Hitman 2's final mission launched back in September, so Agent 47's latest outing is now winding down. Thanks to the holidays and its anniversary, it was busy at the end of the year, but things are going to be a bit quieter now that we're in 2020. At least you'll be able to hunt down Sean Bean again. 

Most of the team has been moved over to the next Hitman, but Hitman 2 still has some life in it. Across the year, new contracts created by the community will be available, along with reactivated Elusive Targets, starting with the first one from 2018, Sean Bean. 

You'll be able to take another crack at the Undying mission from January 17, and today you can check out the first Featured Contracts of the new year, each with the theme of 'stay frosty'. More contracts will appear on January 23, curated by community member MulletPride. 

Are there any Elusive Targets you missed the first time around? I've been filled with regret over not killing Sean Bean (the first time it's probably happened to him) so I'll almost certainly be rectifying that next weekend.

This diary was originally serialised in PC Gamer magazine. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. You can read part one here, and part two here.

No time to beat around the bush. Agent 47 has his work cut out for him. We’re assassinating targets in Hitman using a lotto spinner to choose our weapons. This time, we start at an unsanctioned militia training ground in rural Colorado, where there are a whopping four targets waiting for their unlucky numbers to come up. This includes militia leader Sean Rose and his three lieutenants: Ezra Berg, Penelope Graves, and Maya Parvati. 

Agent 47 infiltrates the area through the undergrowth just outside the perimeter fence. I spin the wheel and out rolls an eclectic arsenal. Ezra Berg gets number 20—fiber wire. Graves gets 3—a shotgun. Parvati gets 2—a silenced pistol. And Sean Rose get 8—an axe. 

As well as being the least glamorous of 47’s many murder-holidays, Colorado is also a hostile area from the start. I slip through the perimeter fence and find myself a basic militia disguise, hiding the knocked-out guard in a conveniently placed dumpster. 

Able to wander freely, I plan my approach. I decide that I’ll tackle Graves last, since a shotgun blast will stir the hive like a bear pawing for honey. Parvati will also have to be handled later, as she hangs around quite a public area. 

Hence, it’s either Berg or Rose first. I settle on Rose, as I know how to get rid of him fairly easily, via one of my favourite mission stories in the entire game. Rose, you see, suffers from OCD, and you can isolate him from his security by triggering it. It’s a particularly evil and insidious method, but also satisfying in its subtlety. 

First though, I need to find an axe. Colorado is a messy level, so I use the online Hitman interactive map to pin down the axe’s location. It’s embedded in a tree-stump in the far corner of the map. I pick it up with little difficulty, and on the way find a shotgun. You practically can’t take a step without falling over a gun in Colorado (just like real life!). I already started with a silenced pistol and fiber wire, so I’m now almost completely tooled up for the mission. But I need one more item. Returning to the main house where Rose normally hangs around, I pick up a special hallucinogenic drug—used by Ezra Berg in his twisted interrogations—which I need to eliminate Rose. 

I skulk around the back of the house, using the drug to spike the cigarettes Rose habitually smokes. I then try to get into the main house, but the guards are Rose’s personal retinue, and won’t let in the regular cannon- fodder. I sneak around the security checkpoint to the side of the house, where one of Rose’s men hangs around near a crate perfect for hiding bodies inside. 

I knock him out and steal his clothes, but I’m caught in the act by another nearby guard. I pull out my silenced pistol and empty a clip into him before he can raise the alarm. A stupid slip up, and I also have to kill the unconscious guard as he apparently counts as a witness. Still, it could have gone a lot worse. I steal a uniform and hide both bodies in the container. 

Heading into the house, I tamper with the clock and misalign the pencils on Sean Rose’s desk, then exit to the rear and await his arrival. A few minutes later he approaches, disturbed by his skewed stationary. The spiked cigarettes further elevate his panic (this really is a nasty way to kill someone) and he rushes into the toolshed to calm down. I help release some of the tension by slicing open his throat with the axe.

Tip of the iced berg

One down, three to go. I dump the body and head outside, running almost immediately into the masked face of Ezra Berg. I follow him around the house toward the outdoor entrance of the basement. I realise that, in doing so, we’re crossing through the area I cleared of guards earlier. Acting on impulse, I pull out the fiber wire and strangle Berg right there in the open. 

It’s a huge gamble, but nobody notices. However I’d forgotten that I disposed of two guards in the nearby body container, filling it up. Consequently, I’m dragging around one of Rose’s dead lieutenants in an area swarming with guards with nowhere to put the body. 

Eventually I realise there’s another body container just behind the main doors of the house. But between me and it is a security camera. Leaving the body on the patio, I head inside the house, disable the security system, and then head back outside. I drag the body right past the main security checkpoint, into the house where there are at least a dozen guards, and somehow dump it in the container without anybody noticing. 

