With less than two weeks until we get our hands on Hitman 2, IO Interactive has released a live-action launch trailer detailing some of the more imaginative weapons you'll use to take out your targets, including an explosive rubber duck, a heavy bag of sugar and a wet fish.

The trailer stars Sean Bean, who will be the game's first Elusive Target, meaning you get one chance—and one chance only—to kill his character in a 10-day time period. In the new trailer, above, Agent 47 manages to slip some poison into Bean's glass, but there will undoubtedly be plenty of other ways to take him out.

Some of the kills in the trailer, such as the deadly fish slap, have already featured in other videos, but the variety on display is impressive nonetheless. You can flush a target's head down the toilet school bully-style, fling frying pans at them or electrocute them with some faulty wiring. Oh, and you'll be able to dress up in a giant flamingo costume, because of course you will.

After playing an early build,  Samuel said the game's levels "feel like the series at its peak", while he said the new 1v1 multiplayer mode had "a lot of potential".

Hitman 2 is out November 13.

Io Interactive has spoken with Gamespot about its split from Square Enix last year, which "decided to withdraw from the business" despite the studio's success with Hitman. Associate director Eskil Mohl told the site that "it's sort of a miracle" that Io is still around, but said that the layoffs it was forced to undergo as a result of its unexpected independence has helped the remaining team members pull together.

Square Enix announced that it was divesting itself of Io Interactive in May 2017, a moment Mohl described as, "Oh shit, we're flying over the Atlantic and we don't have enough gas to get there. So what the hell do we do?" 

Fortunately, Square did Io the kindness of setting it free rather than putting it down, and let it take the Hitman property with it on the way out. Layoffs followed, but the studio was able to keep the lights on, continue supporting Hitman, and keep up work on Hitman 2, which will be published by Warner.   

"We had to let a lot of people go. But that made the team that was left really come together [and say] 'Let's do this, we believe in the product.' We were already working on Hitman 2 and then this thing happened," Mohl said.   

"It sort of unified us in a way. Yeah, it's been super hard, but its always a lot of work, but it's fun work. It really made us go, 'Yeah, we can do it!'" 

And despite the turbulence caused by the split, it sounds like things between Square Enix and Io Interactive are amicable. "I have to say, after Square left us, they've been extremely nice to us," Mohl said. "They had to focus on other stuff, so that was fair."

Hitman 2 is set to come out on November 13. Job one is Sean Bean: You will probably kill him, and he will probably not stay dead. 

Following in the footsteps of actor pal Gary Busey, Hitman 2's first Elusive Target is Sean Bean. 

That's right, the man who's made a career out of appearing briefly in things you like—see: Game of Thrones, the Silent Hill movie and All The Memes—will meet his maker in Miami, assuming you're up to the task. 

Here's a teaser:

Like previous Elusive Targets, players get one chance to kill their prey within a limited time frame. Starring as one Mark Faba, you have just ten days to take out Bean. Named 'The Undying', the mission rolls out on November 20.

Last week, Samuel wrote about how Hitman 2's multiplayer mode lets you compete for silent kills across two timelines. Likewise, he reckons its new levels feel like the series at its peak. Here's an extract from the latter which I enjoyed, including words from IO Interactive community manager Travis Barbour:

Not releasing the levels episodically means there's some welcome mystery to the other four locations in Hitman just a month before release—we've still only seen less than half of them. "We do have a plan for how many we're going to reveal, but we're not going to show too many more," Barbour explains. "We [have] six locations, and we've shown two. Miami, people have seen a lot of. Colombia, people will start to see some of. And the rest, we don't really want to show in too much detail. But I think it's important to let people know what they are in for, what's coming up. So we will have some things that will allude to the locations and show them very quickly."   

Hitman 2 is due November 13, 2018.   

Last Friday, as well as letting me try out Hitman 2's impressively detailed Colombia level, IO also revealed that a surprise multiplayer mode is coming to the sequel. No, you're not going around a level trying to work out who the mystery target is like in Assassin's Creed's old multiplayer mode—although that would be rad in Hitman. You're instead trying to take out the random target flagged on your HUD before the other player does, without being caught. The first to five silent kills wins.

