Hitman (2016)
Hitman is a 2016 shooter video game made by IO Interactive.
Agent 47 returns in a season structured as a series of episodes, each dropping him into a single, enormous location built for maximum replayability. Paris during a fashion show. A coastal Italian village. Marrakech during civil unrest. Each map is a sandbox puzzle where the target moves through a routine and the player finds the seams. The World of Assassination arc uses a spy-thriller frame but the real pleasure is the systems: the disguise logic, the accident kills, the escalating challenges that ask you to complete a hit with one hand tied behind your back.
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Hitman in our writing
- Games: 3 Million Copies Sold, Still in the Red: 007 First Light Is the AAA Crisis in One Number
- Companion guide: Assassins & Hitmen
- Companion guide: Secret Societies
- Companion guide: Shapeshifters
A few thoughts on Hitman
The Day of the Jackal TV series captures the same methodical, surveillance-heavy planning process of a professional working through hostile environments undetected. Polar strips the genre to a similar aesthetic coldness.
Contract killers and bounty hunters who never miss
Hitman is built around a professional who studies a target's routine and finds the one moment it breaks. The Day of the Jackal and Polar follow assassins with that same cold patience, The Punisher: One Last Kill and The Mandalorian and Grogu trade suits for guns-for-hire grit, and Assassination Classroom turns the premise into a sharp, funny school thriller.
Spies working undercover in glamorous, dangerous cities
Agent 47's disguise work turns Hitman into a spy game as much as an action one, and these picks share that same undercover thrill. Mata Hari lived the real version as a WWI-era spy, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: Ghost War and Agent Kim Reactivated send agents into hostile territory, and Largo Winch runs a parallel game of corporate intrigue across glamorous cities.
Puzzle-box worlds where every target has a routine to exploit
Every Hitman map is a system to read: a target's habits, the guards' patrol lines, the one gap in the routine. Portal and Portal 2 reward that same kind of environmental problem-solving, Red Dead Redemption 2 builds its world from NPCs living out full daily schedules, and Sherlock Holmes turns observation itself into the puzzle.