Berg down. Parvati next. The former Tamil Tiger captain is heading some sort of spec-ops training regime, making her difficult to isolate. However, as I shadow her patrol, I notice she briefly diverts from her training to have a discussion with a mechanic near a couple of large garages. I figure if I need to kill her with a straight shot, this is definitiely the best place. 

At first I consider shooting her from inside the garage, through an open window. But there’s a guard patrol that runs right behind me. So I instead stand between the two garages and take the shot at a diagonal angle, instantly moving away from the scene once the shot is taken. It works, my identity isn’t compromised and the kill sticks.

Now for the big one. Graves’ patrol takes her through most of the compound, flanked at all times by two security guards. The only time she isn’t escorted is when she’s inside the main house. After watching her make her rounds, I notice there’s a brief moment where she stops to examine the grandfather clock I tampered with to kill Rose. Adjacent to this is a door leading to the militia’s server room. In theory I can stand in there and shoot her. Everyone will hear the shot, but nobody will see it. Er, in theory.

I let Graves take one last tour of the grounds. When she returns to look at the clock again, I take the shot. Blam. I rush to the end of the room and hide behind a stack of crates moments before a swarm of militia pile into the room. My status reads “hunted” which means if they see me, they’ll shoot on sight, and at one point a guard stands so close I’m sure it’s game over. Somehow though, they don’t notice me, and I’m able to complete the mission without any further noisy incidents.

Sushi gone

Hokkaido, Japan. The last and trickiest of the original Hitman levels. My targets are ICA defector Erich Soders and Yuki Yamazaki, a former lawyer to the Yakuza. Soders is undergoing a heart transplant at a high-tech and even higher security clinic in the Hokkaido mountains. It’s so tightly controlled that I can’t smuggle anything into the building, which means no sniper rifle, fiber wire, or silenced pistol can be used for this mission. 

Nonetheless, I spin the wheel. The numbers that come up are 6 for Soders, which is a sword, and 19 for Yamazaki—“other environmental”. 

I decide to focus on Yamazaki first, as she is considerably easier to access. Even so, the clinic is monitored by an AI security system with computer-controlled checkpoints, so I need to find a uniform that’ll give me better clearance. After spending some time getting my bearings, I find a security guard watching over the toilets beneath the restaurant area. And after giving him a coin to chase, he quickly provides me with a disguise. 

Able to move more freely, I start looking for a way to eliminate Yamazaki. After considering several options, I wander into the kitchens and stumble upon an un-filleted fugu fish. My decision is made there and then. I gut the fish to get the poison, then knock out the two chefs so I can easily steal their disguise.

I head upstairs to the sushi bar and prepare extra- special, extra-deadly nigiri. It isn’t long before Yamazaki ventures into the bar to sample the dish. She collapses a few moments later, dead as the fugu that killed her. 

It’s as well Yamazaki proves an easy kill, because it quickly becomes apparent that killing Soders with a sword is going to be a nightmare. First I need to acquire a sword, which tend not to be that common in a clinic. It turns out there’s a ceremonial katana inside Yamazaki’s suite. But to get to it I need a black security uniform with level 2 clearance, and none of the nearby guards are viable targets. In the end, I have to go all the way around the clinic, sneaking into the high security area just to get the uniform I need to get the sword. 

With this done, I now need access to Soders himself. But he’s in the operating theatre undergoing some pre-surgery stem-cell treatment. Only surgeons have access to the theatre, so I need to scrub up. In the end, I home in on the chief surgeon, who keeps venturing outside to chat to a helicopter pilot. While he’s out there, I deal with two nearby security guards using the old, ‘coin-toss and hammer to the face’ trick, before nullifying the chief surgeon in the same way.

I drag the surgeon into the basement and don his scrubs. I can now access the surgery hall and kill Erich Soders. Unfortunately my problems are far from over. First of all, it turns out surgeons carrying katanas don’t go unnoticed in a high security hospital. Secondly, the operating theatre is overlooked by a control room and two viewing galleries, one of which is filled with doctors watching the operation.

Oh, and there’s also another surgeon inside the theatre itself. It would be easier to walk into an actual theatre and kill the lead actor on stage, because at least the audience might think it was part of the act.

There’s no way for me to this do subtly, so I’ll have to settle for doing it quickly. I walk through the (mercifully empty) corridor into the surgery prep room, then pass through the door into the hall itself. Immediately the suspicion of everyone nearby starts rising. I walk up to the table, katana in hand and... It turns out the game won’t let you kill Erich Soders with a melee weapon.

Because of Soders’ unusual situation, alongside the fact that he’s so closely monitored, Hitman assumes that you won’t be stupid enough to attempt to kill Erich Soders with a large sword. I don’t get a cue to kill him by hand or even throw the weapon at him. All I get is Agent 47 staring blankly at the operating as the whole hospital explodes into chaos.

The alarm goes off, guards boil into the theatre from all sides. They demand that the mysterious assailant surrenders. I look around... and raise my sword.

