Hitman Go Review

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The bald and barcoded professional assassin, Agent 47, has cleverly killed his way through five installments of the Hitman series for the past 14 years. Hitman Go (available now for iOS devices and coming soon to Android) takes the core puzzle-solving of the series and renders it down into a smart, turn-based mobile puzzler.

You’ll still have weapons, hiding places, disguises, shortcuts, and items you can use to distract a variety of enemy types. But this time around, the action takes place one turn at a time as you move and then enemies respond in patterns unique to their type. Runners move back and forth along a preset path while the seemingly paranoid knife-wielders spin 180 degrees each turn, constantly checking their backs. You need to either avoid or eliminate these opponents and make your way to the exit (and the next level). Every few completed levels will bring you to a board that has a specific assassination target that you must take down to achieve success.

Hitman GO is a simple to play, but difficult to master turn-based strategy game set in a stunning interpretation of the Hitman universe. You will strategically navigate fixed spaces on a grid to avoid enemies and take out your target or infiltrate well-guarded locations.

Above: You choose levels from a screen like this, and then the camera zooms in.

What you’ll like

It teaches you without holding your hand

Hitman Go expertly teaches you how to play, how to use new objects, and how to deal with new types of enemies, all without using a single word or presenting you with any formal tutorial. You’ll encounter each new element gradually, and near the end, you’ll have to combine everything you learned to complete your objectives. I’m sure anyone who’s had to suffer through an unskippable hour of learning the controls on a console game will appreciate how Hitman Go teaches you without insulting your intelligence.

Bonus objectives encourage multiple playthroughs with different solutions

Verydice hack generator. Aside from the first handful of stages, each level in Hitman Go has at least three objectives. The first is always the completion of the level, but the second two can vary. Some of these include things such as completing the level in a certain number of turns or less, eliminating all enemies, not killing any enemies, or retrieving a briefcase that’s usually placed in a dangerous area. This encourages you both to play each level more than once and to find alternate solutions, which greatly adds to the replayability.

Above: An example of some of the varied objectives for each level.

Crisp, inventive presentation

Hitman Go features a pleasant and clever board game presentation that has you moving what appears to be miniature playing pieces through diorama-style levels. It’s a unique and well-done aesthetic that I don’t recall seeing before, and it fits the theme and style of the gameplay perfectly. The levels are cohesive, and each one features a part of the larger whole as you navigate down streets, through houses, and around tennis courts. Even the level-select screen is consistent with the stages you explore, giving you a zoomed-out view of the game world as a whole.

What you won’t like

Bonus objectives are not completely optional

Since you must complete a certain number of objectives to unlock the next set of levels, finding alternate solutions isn’t always optional. Hitman Go forces you to play through levels more than once, which may be frustrating for some people as they try to avoid stages that they find particularly difficult or just plain annoying.

Trial and error may turn off some players

Even though the effects of weapons and objects and the patterns of various enemies are not difficult to learn, some levels just boil down to a repetitive exercise of trial and error. Most players will likely find one or two stages where the solution isn’t intuitively obvious. When this happens, your only recourse is just to keep trying over and over until you find the solution through brute force. Since you cannot progress to the next level until you find at least one solution to the previous one, some people may find this a bit tedious at times. While Hitman Go does provide you with a limited number of hints (read: turn-by-turn solutions), once you exhaust these first five, your only recourse to obtain more is through an in-app purchase.

Cthulhu virtual pet codes generator. Above: Those guns up top look useful, but which three enemies should you shoot?

Conclusion

Hitman Go is a smart and well-designed puzzle game that proves being an assassin can be fun, even in a meticulous, turn-based way. The variety of enemies and gameplay additions, gradually introduced, keep the action fresh until the end, and the numerous but short levels with multiple objectives make this a great mobile experience. Even if you’re not familiar with the Hitman series, I’d consider giving this clever and enjoyable excercise in murderous problem solving at least one shot.

Score: 85/100

Hitman Go is available now on iOS devices. An Android version is coming soon. The publisher provided GamesBeat with an iOS download code for the purposes of this review.

A Hitman themed puzzler with a boardgame aesthetic.Developer: Square Enix MontrealPublisher: Square EnixRelease: Out nowExpect to pay: £6.49/$8Reviewed on: Windows 10, 8GB RAM, i5-3570k, GeForce GTX 970Multiplayer: NoneLink:Hitman GO: Definitive Edition is the PC port of a mobile puzzler. Wait, don't close the page. It's certainly no Blood Money, but this Hitman spin-off isn't as throwaway as that opening sentence would suggest. For one thing, this is no match-three time waster. GO is a proper puzzle game, filled with handcrafted levels and varied design.You play as Agent 47, in a fashion.

He's the playing piece on a series of extravagant game boards, (and so about as stiff as Timothy Olyphant in the Hitman movie). You move 47 across the grid lines etched into these boards, navigating around guards and towards the exit square. GO's presentation is sumptuous.

Each board is a detailed diorama, full of incidental detail around its main puzzle elements. There are gardeners pruning bushes, workmen carrying toolkits, and even a wedding guest mourning his lost love.The difficulty is in the layout of the grid pattern, and the guards that patrol it. Movement is turn-based, and each guard behaves differently based on the colour of their jacket. Blue guards stay in the same spot, and only attack if 47 moves directly in front of them.

Yellow guards patrol back and forth across the grid, and are frequently the most challenging part of any level they appear in.In many of the levels, 47 can win through movement alone. To take an enemy out, you must approach from the side or behind – knocking that piece off the board. That's not always possible, and so positioning is key.

You're often asked to identify and unravel the one weak spot in a level's defence. In addition, some levels contain specific tools. Find a piece of trash on the board, and you can throw it to distract nearby guards. Trapdoors allow 47 to teleport between different squares. Later, weapons and disguises appear, and broaden the possibility space in some interesting ways.It's cleverly constructed and satisfying to play, and each chapter introduces enough new puzzle elements and guard types to keep things fresh throughout.

For this reason, GO is a good puzzle game. It's not quite a great one, though. For one thing, it's a bit too easy. Once you've got a feel for the basics, even the most elaborate of guard patterns does little to ramp up the challenge.Some additional difficulty is provided by each level's bonus objectives.

These are drawn from a standard template: retrieve the briefcase from a specific square, kill all the guards, don't kill any guards, or finish in a set number of moves. There are two per level, and often they're mutually exclusive. This is fine when they heighten the challenge – retrieving the briefcase tends to require an extra step in your process that justifies the effort.

Other times, they feel like padding. In one level, it was necessary for me to kill all but one guard to reach the end. Not killing the final, optional guard got me one bonus objective.

To get the other, I simply had to do the same thing again, but move the additional two squares to kill him. That's not a puzzle. It's busywork.The Definitive Edition's PC disguise also struggles to cover GO's mobile origins. To move 47, you click, hold and drag the mouse in the direction you want him to go.

As a swipe gesture that makes sense, but, on PC, why not just click where you want him to move like in every other turn-based game? Still, it's only a mild irritation. Hitman GO is a competent puzzler with a subtly beautiful aesthetic. It's mostly fixed solutions may seem like a poor fit for the Hitman series, but it wears the theme well and, while it could benefit from being more taxing, still offers an enjoyably and satisfying set of challenges.