There are a couple of twists to this, though. The two timelines can interact with each other through an item called a 'ghost coin'. Since you can see what the other player is up to in the game at all times, you can make a guard in their timeline move elsewhere using this coin, which might scupper an attempt to get a perfect kill. There's also an item crate system: removing a weapon from a crate means the other player won't have access to it, so maybe it pays to find one of these earlier in the game, and narrow your rival's options. 

I played the mode last Friday, and honestly, it was hard to get a grasp on it for a couple of reasons, but it has serious promise for hardcore players. In my game, I was playing against a video presenter man who seemed to rush most of his assassination attempts, and got caught in the act multiple times. I was then given 20 seconds to execute each failed target before the new target appeared, but of course in Hitman, 20 seconds isn't a long time to wait for that target to get into a secluded spot. The game kept resetting, and almost every time I waited patiently or went off to find some weapons to help speed up the process, the other player seemed to mess up and the game would reset. In about 30 minutes, we each got one clean kill. It was a little annoying.

The other key factor is, since we were playing the mode within Hitman 2's Miami racetrack level, not knowing the level layout is a hindrance. If the next target spawns halfway across the environment, it really helps to know the different routes under the track and around the venue, which I didn't after having just played Miami for an hour before at Gamescom. You respawn if you're killed in this mode, but any disguise you were wearing when you were killed won't be effective. You also get penalised for killing non-targets. 

My particular demo was a little fraught, then, but I think this mode is a really cool idea with a lot of potential. For experienced Hitman players, this could represent the ultimate challenge of your understanding of a given stage and how the series' stealth systems work. While Ghost Mode will first launch for Miami, the plan is to add it to every other stage in Hitman 2, as well as the levels in the 'World of Assassination'—that is, levels from 2016's Hitman. 

The main question I had for Travis Barbour, IO's community manager, is how the target spawning works. Presumably, each one has a definite solution for a silent kill, and therefore can't be randomly generated. Otherwise, the mode wouldn't work. "The way that the targets work in Ghost Mode, to the best of my current knowledge, is that there are a large number of set scenarios for the target. If you play it repeatedly, you will know that there is a target in the garage who has one bodyguard, and that target will always be there. Every time you start, it's random from that pool of targets you have, so you can't repeatedly play Ghost Mode and master what to do the whole time, because you'll start somewhere and the targets are different. But the target scenarios are the same."

I look forward to seeing if Ghost Mode leads to broader, more ambitious plans for multiplayer in the series down the line. The levels are certainly detailed enough to support it, and anything that gives players more excuses to spend time in these places suits me.

Above: this is from the PS4 version of the game.

Agent 47 is crouched in a meeting room, hiding by a door and waiting for a target to walk in and get electrocuted by an elaborate trap I've set up. I've exposed a live wire, and made a water machine leak, and now I'm just waiting for the right moment for my cartel target, Andrea Martinez, to wander in, check out the leak and meet a dreadful end. 

Unfortunately, her guard notices the leak first, and walks in to investigate. Sod it, I think. I'll turn on the plug anyway. I electrocute the guard, take his outfit, then tail Andrea around her headquarters until she decides to wander back down to the meeting room. When she walks in to investigate the half-naked guard's fried body, I choke Martinez, snap her neck, climb through the window and hop over the creaky wall I used as my entrance. 

Such messy encounters are how Hitman levels typically play out for me on the first attempt, while I'm learning enemy patterns and how the level is structured. I can't promise my next attempt at Hitman 2's Colombia-set level, Santa Fortuna, would've been much better, but discovering a new backdrop is as fun here as it was in 2016's episodic affair. 

I've played a more-or-less complete run through the two revealed Hitman 2 levels now, including the Miami racetrack revealed at E3. If you loved how lavish Io made the levels last time—with entirely different-feeling districts, opportunities, chatty NPCs and little stories playing out in the same space—then this is similarly dazzling. The jungle-based Santa Fortuna is broken up into two main areas: a slightly ramshackle village neighbouring an enormous Delgado cartel mansion, where the mission's other two targets are waiting for you. This mansion is separated by a bridge, which has a Jabba's palace-style sentry and enormous gates keeping you out. Luckily, Agent 47 can climb vines around the right-hand side of the wall, letting him hop into the heavily guarded gardens.