This diary was originally serialised in PC Gamer magazine. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. You can read part one here.

We’re in Marrakech, the Big Haggle. Agent 47 is on the trail of rogue Swedish diplomat Claus Strandberg and wannabe military dictator Reza Zaydan. We’re killing targets with weapons chosen at random using a lotto spinner. Before we turn the bingo- wheel of fate, however, we need to talk about odds.

Last issue, I used a bespoke list of weapons for each level I played, assigning each weapon a number corresponding to a number in my spinner. However, I’ve noticed that simply listing all the weapons that appear in a Hitman mission skews the odds in favour of melee ones, simply because there are so many of them. Hence, for this entry, I’ve rewritten the list to be slightly more general, to best ensure each weapon class (gun, melee, explosive, environmental) has roughly the same number of entries on the list. You can see this updated lineup in the boxout overleaf. 

This less stabby list seems to pay off immediately. The numbers for Zaydan and Sandberg respectively are four, which is an automatic weapon, and 16—lethal poison. One loud, one quiet, neither melee. Strandberg is holed up in the Swedish embassy south of the market, while Zaydan is preparing his coup at a former nursery school to the east.

Gunman, chronicles

I decide to head for Zaydan first, the first of multiple mistakes I’m going to make on this mission. I start out by re-familiarising myself with the twists and turns of Marrakech market. As I do so, I overhear a conversation about the school’s former headmaster, who still has the school’s master key. I sneak up to the rooftop garden where the headmaster is, and quietly steal his keyring. 

Now I need to get past the security checkpoints, so I start scouting for a military uniform to steal. The streets are way too busy, so again I look to the rooftops. Eventually I find a soldier whose patrol takes him to a quiet spot in a rooftop garden. I knock him out with a wrench, don his uniform, and hide the body. This turns out to be a complete waste of time, as the uniform I’ve nicked is for a rank too junior to get past the checkpoint. 

Frustrated, I wander around some more, until I find a guarded entrance to a shop. Hopefully there’s a way through to the school. Sneaking past the guards here is easy. I slip through the shop to the rear exit, where there’s a small, walled-off courtyard. 

As it happens, this route leads to a secret tunnel running under the market to the embassy’s car-park. I make a note of it for later. Right now, I’m more interested in the lone soldier wandering around wearing a more senior uniform. I knock him out, change clothes, and take his assault rifle, which is exactly what I need to kill Zaydan. Suitably disguised, I make my way to the school undisturbed, using the key to get inside. Reyza Zaydan is milling around both floors of the school. He doesn’t have any bodyguards, but with so many soldiers patrolling the school, he doesn’t need them. Killing him with a Very Loud Gun is going to be tricky. 

I spend a good 20 minutes examining his circuit of the school. Eventually I notice that he stops by a window on the first-floor corridor, while behind him is an empty classroom with a clear line-of-sight. I stand inside and wait for him to come around again, before putting an end to his ambitions with a single shot to the head. 

Not very subtle, but it was never going to be. I hope for a repeat of Paris, where I slipped out the window quickly enough that nobody clocked the creepy bald dude making a very quick exit. Sadly, trained soldiers are slightly more perceptive than fashionista bodyguards. The dreaded notification “Hunted” appears in the bottom-left corner of the screen. I hide until the heat dies down, but my disguise has been compromised, meaning I must sneak out of the school grounds.

I can’t walk through the checkpoint either, so I shimmy up a drainpipe and creep along a ledge, stumbling right back into the headmaster’s garden.

Goddamn it. After all that effort, I could’ve just slipped down the drainpipe straight into the school. I take out my frustration on the headmaster, knocking him out and nicking his clothes. Now I need to find some lethal poison, so I look up the locations on the Hitman Interactive Map. There are two lethal poison pickups. One is back at the school (sod that). The other is down in that secret entrance I noticed earlier. Retracing my steps, I slip past the guards again and descend. The tunnel reads as a hostile area, so I return upstairs and change into that basic soldier uniform I stole earlier. Ugh, still hostile. The only disguise that will work down here is the one I have already compromised. Smashing.

I’ve no choice but to press on. The underground corridor leads to a square chamber bristling with both guns and guards. It’s going to take some masterful stealth to get that poison unnoticed. Fortunately, I don’t need to worry about this for long, as I completely screw up knocking out the first guard, alerting the whole room to my presence and ending up in a massive gunfight.

I prevail, but I end up killing somewhere between five and ten non-targets, which in Hitman’s book is a disaster. Reluctantly, I step over the corpses to pick up the poison and carry on. The car park is crawling with more of Zaydan’s goons, but I manage to creep through without being spotted. I then sneak across the front of the embassy to a small guardpost where I pick up an embassy security guard uniform.

This mission has been a complete mess, but I at least end on a high, sneaking into Strandberg’s office and poisoning his wine unnoticed.

