Jan 2, 2019

The best levels, maps, and locations 2018

HITMAN™ 2

This year we've been to ancient Greece, the 1940s, New York City, a rural fever dream reimagining of the UK, several boats, and the Moon, of course. 2018's games have spoiled us with vivid new worlds to explore, so we decided to round up the smartest and prettiest places we've visited this year in a feature we like to call 'The best levels, maps, and locations 2018'. Let's start with...

Miami, Hitman 2

I've spent the most time in Miami from Hitman 2 so far, optimising my route through the level to knock my pals off the leaderboard (it's pretty much the only level where I've managed to do this). It's a gorgeous sprawl, and like Paris from Hitman 2016, you're playing it in the midst of a live event—a formula one race. It's a touch easier than most of the other Hitman levels, but it's among the nicest spaces to spend time in. In completing every mission story, I operated a food truck, set some fireworks to kill, told a robot to murder a guy for me, sabotaged a car, and pushed one target off a roof onto the other. I also killed Sean Bean in a toilet in Miami. Good times. Hitman is the greatest. —Samuel Roberts

Twisted Steel, Battlefield 5

I’m not afraid to admit that, when it comes to multiplayer maps, I love a gimmick. Whether it’s the symmetrical towers of Facing Worlds or the bridge connecting the two bases in 2Fort, I always enjoy a map built around an idea like this. So this is perhaps the main reason why I love Twisted Steel, an enormous map featured in Battlefield V, so much.

Set in war-torn France, this swampy expanse is dominated by an enormous bridge—part of which has dramatically collapsed. Below the bridge is a dense, marshy forest for skirmishing in, but it’s on the structure itself where the most exciting firefights inevitably take place, around the two capture points placed strategically at either end of it.

When the enemy has control of the bridge, wrestling it back from them is a really satisfying challenge. Its elevated position gives snipers a great vantage point on the swamp and scattered buildings below, but the bridge itself is strewn with rubble and wrecks, providing just enough cover to push through and claw it back. —Andy Kelly

The Moon, Prey: Mooncrash

I think I spent more time on Prey's version of the Moon than many real-world places I actually like this year. This unusual roguelike expansion tasks you with finishing the game in multiple ways, ending at different places with a specific character. It's a surprisingly huge space—but it's clever in the small ways it changes between resets of the game. A staircase you needed might vanish, meaning you need to find a new way up. The enemy types will change depending on how high the alien threat level is. That door to the tram that was real handy in your last playthrough? It's on fire now. Across all of its games from both studios, Arkane build world class environments—Mooncrash is imperfect and slightly too gruelling to be as fun as the main game, but it allows the designers to play with the parameters of the level in fascinating ways. —Samuel Roberts

Righteous Stand, Warhammer: Vermintide 2

I've picked the opening to Vermintide 2 partly because it's the level I've spent the most time in from the game so far—mostly because the game was so damn hard when it launched, we had to grind at it over and over again (Fatshark later patched it to be a lot kinder). Compared to the first game's rote objectives and repetitive spaces, though, playing this with the PC Gamer crew was quite the experience: this sprawling city offers quite the view, as well as a number of huge-feeling set pieces. An early nervous encounter in a courtyard is particularly dramatic, since it's the first time you're swarmed from all sides in the game. And the finale—slowly waiting for your exit to emerge from the ground in a big castle while being attacked by rats from every possible angle—feels bigger than anything in the first game. Although, reading that last sentence back, I could pretty much be describing any Vermintide level, there. —Samuel Roberts

Fort Deadlight, Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire

When charismatic orlan pirate Serafen joins your crew in Deafire, he reveals the location of a pirate leader who you have a special interest in killing: a criminal hangout called Fort Deadlight. And it’s here where the game’s best quest takes place. If you’re feeling brave you can fight your way through the fort, but it’s much more fun to slip in undetected and blend in with the other pirates there. Talking to them reveals clues about your target’s routine, his weaknesses, and suddenly you’re playing a Hitman level.

