This game is a 3 when you're fighting mummy-things in a crypt and an 8 when you're not. The crypt levels are a cringe idea, and the enemies are all absolute bullet sponges. At least with the robots in the later missions, you could run away and regain your bearings, but in a crypt every thing is so diarrhoea brown that you can't find a place to run away. Another dumb idea is that at the start of every new mission your health is the same as where it left off in the last mission, so God help you if you finished the last mission by the skin of your teeth only to find you have 3 waves of enemies at the start of the next mission before you can get just a sixth of your health back. Sometimes there's no choice but to revert to the Cheat Codes, it makes the game less stressful and makes you realise just how time-consuming killing just one enemy on normal difficulty really is. I definitely wouldn't be able to finish that boss-fight with the **** without them. The game still deserves some credit due to the realistic fighting with humans and the fun strategic dashing in and out of hallways required to kill them all. The best part of the game is definitely when you are racing against a countdown to stop the launch of a rocketship, and you are just blasting your way through enemies to pull a lever in the last 5 seconds before you fail. I did fail this bit once because the lever kind of blends in with the rest of the consoles in the room it's in, but I didn't mind doing that fun part again with more knowledge on how to retain some health. All in all, if you want the best of the game you'll find it in Mission 3 Part 2 (rocket base), and if you want the most infuriating experience on the original Xbox it won't be the stealth mission like everyone tells you (they are fine just go building by building) it'll be the latter half of Mission 2 when you're unloading ammo mindlessly into exploding mummys and Olaric. Good Luck!
I have a sprawling video game collection, have played hundreds of AAA games and plenty of AA's as well, but there's no game that even comes close to replicating the infectious tone on display in this one. The rainy day aspect of the whole game makes you realise how disturbing and crumby of a life Agent 47 lives, and the eerie atmosphere it brings makes you nervous to turn every dark corner, you just don't know what can happen. Of course, the negative aspect of the game being (now) elderly is that stepping out of line completely strips away the immersion because you are now in an unwinnable firefight with every NPC on the map, but unlike Hitman 2 all you want to do is follow the rules because at some points it does indeed feel like a movie, the atmosphere of classic missions like the Butcher or the Chinese Restaurant Massacre (among countless others of course) feeling like dreams when you look back at them, as 47 is doing in the game. Plus, the soundtrack by Jasper Kyd never gets annoying and throws you deeper into the level, unlike the menu chanting in the new Hitman 3. For its success in providing such an atmosphere, it deserves a 10.