By the time he drinks the poison, I’m already outside the embassy. It’s a somewhat hollow victory, but at least I feel like I earned the single star I’m awarded for my otherwise dreadful performance.

Bangkok dangerous

Somehow Hitman 2 doesn’t delete my save out of sheer embarrassment, and in a jiffy we’re off to Bangkok, specifically the exclusive Club 47 Hotel. My targets here are Jordan Cross, indie rock-band megastar and weapons-grade arsehole, and his equally nasty lawyer Ken Morgan.

The numbers that roll out of my lotto machine are next-door neighbours. Jordan Cross gets 16, which is death by falling, and Ken Morgan gets 17, which is drowning. 

After the mess in Marrakech. I’m relieved by the clean and quiet approaches the machine has chosen. It almost seems a like a sign. Turns out it’s more of an omen. 

Let’s quickly go over Cross. As far as I know, there’s only one way to kill Jordan Cross via a fall. That’s by playing through a mission story wherein Agent 47 infiltrates Cross’ recording session in the guise of a replacement drummer. This is the method I follow. There might be other ways to do it, but given what happens next, I’m glad I opted for the straightforward approach.

With Cross dead, my attention turns to Ken Morgan. I’m told in the mission briefing that Morgan hangs out in around the restaurant area, so my first thought is to spike the restaurant food with emetic rat poison, then drown Morgan in whichever toilet he subsequently chunders into. Unfortunately, when I try this, Morgan instead empties his stomach into a nearby bin. Unless it hasn’t been emptied for a long time, typically you can’t drown someone in a bin, so that’s the end of Plan A. 

Fortunately, Club 47 is located at the side of a river, and Morgan’s circuit of the hotel takes him to a patio area on the riverside. My new plan is to knock him out, then haul him over the balustrade into the water below. But there’s a small issue with Plan B, namely all the witnesses in this very public area. Not only does Morgan have a bodyguard shadowing him, there are five hotel staff in close proximity, another guest who frequently walks through the area to talk on his phone, and a gardener trimming the verges nearby.

The locations of these individuals are burned into my mind, because I try countless times to enact this plan. I try poisoning the bodyguard to get Morgan alone. I try knocking out all the nearby witnesses. I try tossing coins to get Morgan into a position where he can’t be seen by anyone. I try completely losing my shit and murdering half the hotel. It all ends the same way, panic, chaos and death. Finally, after over an hour of this nonsense, I succeed in getting Morgan over the rail without anyone noticing. I celebrate for exactly one microsecond before I hear the loud crunch of Morgan’s body landing on the rocks beside the river. Ffffffffffuuuuuuuu-

At this point it’s clear that drowning might not be a viable tactic for Morgan. Certainly not for someone of my limited skill. So the only thing I can do is spin the wheel again. Out rolls number 11—fire extinguisher. Oh great, explosives, the perfect weapon for assassinating one specific person in an extremely public area.

I feel like giving up and going back to my virtual hotel room. Then I have an idea. The area where Morgan makes his phone call, although highly visible, is vacant of people most of the time.

What’s more, my hotel room balcony looks down on that same corner of the front patio. As I mentioned in the first diary, I always bring a sniper rifle as my smuggled item, which is located in my hotel room.

I rush upstairs, grab the sniper rifle, and check to see if the shot is viable. I can’t clearly see the actual area where Morgan makes his phone calls, as it’s obscured by folding screens. But there is narrow stretch that he walks through where I can get a clear shot. Plan C is officially a go. I head downstairs, grab a fire extinguisher off the wall, and drop it outside, much to the confusion of everyone around me. Then I head back up, get into position, wait for the moment, and take the shot.

Rather than detonating on impact, the shot kicks the fire extinguisher away. It explodes a second or so later. Morgan goes down, but isn’t killed. I have just enough time to spit a curse at my screen before security busts down the door of my room and riddles me with bullets.

On reload, I decide to try the same thing, but this time with three fire extinguishers. Again the explosion isn’t powerful enough to kill Morgan. At this point I’ve been playing this mission for over two hours, so I decide fuck it, no more half measures. I put every fire extinguisher I can find in a pile, then add a propane flask for good measure. If you want to get technical, I’m pretty sure the concussive blast of an exploding propane flask would extinguish any nearby fires. It would just cause a lot of other fires in the process.

After a heart-pounding wait, Morgan appears. I take the shot. The resulting explosion throws his body ten feet in the air, and the blessed words “Target Eliminated” appear on my screen. I quickly pack away the sniper rifle, exiting the room just as the guards burst in. (I’m dressed as a guard, by the way, and have been for almost the entire mission.)

All that for one target. But at least I put the ‘bang’ in Bangkok. Ho ho. Morgan’s death even registers as “Accidental”, which is fantastically stupid. The next stop is Colorado, where there are four targets I need to eliminate, all surrounded by gun-toting militia. I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be quite the show. Until next time!

