreal took a huge gamble. Instead of simply adapting the series’ formula to work on touchscreen devices, the studio condensed it one step further, creating a board game that somehow managed to capture the very essence of Hitman.
Its latest game, Hitman: Sniper, is a much safer bet, eschewing stealthy puzzle-solving for an objective-based shooting gallery. It’s worth pointing out straight away that this isn’t a slapdash port of Sniper Challenge, the download-only prologue to 2012’s Hitman: Absolution, and although both games have a lot in common, Sniper also has plenty of nuance and is clearly a game that’s been designed specifically for mobile and tablet.
There’s no overarching narrative here or any meaningful sense of character development. As Agent 47, you are dispatched to a well guarded complex, your handler providing a constant feed of targets to whack. Although these targets will change between contracts, the environment remains the same and so do many of the guards’ AI patterns.
A typical contract will task players with eliminating a target while also performing one or two bonus actions. These can be to perform moving kills, headshot kills, double kills and so on, as well as clearing a certain score threshold. As soon as you’ve killed your primary mark, however, the mission will end and all points are tallied up before moving onto the next mission.
Through completing objectives, you’ll not only earn experience but weapon parts too. Dropped randomly after beating a contract, they come as parts of individual sets that, when combined, unlock new sniper rifles for Agent 47. Aside from better accuracy and larger ammo clips, each one has a cluster of active abilities such as x-ray vision or giving you a longer focus duration.
Regardless of which rifle you choose, they all handle pretty much the same and in a way that suits touchscreen devices. By swiping and pinching, you’ll be able to line up your crosshairs before tapping on-screens icons to shoot or temporarily slow time. It’s an intuitive layout and one that’s just as effective as using a traditional gamepad.
The first hour or so of Hitman: Sniper is a real treat. The more your return to the complex, the more you’ll notice hidden features while continually refining you assassination tactics. However, there will come a point at which you’ll begin to tire of the same map and the contracts and objectives that begin to repeat.
Still, at £3.99, it’s a decent slab of content to get through, enhanced by leaderboards and social interactivity. It also looks great too, from the way NPCs roam around the complex down to Agent 47’s flashy reload animation. It’s just a shame there aren’t more locales to explore.