There are numerous ways to locate and kill him, and the sprawling, maze-like fort is filled with alternate routes, hidden paths, and NPCs. It’s a brilliantly designed quest, and the location itself is wonderfully vast and intricate. It’s proof that a game doesn’t have to be in three dimensions to create an interesting play space. And the sheer number of ways to complete the quest make for some superb role-playing, including hiring some prisoners to steal your target’s prize ship right from under his nose. —Andy Kelly

The Obra Dinn, Return of the Obra Dinn

This is probably the smallest location on our list, but one of the richest and most powerfully immersive. As you explore this stricken merchant ship a storied past begins to emerge, painting a vivid picture of both everyday life, and the horrors that befell it. The fact that we see the mundane day-to-day activities of the crew makes the moments when tentacles start flailing, flintlocks start firing, and people start dying even more impactful.

Even with that gorgeous 1-bit art style, the ship is remarkably detailed. It’s all in the animation and sound: the creak of the wood, waves lapping at the hull, gas lamps rocking in the wind. The ship feels alive, despite the fact that absolutely everyone is dead. And the more secrets you uncover with your magical pocket watch, the darker your presence there begins to feel. More videogames set on ships, please. —Andy Kelly

Temple of Aphrodite, Assassin's Creed Odyssey

Although the settings in the Assassin’s Creed series have always been romanticised and exaggerated to a point, Odyssey is Ubisoft’s most dramatic and imaginative departure from historical accuracy yet. This is not the ancient Greece of the history books, but of myths and legends. It almost feels like a fantasy setting in places, with towering statues of the gods dominating the skyline and temples perched atop impossibly high mountains. One of which, in the Korinthia region, is the magnificent, colourful Temple of Aphrodite.

Appropriately enough for Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, this is one of the prettiest locations in the whole game. Her grand temple is draped in vibrant pink tapestries, the walls are covered in lavish, dramatic murals, and gleaming white marble statues line the streets around it. It’s the mythical ancient Greece you imagine when you read stories about the era, and I was more than a little awestruck when I stumbled into the temple complex by accident while exploring the map aimlessly on my horse. —Andy Kelly

The Dreaming City, Destiny 2

Why were the Awoken slumming it on the Reef when they had this beautiful rainbow palace hidden away all along? Destiny 2: Forsaken’s endgame zone is designed to provide shifting challenges across a month. Secret dungeons move around week to week, and you can hop through dimensional portals to slip between two instances of the zone.

The dreaming part of the city looks like an alien heaven—it’s all marble plazas, glittering interiors, and spinning orreries. The nightmare part feels abandoned and apocalyptic, and overrun by the dark spheres that characterise Taken infestation. The Hive are there too, somehow, burrowing into the mountains to perform their rituals. The Dreaming City doesn’t feel as dangerous or weird as the Hive Dreadnought, but it’s one of the prettiest locations in all of Destiny and Destiny 2—and that’s really saying something. Bungie is so good at awe-inspiring space stuff, and along with the underused Titan Arcology, this is some of the team’s finest work. —Tom Senior

Japan, Yakuza 0

The weird, brilliant Yakuza series has finally punched its way to PC, and this prequel features two beautiful, atmospheric slices of Japanese cities to explore: Kamurocho in Tokyo and Sotenbori in Osaka. Based on Kabukichō in Tokyo and Dotonbori in Osaka, both perfectly capture the feeling of being in a busy Japanese city, and the 1980s setting is brilliantly fleshed out with era-appropriate tech and fashion.

It’s the neon signs, and the /density/ of them, that catch the eye. Both cities are incredibly busy, cluttered, and packed with incidental details, with glowing, colourful advertisements seemingly filling every inch of the screen. But beyond the visuals, this setting is absolutely heaving with weird, interesting, and often slightly disturbing individuals to meet and complete quests for. It’s a compelling and hilarious caricature of ‘80s Japan. —Andy Kelly

Yokosuka, Shenmue I and II

From the bustling Dobuita high street to the sleepy suburbs of Sakuragaoka, Shenmue’s slice of 1980s Japan is one of my favourite videogame settings of all time. And I was glad to see the remaster stick faithfully to the original game’s art style, only boosting the resolution and adding a few tasteful bloom lighting effects. Because despite the relatively simple geometry, the atmosphere of this place is incredible—especially when winter sets in and the snow starts to fall, piling up on the streets, painting the streets white.