Check back tomorrow for the final part.

This diary was originally serialised in PC Gamer magazine. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US.

I never get the most out of sandbox games, because I’m always looking for the ‘right’ way to do something. If a game like Deus Ex has optional stealth, I will do everything I can to ghost that sucker, while if a game suggests a way of completing an open objective, I will follow that method to the bitter end. Nowhere have I struggled with this more than IO Interactive’s recent Hitman games. Their sandboxes are bigger and more choice abundant than most, yet I cannot bring myself to mess around with any of it. 

In a bid to make myself think creatively, I had an idea. I bought a cheap bingo set that includes a spinning lotto machine. My plan is to look up every weapon on every Hitman level, assigning each a number corresponding to the numbers in my lotto machine. At the outset of a mission, I’ll spin the machine once for every target on the level. Whatever number falls out, that’s the weapon I must use to eliminate that particular target, no matter how noisy, conspicuous or absurd it may be. 

For the purposes of this escapade, I’m playing Hitman 2 with the legacy pack installed, mainly because it’s tidier. I’m playing the vanilla Hitman campaign in sequence with the exception of the tutorial mission. I’ll start each mission with the same equipment, a silenced pistol, fibre wire, some coins, and whatever the default disguise is for the mission. I’m also adding a sniper-rifle as a smuggled item, as they tend not to appear in the game. 

While I can only kill targets with the specified weapon, for non-targets I can use whatever the situation requires. I’m also only allowed to reload a save if I die. As for the weapon list, it includes anything that can be picked up and used as a weapon in a Hitman level. 

I’ve also added ‘Falling’ and ‘Drowning’ to the list, as both of those can be performed on most targets. I’m going to get out of my bad habits if it kills me. Or at least, if it kills a lot of other people.

Sharp fashion

It’s Paris Fashion Week and my targets are Viktor Novikov and Dalia Margolis, who are using the show as a front for auctioning terrorist strikes. I’m here to put an end to the bidding, permanently. Time to spin the wheel. 

The first ball to roll out of my machine is number eight. According to my list that’s a kitchen knife, a long-standing Hitman staple that I’ll soon be using to staple Viktor Novikov to a wall. 

The second ball is 15, a wrench. Hardly the most exciting weapon in Hitman’s list, but it will mean getting up close and personal to Margolis, which I remember from my previous playthrough to be tricky. 

Novikov first. He’s wandering around the show floor with a bodyguard in tow, so I’ll need to separate the two. I also need to acquire the knife, so naturally I start looking for the kitchen. I head into the bar, where I notice event staff wandering around. I’ll need a uniform to get into the kitchen, so I continue out into the garden finding a flight of stairs leading to the basement. Two event workers are having a smoke break at the bottom. I overhear them chatting about how Novikov’s preferred cocktail is something called a Bareknuckle Boxer. I file this for later. 

One of the workers returns upstairs. The other walks through the door leading into the basement. I follow him and quietly knock him out, stealing his uniform and dumping his unconscious body in a crate. I wander through the underground vaults before stumbling into the kitchen. After a minute of poking around I find a kitchen knife. I also find a wrench in a storage area adjacent to the kitchen, which is nice stroke of luck. 

I head back upstairs, a plan forming in my mind. Behind the bar is a food-prep area. In the far corner is a box of rat poison. I pick one up and head to the bar, making up a Bareknuckle Boxer with one extra special mixer. Then I wait until Novikov arrives for his drink, and dash to the nearby men’s room, hiding in a cupboard. It isn’t long before Novikov stumbles through the door and deposits several ounces of featherweight champion into the toilet. The rest is easy. Knife. Throat. Dead. I stuff the body in the cupboard and leave. A clean job. But if I’m honest, that’s roughly how I offed Novikov the first time I played, only that time I drowned him in his own sick.

In truth, I’d forgotten about the bodyguard, and trying to navigate that problem threw me back into my old patterns. Hopefully Margolis will spur me into being more creative. She’s upstairs at the auction.

I found an invite to the auction earlier, so I get my tuxedo back and pass through the security to get upstairs where there’s another checkpoint frisking people.

I don’t want to lose my wrench, so I carefully knock out a patrolling guard and steal his uniform. I also pick up his pistol, a Bartoli 75-R.

I head upstairs and find Margolis. Like Novikov, she’s being trailed by another bodyguard, and she’s constantly surrounded by other people. I spend ages following them around, looking for an opportunity where I can, ahem, wrench her out of existence. Eventually I decide to just try my luck, but as I’m selecting the wrench I notice three words beneath its icon “Non-lethal melee”.

Ach! I’d forgotten you can’t kill people with blunt weapons in Hitman. I consider how to resolve this, concluding the only fair way is to spin the lotto machine again. The number that rolls out is one, which turns out is a Bartoli 75-R.

At least I don’t have to go scouting for the new weapon. But this is an unsilenced pistol, so not exactly a subtle weapon.

