HITMAN World of Assassination review

 

  Ever so slowly but surely, the big, ambitious titles that dominate the conversation and experience of most people who consider themselves "gamers" are landing on the App Store.   It's impressive, no doubt, that a game like HITMAN World of Assassination can run as well it does on my iPad, but while I'm playing (and enjoying) it, I am also often wondering why someone would choose to experience this specific game on this specific platform, especially considering the fact that virtually nothing has been done to make this game easier to play in a mobile format.

Small time assassin

The Hitman games are all about setting up clockwork sandboxes that give you several different options for going about completing a contract killing. World of Assassination is a collection of the three most modern releases in the series, which generally just means things look nicer and some of the level designs push things to some of their most ridiculous or complicated limits.

The major innovation outside of that is the injection of a sort of battle pass that rates you on mission performance, awards experience, and grants you new ways to take on stages you already cleared when you level up. This, on top of a set of live content updates that create new challenges, add longevity to what otherwise mostly feels like a nicer-looking Hitman: Blood Money.

Killing mobile

Given my experience with other big console releases coming to iOS, I was prepared for some mobile-unfriendliness with HITMAN World of Assassination, but I was not quite as ready for this game to so vehemently fight against the biggest strengths of the platform. As with many of these kinds of games, the ideal way to play it is with a controller on a larger screen if you can (provided you have enough storage space available), but HITMAN World of Assassination adds the wrinkle of essentially requiring an internet connection to play.

While it is possible to play this game offline, that feels more like that is technically true than actually true. Case in point: I prepped everything with HITMAN World of Assassination before going on a flight by confirming the game unlock and predownloading a bunch of levels only to login in "offline" mode but be told I couldn't access any of the levels until I could connect to the internet to verify the in-app purchase activating the whole game.

On the return flight, I actually managed to circumvent this (by having the game already started and suspended in a level in offline mode in advance), but then I ran into problems where levels I had marked for download had seemingly been offloaded automatically.

The one true strength of a mobile port should be its portability, and I think it's more than safe to say you basically have to play HITMAN World of Assassination in non-mobile conditions for it to work at all.

Botched attempt

I wish I could also say HITMAN World of Assassination was a great experience when playing in ideal conditions, but even on a larger-screen device with a controller and internet connection, there are some issues that hamper the experience. The most annoying one that crops up seemingly once a session is a bizarre bug that switches my controller analog sticks from controlling Agent 47 to the viewport of the screen. If I restart my controller, things work properly again, but it is an annoying thing to have to do.

I've also had times where the framerate drops or the in-game lighting temporarily gets way too dark/bright, but the speed of the action in this game has never made these things feel like a huge deal. I'd be remiss not to mention a single instance of the game hard crashing to the home screen, though that obviously seems like something that may only happen rarely.

It certainly would have sucked if that happened while playing on my flight, as I'd imagine I would just have to stop playing it completely at that point!

The bottom line

I keep searching for a use-case for buying and playing HITMAN World of Assassination specifically on iOS, and the only one I can really think of is a scenario where the only game-playing devices you own are mobile ones. Otherwise, I could imagine having a likely better experience just playing these games over something like Steam Link, provided you'd prefer to play somewhere that isn't on a couch or at a desk.

At its core, this game isn't much more than Hitman: Blood Money with added bells and whistles, and those additions--quite frankly--make playing it on iOS much more painful.