It’s more than just the lighting, ambient sound design, and grounded architecture that draw you into this world—the routines of its citizens do too. The more you play, the more the place starts to feel like home. You know that, if you walk past Funny Bear Burger in the afternoon, you’ll see Ryuji Tatsumi from the thrift store eating his lunch. It creates a sense of place, of community, that few games can boast. And also the sensation that this is a world that exists and operates whether you’re there to see it or not. —Andy Kelly

The Coral Highlands, Monster Hunter: World

It’s hard to separate Monster Hunter’s levels from the creatures that live there. When I think of the Coral Highlands the first image that springs to mind is a giant inflating bat. The sacred furry wyvern Paolumu is perfectly at home among the pink coral fronds. As it inflates in self defence, it starts floating around and bumping into things like a panicked bubble. When you track it back to its lair there’s a long convenient vine dangling in the centre of the arena. I dutifully climbed it and secured a jump attack onto the bat’s back for a mean kill.

The game’s most pleasant monsters come to live in the Coral Highlands. The zone is heavily tiered. In the lower areas you find cool little dinos like the Tzitzi-Ya-Ku, with its flashing mantle. In the upper reaches Legiana has its eyrie. Hunting the glorious ice dragon feels like murdering a Swan, but that’s the Coral Highlands for you. You’re a vandal in a pristine slice of paradise. Enjoy it while you can, because after this it’s the Rotten Vale, and that place is full of total bastards. —Tom Senior

Oregon, American Truck Simulator

After the dry, dusty deserts of Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona, Oregon is a breath of fresh mountain air. This expansion for SCS’ latest trucking sim adds the Beaver State to the map, giving you the opportunity to haul heavy cargo through pine forests, mountain trails, and sleepy rural towns. It’s one of the Czech developer’s finest creations to date, showing just how far its world-building has developed over the last few years.

My heart still belongs to Euro Truck Simulator 2, but this is an exciting glimpse at the variety of terrain we might get to experience down the line. ETS2 has grown massively since release, adding Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and parts of Russia, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see this map take a similar route. I’m still dreaming of being able to drive coast to coast, but Oregon is more than enough for now. —Andy Kelly

New York City, Unavowed

You’ve seen New York City in a thousand games before, but what makes Unavowed special is that it makes this familiar setting feel brand new. This is a dark, atmospheric, and uncanny vision of the city, with blood red skies and an otherworldly, unsettling feeling permeating every graffiti-covered street, alleyway, and rattling subway train.

I’m not normally a fan of when fantasy is married with the contemporary, but it’s so tastefully done in Unavowed that I couldn’t help but be swept up in the setting and story. It has the shadowy, mysterious feel of a film noir, but that vivid colour palette, all fiery reds and oranges, sets it apart from other games in the genre. —Andy Kelly

Edinburgh, Forza Horizon 4

It must have insufferable to drive through Edinburgh with me, as one co-op buddy had to when we headed up north in Forza Horizon 4. I don’t get to see many of the places I’ve lived in games, aside from a few with levels set in Dubai, and certainly not facsimiles as detailed as Scotland’s very lovely capital. It’s wild. Every street made me yell and whoop like I’d just seen the most incredible thing. “I used to get stuck in traffic here every day,” I’d shout with delight. It’s not just the big monuments like Edinburgh Castle, whole chunks of the city have been recreated. It was all a bit trippy.