I follow Margolis around a bit more, thinking things over, when I notice that one of the rooms she goes in—overlooking the fashion stage—only has one other guard in it. I decide to knock out the guard and make my kill there. I’ll have to kill the bodyguard as well, but so be it.

Margolis leaves with her shadow, and I quickly deal with the bodyguard, hiding him in yet another cupboard. After a while Margolis returns with her lapdog. I’m about to pop the two of them when something unexpected happens. Margolis walks toward the windows, where I’ve mistakenly left the security guard’s rifle on the floor. “Isn’t it your job to look out for these things?” she sneers to her bodyguard. He walks up to the rifle, picks it up, and leaves the room with it. I silently thank the god of murder and raise the pistol. One loud bang later and Margolis is dead. I rush out the door and escape via a nearby window, sliding down the drainpipe and exiting the level via a helicopter at the back of the building.

Getting medieval

Sapienza, Italy. This medieval coastal village is the jewel in Hitman’s locational crown. I’m here to kill local crime lord Silvio Caruso, as well as a rogue scientist named Francesca De Santis. She’s developing a virus for Caruso that I also need to destroy. 

After what happened in Paris, I’ve altered the rules slightly, leaving out the non-lethal weapons on my deadly bingo card. I spin the wheel while 47 reads the local newspaper. The numbers that come out are 15 for De Santis, which is a sabre, and six for Caruso, which is a medieval battle axe. Two of the most conspicuous weapons in the game. This’ll be interesting. 

I’ll worry about the weapons later. First I need a disguise, and a good one—one of Caruso’s henchmen to be precise. I know I can get into the mansion via a crumbling tower of Sapienza’s medieval wall. There are two henchmen patrolling it, one of whom proves easy to grab for a new disguise. 

Suitably threaded, I now need to find the weapons. But Sapienza is a massive level, and I don’t have hours to spend scouting every corner. In the end I look up the weapon locations, and I’m glad I did, because both are hidden away. The sabre is located inside the town hall, while the battle axe is embedded into the ceiling of another old tower behind Caruso’s mansion. 

I grab the sabre first. The town hall is locked up tight, but I shimmy up a drainpipe and enter through a second-floor window. The sabre is above the door, and I have to shoot it down with my silenced pistol. I’m concerned about how I’m going to get the sabre out of the town hall, but it turns out nobody seems to mind a bald gangster wandering around town with a sword.

The obliviousness continues as I stroll through the mansion gate. This piques my curiosity, and I decide to grab the battle axe before moving against either target, which I do without too much fuss. I’m now walking around a heavily guarded crime-lords’ mansion with a sword on my back and an axe clutched in my right hand. Nobody bats an eye.

I can only assume the pattern of my Italian shirt makes me invisible to mafiosos. One guard holding a shotgun even waves to me and says, “What up, bro?” as I saunter past him armed like Robert the fucking Bruce.

Killing my targets still isn’t going to be easy. Caruso is flanked at all times by three bodyguards, all of whom have the dreaded white circle of suspicion hovering over their heads. Da Santis only has one lackey, but the room she spends most of her time in is absolutely swarming with guards.

I spend ages trying to figure out a way to get them alone. I could follow the mission stories, but the whole point of this exercise is to avoid the trodden path. I walk around for so long I get sloppy, and almost blow my cover by walking right into Caruso, arousing his suspicion. I run off and hide until the heat cools off.

I’m about to start exploring the mission stories, when suddenly Caruso walks alone into the ground floor lounge. I’m not sure what’s happened, but I can only assume that my bumping into him upset the AI’s routine, somehow shedding him of his protection. Without hesitating, I cob the battle axe straight at his head. Caruso goes down like, well, like he’s been poleaxed. A nearby maid I didn’t notice screams. I walk over and punch her in the face, then leg it as guards start to pour in from all sides.

I run up the stairs, somehow undetected, astonished I got away with such spur-of-the-moment madness. There’s an unconscious witness to deal with, but I’ll do that soon enough. Emboldened by my success, I set my sights on De Santis, gliding straight through the guard hive to the balcony on the far side. Now I notice that De Santis’s actual office has no guards in it.

I wait outside on the terrace for her to come around, toss a coin to bring her and her bodyguard out of the room, then slip into the office and stick the sabre through her back. I’m dust before the body is found.

Job done, mostly. I head downstairs, quietly drag the unconscious maid into a nearby bathroom, and put a bullet in her head with my silenced pistol. Then I head down into the laboratory underneath the mansion and deal with the virus. I escape in a flying-boat moored outside the laboratory.

I did it. I took a ludicrous chance with a ludicrous weapon and it paid off. This is the most free I’ve felt in a sandbox since it was actually filled with sand. There are three targets in my next destination, Marrakesh. It’s going to be quite the rollover.

Check back tomorrow for the second part.

