The Sun, Sea & Assassinations Of Hitman’s Second Episode

The opening episode of this year’s Hitman game was a pleasing return for the series. It brought the glitz and glamour of a Parisian fashion show to life in a grand building full of hundreds, if not thousands, of onlookers, and featured more than a few opportunities to make good on your contract killings in some of the best Hitman gameplay so far. While it was an entertaining environment that could be spun in a number of different ways, there was just a hint of this being more of a technological showcase than anything else.

The second episode set in Italy really broadens the level design. Where Paris was effectively just a big, layered box, Sapienza is a little more sprawling and feels like the sunny little coastal town that it is. The square in front of the mansion plunges down a small cobbled road, with the building lining the street showing signs of wear and tear, as the coloured paint makes way for the bare stone. It’s not long before you reach the seafront, with tourists gathering round a street performer and a church off to one side.

It’s a simply gorgeous setting and one that I happy to wander around and explore for far too long. You can duck into small side streets, head up and into some of the upstairs apartments, pop into cafe or a barbershop, and plenty more. It’s all an unassuming facade to a dark secret buried deep in the town’s bedrock.

Silvio Caruso is the target in this mission, a scientist who’s stem cell research is heading down a particularly dangerous path. He’s working to create DNA-specific viruses that can target specific people with absolute precision in a laboratory hidden underneath his mansion. The ICA have a vested interest in this – killing people is what keeps them in work, after all – but it’s also the right thing to do, to halt and sabotage the research efforts underway.

At the very least it shouldn’t get into the hands of the Ether Biotech Corporation, but even with Caruso out of the picture there’s a secondary target. Francesca De Santis is more than capable of carrying on his work, but she was sent by Ether to keep an eye on Caruso and to make sure he didn’t go off the rails.

So just as in the first episode, there are two targets to take out over the course of the mission, and Sapienza is littered with different ways of getting to them. Right off the bat there’s a car accident that you can make use of, just outside the town’s ruined castle archway. The flower delivery van was meant to deliver a wreath for Caruso’s mother’s grave, but now you can use this to get onto his mansion’s grounds. Alternatively, there’s a private investigator on the prowl, whose identity you might be able to assume to get closer to one of the targets.

The opportunities system returns, guiding novices step by step through a kill, or at least pointing you in the right direction. It’s useful to have those pointers, but I still felt that I was more actively planning this assassination than I had been in Paris. There, I felt like I was in the middle of a hit as soon as Agent 47 walked through the front gate, but here I had to find my own point of ingress into the grounds of Caruso’s heavily guarded mansion.

Beyond that, this level has been packed with the same kinds of broad content that will make it a pleasure to revisit and play in different ways. The Escalation contracts have a lot more interesting locations to make use of than before, and there’s some weird and wonderful disguises that you can make use of as well. Remember the street performer I mentioned from the seaside square? I easily frittered away the last 10-15 minutes of my hands on time trying to kill him, steal his costume and run away before the gun toting goons could gun me down. It didn’t go well, but there’s plenty of these opportunities for nonsensical (and cold blooded) play.

Whether you’ve tired of the first mission or are still finding new ways to make the most of the content on offer, it’s not long before this second episode is in your hands. It’s out in little over a week on April 26th, and for my money, it’s looking like a much bigger and better level than the first.