I lived in Edinburgh for 11 years, first moving there for university, so it’s a city absolutely full of memories—most of the first few years are a haze, admittedly. I left four years ago, so my drive through the city was a nostalgic one, full of detours and stops as I went on a catch-up tour. It’s a bit fantastical. There’s a volcano named after King Arthur a short walk from the centre of town—my old flat was right opposite it—and next to it are cliffs that look like a gargantuan wall constructed by giants. It’s a hell of a place to drive through. —Fraser Brown

E3M4: Crypt of the Flash, Dusk

Dusk is a trove of excellent and surprising level design, but my favorite might be E3M4: Crypt of the Flash for its total tonal shift. After falling from a great height into a darkened crypt, your flashlight goes out, and chances are you spent almost all your ammo thinning out the crowds of cultists in their underground village from the level prior. With almost no light and a thin arsenal, Crypt of the Flash is a tiny pocket of survival horror in an otherwise swift and violent shooter.

Viscous moans echo in the dark as you tip-toe through narrow tunnels in search of the hidden keys and buttons that’ll give you a way out. But that moaning is coming from somewhere, and the thin, pallid, puking things making that sound have some good hiding spots and don’t go down easily. It’s a jarring change of pace, but a welcome one with some genuine scares. And a secret exit. If you find a toilet (I know, a toilet in the catacombs?) hop on and flush. —James Davenport

Dec 31, 2018

Hitman 2 performance analysis: what you need for 60fps

HITMAN™ 2

Hitman 2 is essentially more of its predecessor, which is no bad thing. However IO Interactive has certainly made it look a bit more impressive, with denser crowds and some extra bells and whistles. But how well does it run compared to 2016's Hitman?

A major talking point here is that DX12 was dropped for the new game, which is odd considering it was in the previous version. It's even more confusing considering Hitman was one of the best DX12 implementations. It speaks to the amount of extra work maintaining two separate APIs requires, and with a lack of AMD branding this round, apparently DX12 was deemed unnecessary.

In terms of hardware, most mainstream GPUs (GTX 1050 Ti / RX 570 and above) can run Hitman 2 at 1080p and 60fps or more, and while you'll also benefit from a faster CPU in some areas (especially larger crowds), just about any CPU from the past five years should suffice.

As for features, Hitman 2 does okay, with some minor omissions. There are 10 graphics settings to tweak, but no global presets. You can cap the frame rate at 30 or 60 FPS (with Vsync), or disable Vsync and run fully unlocked. There's also no option to change the field of view, though it does auto-adjust based on your resolution. Similarly, you can play the game in 21:9 aspect ratio but you'll get black bars on cutscenes. You can rebind keys to your heart's content, but if you're using a controller you'll have to use the default settings. And finally, mod support is not present in any capacity, so outside of hacks and reshade mods we don't expect to see much in the way of user generated content.

Let's dig into the settings a bit more.

Hitman 2 settings overview

Hitman 2 offers 10 graphics settings, without really giving you an idea of how your performance will be affected if you change them around. We've tested them all using both a GTX 1060 6GB and an RX 580 8GB, with the game running at 1080p.

At Ultra, the RX 580 has a slight edge over the GTX 1060, and that trend continues as you work your way through the various settings and compare them to the maximum. We've set each of the individual options to the minimum value as noted below, to see how performance is (or isn't) affected.

Level of Detail Low: You'll see about a seven percent increase in performance by turning the level of detail down, but of course it will decrease the quality of the visuals in the environment.

Texture Quality Low: Another pretty self explanatory one, turning this down means you'll see lower resolution textures, giving you around a three percent boost. Generally not necessary unless you have a card with 2GB or less VRAM.

Texture Filter Trilinear: Texture filtering is how an 2D image is displayed on a 3D model. Bilinear is the simplest, and mipmapping uses lower resolution textures for distant objects. Trilinear filtering smooths the transition between mipmaps, keeping the quality up when you're looking at far away things, although it will still be a little blurry. Anisotropic filtering is a higher quality mode and looks a bit better. Opting for trilinear gives about a three percent boost in performance.