The highlight of Hitman 2's November roadmap was undoubtedly the revelation that IO Interactive is working on the next game in the Hitman franchise, but there's plenty of other murdery goodness in there. This month will feature the most new, free content the game has seen since it launched a year ago.

The first addition arrives today in the form of two Legacy Escalations: The Teague Temptation, set in Paris, and The Bahadur Dexterity in Marrakesh. These are are five-stage scenarios that each has a unique set of requirements to complete. Players will also find a new challenge pack called Breaking and Entering for the Whittleton Creek map, which unlocks an ICA titanium crowbar as a loadout option. It works just like a normal crowbar, but it's shinier.

On November 14, players will see two Legacy Challenge Packs arrive in Hitman 2. There's Master Fortune Teller in Marrakesh, which unlocks the TAC-4 S/A Desert skin, and the Art of Revenge in Hokkaido, which unlocks the Masamune katana. You can also look forward to The Montague Audacity escalation contract in Santa Fortuna that day, as well as several featured contracts created by the Hitman community.

November 19 will see two more Legacy Escalations, the Arthin Occultation in Bangkok and the Szilassi Darkness in Sapienza. Blake's Endeavor on the Isle of Sgail is a new challenge pack that arrives alongside these, and completing it unlocks the Arkian Tuxedo outfit for Agent 47. Two Legacy Challenge packs are also arriving on the 19th: Plumber's Apprentice and Master Sniper, both set in Sapienza. These unlock the claw hammer and Jaeger 7 Covert rifle respectively. That date will also see the release of Hitman 2's November game update, which will include various fixes and tweaks.

The Fixer, a Legacy Elusive Target, will follow all this on November 22. He's a tricky fellow, and IO says he's got the lowest clear rate of all the Elusive Targets to date. 

Rounding out the month are three more Escalations: The three-stage McCallister Ransack in Whittleton Creek, the increasingly complicated Quimby Quandary on the Isle of Sgail, and the improbably-named Bartholomew Hornswaggle on Haven Island. This last one unlocks the Buccaneer outfit for 47, which includes a tricorn captain's hat and the requisite eyepatch.

Even as IO ramps up production on the next Hitman game, the studio has made sure to keep current players busy. The studio will hold a livestream November 18 to talk more about what's in store for the series. If you're not playing Hitman 2, well, why aren't you? It's very good.

Hitman 2 has been subject to countless updates since its release last November, but it looks like IO Interactive is moving most of its resources on to the next major installment in the series. In a new November roadmap published today, the company said that it's "looking increasingly to the future". Which means that "in real terms, we're moving more and more of the Hitman 2 team to join the next Hitman game, which is well underway."

This is good news for Hitman fans, who might have feared that IO Interactive's forthcoming non-Hitman game—which will be published by Warner Bros—could signal a long break in Agent 47's bloody career. While the Warner Bros published game hasn't been thoroughly detailed, it did come with the sentiment that the studio wants to explore "new universes, new franchises"—Hitman is neither.

While Hitman 2 won't get new missions, there's still a wealth of Featured Contracts coming, as well as the addition of Community-curated Contracts. Some Seasonal Content—the announcement doesn't specify which—will be added to the game permanently, and there's a new Escalation and Elusive Contract coming in December.

So the game is still "living", in other words, but probably to a lesser extent than we've seen throughout 2019. For the full IO Interactive statement, as well as a round-up of new November content, it's worth reading the roadmap for yourself.

In case it wasn't very obvious, Hitman 2 is a very good game. "Essentially more of its predecessor but with a more consistent quality of levels," Phil Savage wrote in his Hitman 2 review, adding that this is a very good thing.

Hitman 2's Halloween Escalation Contract is set to go live tomorrow, and developer IO Interactive still hasn't said what exactly it's all about. But today it dropped a new trailer that leans very heavily into classic horror movie themes, with Agent 47 taking the role of the implacable, inhuman masked killer who's come seeking revenge! For... something.

It might be a bit odd, but I'd say that 47's Headless Hitman getup is the most normal thing about this video. Avoiding detection by wearing the stupidest outfit possible is his signature move, after all. But I feel like this goes beyond the usual costume-wearing nonsense that he employs in his day-to-day business, especially since the video portrays Hawke's Bay, the isolated New Zealand beach house from Hitman 2's tutorial level. It wouldn't be the first return to that locale—he offed a corrupt politician there earlier this year—but it sure looks like it could be the weirdest.

The Hitman Halloween event is available through the free Hitman 2 Starter Pack, so you can take part in the festivities even if you don't own the game. The contract goes live on October 22, and will be a permanent addition to the game.

Today I read that Hitman 2 (the 2018 one, not Silent Assassin) sold 90% fewer copies than Hitman: Absolution, which broke my brain a little. And as I type this, only about a thousand people are playing it on Steam. Plenty of great games underperform, because sales are not a barometer of quality. Far from it. But this isn't some weird new IP or obscure indie game. It's Hitman! And not just any Hitman, but arguably the best Hitman in the series.