One of the two additional targets is Rico Delgado, who wanders from the swimming pool of the mansion to his guarded office, and the other is Jorge Franco, who's making a new drug in his nearby factory. My dispatch of the latter was a pretty over-the-top affair. With five minutes to go until my time with the game was over, I garrotted him in a shed without realising a guard had spotted me through a window. I then had to shoot my way out, fending off guards wearing those Breaking Bad-style overalls that I recognise as the uniforms of people who make drugs for a living (see the screenshot above).

I see a bunch of escape methods: wandering peacefully out of the mansion wearing a sicario uniform, which I wear for a while while tracking Rico, and another via a speedboat on a beautiful nearby lake. In a preview demo like this, it's hard to get a sense of all the different ways in and out of the place, but like Sapienza or Hitman's other best levels, I can see myself spending at least five hours here unpicking all the different methods, costumes and related secrets. 

This comes from a studio that knows its fans extremely well at this point. If 2016's Hitman gave you everything you'd wanted from the series since Blood Money, this is very much more of the same so far. That might be deliberate in the case of the Colombia level—some bigger twists on the formula are waiting deeper into the game. "Colombia is quite traditional, in a sense, that you have the targets and know where they are on a map," explains Io's community manager Travis Barbour. "There are some locations where we mix that up a little bit. There's more options in terms of how you approach the level, and you're not always just searching for targets. There's other elements involved in the locations as well."

Not releasing the levels episodically means there's some welcome mystery to the other four locations in Hitman just a month before release—we've still only seen less than half of them. "We do have a plan for how many we're going to reveal, but we're not going to show too many more," Barbour explains. "We [have] six locations, and we've shown two. Miami, people have seen a lot of. Colombia, people will start to see some of. And the rest, we don't really want to show in too much detail. But I think it's important to let people know what they are in for, what's coming up. So we will have some things that will allude to the locations and show them very quickly." 

My remaining fear for Hitman 2 is that, given the drama around Square Enix dropping the series last year, it's now being wedged in the release calendar between Red Dead Redemption 2 on consoles and Fallout 76 when it arrives next month. On the evidence of what I've played so far, Agent 47 will once again deserve a lot of attention, but it's arriving at what will probably be a challenging time for any game that isn't enormous. I hope it doesn't get lost. 

Today, Io Interactive has announced that Hitman 2 has gone gold ahead of its November 13 release date. If you've somehow not encountered this term before, it basically means full development is finished and that physical copies of the game are ready to be manufactured for shipping. 

Obviously that last part doesn't mean much on PC, but it's a handy milestone to remind you that the game isn't far off. We've so far had a look at two of the six levels in the new Hitman: a Miami racetrack, where at Gamescom I beat a guy to death with his own didgeridoo, and the Colombian jungle which was revealed earlier this week. I sort of hope they don't show any others before release, and preserve the surprise for launch. My impression of Miami, though, despite the demo mostly being guided, is that it's as packed with amazing detail and possibilities as 2016's Hitman. 

My slight fear is that releasing Hitman 2 in proximity to Fallout 76—the day before—will bury what's probably going to be a great game, when it might not have hurt to release it in January when we'll likely be starved for new things to play. 

But hey, I'm no market expert. I'm just a guy who wants to beat another guy to death with his own didgeridoo. 

Warner Bros and Io Interactive have released a new trailer for Hitman 2, giving us more detail about the Colombian jungle level that we got a glimpse of a few weeks ago.

In the above trailer, we are introduced to Santa Fortuna, a small village in an idyllic location—an excellent holiday spot, providing you can ignore the loitering gunmen and dodgy dealings. Unluckily for you, it seems you won't have time to relax, as it seems Agent 47 has been deployed there to deal with three cartel leaders.

Along with the lush backdrop of the Colombian rainforest, we get to see caves and ruins and other locations, ripe with kill possibilities. In fact, the video gives us a glimpse at some of the ways you'll be able take out enemies, such as stealth takedowns, the use of the environment—gas canisters or, from the looks of it, pretty much anything that isn't tied down can be used for murder. Agent 47 also throws a hammer. It's your usual wholesome Hitman stuff. 

We heard more about Hitman 2's creative kills and immersive qualities last month, including Agent 47 killing a man with a fish.

HItman 2 is set for release on November 13.