SSAO Off: Screen space ambient occlusion is an approximation of ambient occlusion used in real-time rendering. Essentially it tries to determine which parts of a scene shouldn't be exposed to as much light as others. Sometimes it's great, sometimes SSAO gives things an ugly looking 'anti-glow.' Turning it off here gives you a 10 percent performance boost.

Shadow Quality Low: This is the biggest factor in performance when talking about individual settings. It affects the quality of soft shadows and the distance for detailed shadows, but you'll see a pretty handy 12 percent increase in performance.

Screenspace Shadows Off: This one won't give you as much of a boost as simply turning the quality down. You'll get about a five percent increase.

Reflection Quality Off: Simply put, this option makes reflections in mirrors and water look better. Plus, turning it off will barely change your performance at all based on our testing (which may not have had 'enough' reflective surfaces).

Motion Blur Off: Turning motion blur off hardly affects performance, so if you like the effect feel free to leave it enabled.

Dynamic Sharpening Off: This counters effects caused by temporal anti-aliasing, and in testing we saw a slight dip on the RX 580 but a slight increase on the GTX 1060 (but basically margin of error).

Simulation Quality Best: Same story here, although the actual dips and boosts in performance are fairly negligible. This setting improves the amount and fidelity of crowds, cloth, destruction, and the particles system, depending on your CPU, and it affects audio. Slower or older CPUs may benefit more when turning this to 'base,' but we saw little difference in testing.

MSI provided nearly all of the hardware for this testing, including all of the graphics cards. The main test system uses MSI's Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC with a Core i7-8700K as the primary processor, and 16GB of DDR4-3200 CL14 memory from G.Skill. For the Core i9-9900K, testing was performed on the MSI Z390 MEG Godlike motherboard, using the same memory. I also tested performance with Ryzen processors on MSI's X370 Gaming Pro Carbon. The game is run from a Samsung 860 Evo SSD for all desktop GPUs.

MSI also provided three of its gaming notebooks for testing, the GS63VR with GTX 1060 6GB, GE63VR with GTX 1070, and GT73VR with GTX 1080. The GS63VR has a 4Kp60 display, the GE63VR has a 1080p120 G-Sync display, and the GT73VR has a 1080p120 G-Sync display. For the laptops, I installed the game to the secondary HDD storage.

Hitman 2 graphics card benchmarks

Most of the graphics card testing is as you would expect, with the beefy Nvidia cards, which dominate our best graphics cards list, coming out on top at all resolutions and graphics settings. The super expensive RTX 2080 Ti really shows how good it is at 4k with maximum ('ultra') quality still easily breaking 60fps. Everything else struggles while it still chugs along quite nicely. It beats out the RTX 2080 by around 24 percent, and then it's another steep drop down to the 1080 Ti and beyond.

The best AMD can manage at these settings is the RX Vega 64, which falls between the GTX 1070 Ti and GTX 1080, but the RTX 2080 Ti gives you a performance increase of a whopping 50 percent. For about triple the price.

Unless you're breaking the bank on a graphics card, you'll probably want to stay away from this resolution and graphics setting.

Ultra at 2560x1440 makes for slightly better reading, although the cards closer to the budget end of the scale won't handle this very well either. The 2080 Ti comes out on top, of course, but it's only a small step down to the RTX 2080. We're starting to hit CPU limits as well, even with an overclocked i7-8700K.

The RX Vega 64 sits between the GTX 1070 Ti and 1080 again, while the 580/570 cards slightly outperform their 1060 counterparts. If you're looking for this resolution and graphical quality above 60fps, you'll want at least an RX 590 or above (and perhaps tweak your settings slightly).

Down to 1920x1080 then, and the gaps start to close up, particularly at the top. Everything from the GTX 1080 up to the RTX 2080 performs basically the same, with a couple of percent increase in performance for the 2080 Ti. The RX Vega 64 isn't far behind either. Basically, we're hitting CPU limitations.

Just about all of the cards run above 60 FPS just fine. You'll have to go back a generation or two or find a budget card not to hit that mark. Even the GTX 1060 3GB handles it fine.