I know what you're thinking. Blood Money is the best Hitman, right? Curtains Down, You Better Watch Out, A New Life... all classic missions. That's why I said arguably, because there's a condition to this rather wild statement. Hitman 2 on its own is a great game, but probably not as great as Blood Money. However, throw in the DLC that adds all the levels from the original 2016 reboot and it's probably the best Hitman experience you can have on PC.

Why? Well, IO's assured Hitman reboots have deep systems that let you dream up creative ways to complete your objectives, making them supremely satisfying stealth games. Sneaking into a heavily guarded area, killing the target, making it look like an accident, then strolling out unseen, whistling a lil tune, is a sublime feeling. The AI is fun to screw around with, the levels are intricate and detailed, and it's all super polished, just like Agent 47's wonderfully shiny head.

But what really elevates Hitman 2 is its exceptional level design. Along with the 2016 maps, this is probably the finest collection of stealth puzzle boxes on PC. These complex, sprawling spaces are heaving with potential for creative assassination, from the idyllic Italian coastal town of Sapienza to the wind-battered Isle of Sgàil. Every location has its own distinctive personality, rich with systems to exploit, shortcuts to take, and details to discover.

Another thing IO excels at is creating a sense of place. These levels aren't just mechanically interesting; they're also atmospheric, exotic places to spend time in. Whether it's the leafy American suburbs of Whittleton Creek, Hokkaido's ultra-high-tech mountain hospital, or the bustling slums of Mumbai, these environments are prime examples of just how good IO's artists are when it comes to building immersive, detailed worlds.

The freedom is another thing I love. If you want to orchestrate your own elaborate murder, you can. The systems are deep enough. But you can also follow mission stories to gently guide you towards a solution. These are all worth doing at least once, because they let you dispose of these horrible people in an ironic, darkly satisfying manner. Ultimately it's just nice to have the choice of how involved you want to be in a hit, depending on your mood.

You can read Phil's review for a more in-depth analysis of what Hitman 2 does well, but I feel it's my duty to remind you that A) this game exists and B) it's incredibly good. And with two new levels added recently—a bank in New York and a tropical island in the Maldives—it's only gotten better since it launched. We love deep, systems-rich games on PCG, and while Hitman 2 isn't quite Deus Ex, it's among the finest stealth games you can play on PC today.

Hitman 2's enigmatic Agent 47 adores dressing up, so Halloween is a very special time of year for him. This year, IO Interactive is keeping him pretty busy, but there will still be time for costumes, as well as tricks and scares across the month. 

October's first event begins today in Miami with the Riviera Restoration Escalation Contract, followed by a three-part Escalation in Mumbai on October 10, netting you the Imperial Classic with Gloves outfit, previously only unlockable through an Elusive Target. Then, on October 11, the Warlord will be returning in the month's only Legacy Elusive Target.

The spooky shenanigans finally begin on October 17, when IO will show off this month's community-created contracts, all with a trick or treat theme. Submissions for the contracts ends on October 14.

The Halloween Escalation Contract, coming on October 22, is still a mystery, but players are promised two rewards. You'll be able to take it for a spin whenever you want, too, as it will be a permanent fixture. On the same day, Legacy Challenge Packs will slip into Hitman 2, giving owners of the Legacy Pack a trio of challenges to complete, each of them unlocking an outfit and weapon. Complete them all and Agent 47 will have everything he needs if someone finally invites him to a Halloween party.

October 25's Elusive Target is a serial killer in Whittleton Creek, followed by the chance to becoming a slasher movie villain in the Hawke's Bay challenge pack on October 31. Hokkaido and Sapienza Legacy Escalations will be appearing on the same day, if you've got a hankering to relive two of the last game's best missions. 

Expect more details about the Halloween Escalation Contract during IO's livestream on October 21, the day before the mission appears. It's shaping up to be another full month of murder and costume changes. 

With Agent 47 taking a working holiday to the Maldives later this month, IO Interactive has given us a closer look at Hitman 2's new destination, Haven Island, as well as the accompanying mission, Last Resort. 

Haven Island is a tropical paradise with golden beaches, crystal clear water and one bald assassin. It's the HQ of a reputation management service, which treats its presumably terrible guests to all the luxuries they want. 

In Last Resort, set right after the bank mission, Agent 47 will need to pose as a guest to take out a trio of targets. IO Interactive will share story details later, but for now we know that there will be more than 75 challenges, 20 mastery levels, four unique items, a new suit and seven achievements. Haven Island will also be available in Contracts mode. 

More details on the targets and location will be released soon. Unfortunately, it's the final piece of the Expansion Pass, though we'll still have more contracts and targets to keep us occupied after it launches. Hopefully it's a memorable one. 

Haven Island and Last Resort are launching on September 24 for Expansion Pass and Gold Edition owners.