Hitman: Contracts Preview

Agent 47 wanders down the hall, gut-shot. The hit was strange; the target was waiting for him, and looked him in the eyes. Weakened, he stumbles into a hotel room, collapsing on the floor.

From seemingly nowhere, a .45 appears, coming to rest against the temple of the fallen man. The trigger is pulled. The body bounces, and the camera pulls back to reveal the face of the assassin – it’s Agent 47.

That is just the beginning of a wild ride in the Eidos Interactive and Io Interactive Xbox title, Hitman: Contracts. If you want action, if you want to feel you are walking the edge of a knife, with guns pointed at you from every direction, Hitman: Contracts may be just the shooter title you are looking for.

The game begins in Romania, in the year 2000, in an asylum. Insane would be one term for it – surreal would be another. There are bodies all over the place and it appears that, indeed, the inmates are running the asylum. Rather, inmates are hacking away at some of the survivors. The eerie thing is that most of the people in the asylum bear some semblance to Agent 47.

Soldiers move in, surrounding the asylum. Their command is direct and simple, surrender peacefully or you will die. Well, Agent 47 does not give himself up (and the game won’t let you for that matter).

Your choices are equally as simple, you can’t outgun the entire Romanian SWAT team, so you will have to rely on stealth, and letting the guards slip past in order to get through. Using disguises works only marginally. Perhaps it has to do with a SWAT officer running about with twin chrome .45s that give you away. But this is just the beginning of a game that is highly intriguing, fast-paced, action-filled and a whole lot of fun.

The game uses a new graphics engine, which really does a superlative job of rendering the brutal nature of Agent 47’s work. The rag-doll effect is in full motion, and is really highlighted when our favorite hitman drags a lifeless body across the floor, banging it into walls. While there is a lot of blood in this title, you will not see many smears of blood across the floor when you drag a body through a pool of its blood.

Oh, and hitting a target point-blank with a shotgun produces a very nice effect of the body getting blown back across the room.

The targeting controls seemed a little sluggish in the preliminary build, but the targeting is very forgiving on the lower difficulty levels. The game has three settings – normal, expert and professional. You will have to be very, very good to survive at the professional level in Hitman: Contracts.

You do get a map, which can help guide you through the myriad of passages in the maze of each level.

The game features some nice effects. For instance, if you round a corner, and into a group of enemies, and the game goes into slow motion, you know you are dead. Remember that scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where Butch and Sundance run out and the scene slows down as they face the entire army and are about to die. You will get that feeling here.

Hitman: Contracts is intense and from this early build seems to be a perfect title to carry the Hitman banner forward.