Drop the graphics settings to 'medium' (we use the 'medium' or 'moderate' setting where available, with SSAO and screenspace shadows off) and most cards will run Hitman 2 like a dream. However, the budget GPUs like thethe GTX 1050 / 1050 Ti and RX 560 still struggle with maintaining 60fps.

Elsewhere, our test sequence clearly hits the CPU harder, as from the GTX 1060 3GB right up to the RTX 2080 Ti, you'll only find about a 10 percent performance difference.

For integrated graphics solutions, the Ryzen 5 2400G with Vega 11 Graphics does reasonably well, averaging 40fps. Oddly, dropping the resolution to 720p and minimum quality doesn't really help it run any faster, so it's bumping other bottlenecks. Intel's HD Graphics 630 meanwhile comes up well short of being playable, mustering just 17fps even at minimum quality and 720p.

Hitman 2 CPU Performance

For CPU testing we're using the MSI RTX 2080 Duke. A powerful graphics card like this will best highlight the performance potential for each of the CPUs we tested.

At 3840x2160 ultra, all the CPUs handle it around the same, with only a three or four percent drop in performance when you compare the Ryzen 5 2600X to the Core i9-9900K. Everything else stays even closer in quality. It's when you start dropping the resolution and the graphics quality that you start to see the big differences come into play.

At 2560x1440 Ultra, the i9-9900K still performs the best, with the Core i7-8700K OC not far behind. The other CPUs then start to see a drop off in quality. The Core i3-8100 is 22 percent worse off compared to its big, big brother. The AMD CPUs fair better than the i3, but there's a big jump up to the Core i5-8400 and the rest of the Intel CPUs at the top of the list.

At 1080p, the Core i7-8700K OC actually jumps above the i9, at both Medium and Ultra. The rest of the list stays in the same order. The AMD CPUs range between around 21 and 25 percent worse performance compared to the i7 at both graphics settings.

Hitman 2 notebook performance

Over to laptops, it's about as you'd expect, with desktop GPUs outpacing the mobile versions even though they sound beefier on paper. At both medium and ultra, since we're limited to 1080p displays on two of the three laptops, the desktop GTX 1060 outpaces even the GT73VR 1080, and by a pretty huge margin at medium quality.

The desktop 1060 is 25 percent faster at medium, while at ultra the mobile GPUs catch up a bit and the GTX 1060 is about seven percent better. Meanwhile at the bottom of the scale, the GS63VR 1060 starts to struggle a bit and generally does best by turning down a few settings.

Closing thoughts on Hitman 2 performance and hardware requirements

IO Interactive gives the following system requirements, but unfortunately makes no mention of target framerates, resolution, or settings. Based on the specs, I'd assume 1080p 30fps for minimum, and 1080p ultra 60ps for the recommended PC.

MINIMUM:OS: OS 64-bit Windows 7Processor: Intel CPU Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz / AMD CPU Phenom II X4 940Memory: 8GB RAMGraphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 / Radeon HD 7870DirectX: Version 11Storage: 60GB available space

RECOMMENDED:OS: OS 64-bit Windows 10Processor: Intel CPU Core i7-4790 4GHzMemory: 16GB RAMGraphics: Nvidia GPU GeForce GTX 1070 / AMD GPU Radeon RX Vega 56 8GBDirectX: Version 11Storage: 60GB available space

In terms of 'realistic' system requirements, we recommend a GTX 970 or about for 1080p 'medium' quality at 60fps, while 1440p 'ultra' gamers will want a GTX 1070 or above for 60fps. 4k is mostly the domain of extreme hardware like the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti, which are the only GPUs to break 60fps averages in our testing. Don't neglect the CPU either, though Core i5-8400 and above will get pretty close to maxing out any current graphics card.

Overall, Hitman 2 is an excellent game, and it garnered our Best Stealth Game of 2018 award. Not surprisingly, performance ends up being very similar to the previous outing in most respects, though the removal of DirectX 12 support still feels weird.

Hitman (2016) saw numerous updates over time that improved performance, including support for multi-GPU under both DX11 and DX12 modes. It's not clear if the engine and environment changed so much that maintaining both APIs was deemed 'too difficult,' or if DX12 was dropped simply because it didn't provide enough of a benefit. Or maybe the switch in publisher from Square Enix to Warner Bros. Interactive is to blame. Whatever the case, it's still an odd change of heart.

I also miss the built-in benchmark mode of the previous release, not because it was absolutely necessary but because it makes it easier for others to compare performance with our results. Left to my own devices, the benchmark sequence consists of running through a large crowd in the Finish Line mission. All of the people likely put more of a strain on the CPU than GPU, which may explain some of the results, and other 'lighter' areas in terms of crowd control may run at higher framerates.

Once again, thanks to MSI for providing the hardware for this testing. I used the latest Nvidia and AMD drivers at the time of publication, Nvidia 417.35 and AMD 18.12.3. Testing was completed in December 2018, so a few months of patches and driver updates have helped to equalize performance. AMD and Nvidia GPUs generally perform about the same, for the various performance levels, though that means AMD still has no alternative to anything above the GTX 1080 / Vega 64. Hopefully that will arrive in 2019.

Dec 28, 2018

Best Stealth Game: Hitman 2

HITMAN™ 2

Hitman 2 brought one of our favorite series back to PC in arguably its best ever form. Find the rest of our GOTY awards here.

Samuel: It makes me happy that IO Interactive is still making murder puzzles on this scale, with this much detail, in 2018. Hitman 2's levels are best-in-class sandboxes that can take hours for their full potential to unlock—and while this game's selection of locations is a little conventional by the series' standards, they're still tons of fun. Plus you can download its predecessor's levels inside the new game. Warring with Phil over the leaderboards has been a highlight of 2018 for me. How the hell did he do Hawke's Bay in under two minutes? Unbelievable. At least I kicked his ass in Miami. As soon as I worked out how to kill one target with the other, the number one spot was mine.

Phil: The trick, Sam, is to attempt things that you're almost certain won't work, because sometimes you get lucky and look really clever. (Luckily the leaderboards don't track all the times it went very, very wrong.) Our assassination competition has done wonders for my appreciation of Hitman 2, though, and I already liked the game a lot. Many of the safest, most reliable ways to kill your target are also relatively slow, and so competing for high scores has forced me to reassess levels that I thought I knew incredibly well—finding new routes and opportunities, and seizing them as stealthily and efficiently as possible. And when I'm tired of shaving seconds off my times, I still enjoy just being in the environments, trying to figure out the many unique and often quite funny ways you can kill each target. It's Groundhog Day as a stealth puzzler, where one attempt you'll be sublime, and the next you'll be ridiculous—with no consequences beyond a great (or terrible) score at the end.

I'm glad that IO have brought back elusive targets, too. Having just one attempt to take down your target adds an extra level of tension that's missing from the missions proper. Even actions that I've performed hundreds of times before, on levels that I know incredibly well, feel risky and dangerous, because if I mess up, there's no going back.

Andy K: This isn’t much of a leap from the 2016 reboot, and I don’t care. All I wanted was some more great levels, and maybe a couple of tweaks, and that’s exactly what IO delivered. A few of these elaborate, detailed puzzle-boxes are among the best in the series, and finding ways to game the systems to kill your targets is as compelling as ever.

Fraser: I’ve only played a couple of Hitman 2’s new missions, technically, and it’s still my favourite stealth game of 2018. See, all of the previous Hitman levels have been remastered with the Hitman 2 bells and whistles, so I’ve been playing through the whole thing, 1 and 2, mixing up the old with the new. It’s been great, giving me a chance to take paths I’d ignored before, all with the benefit of these new additions. Now I’m delving into the new missions, and I’m not even remotely burned out.

Here's Phil's original review of Hitman 2, and here's the origin of Phil and Sam's leaderboard war.