Review: HITMAN World of Assassination – Signature Edition (Switch 2)

HITMAN World of Assassination – Signature Edition is a hard game to get into—not because it’s not fun, but because of prohibitive Internet requirements, excessive legalese, and numerous bugs. But when you’re able to execute a mission without interference, it’s wonderfully entertaining.

I’m going to harp on the initial experience because I want to get it out of the way. HITMAN World of Assassination – Signature Edition requires an Internet connection even for solo play, so you’ve got to agree to that. So much for playing on the go. You’re asked to create an IO Interactive account if you don’t already have one. You’re told to provide access to your My.Nintendo account. All of this, or you don’t play. That was off-putting, but I quickly came to understand why the game’s so invasive. Within five seconds of taking control of Agent 47, the game froze. I hope my shared info helps you solve that, IO!

With that out of the way, World of Assassination is a very fun game to play, and it gives you multiple ways to play it. First, you can tackle any mission across any of the three, full games as you see fit (those games being Hitman, Hitman 2, and Hitman 3, along with no shortage of expansions and DLC). This will make sense to those double-dipping with these previous entries; you can just skip right over anything that may be a bother. On the other hand, new players or those who just want to experience everything all over again can play through the campaign that connects the content in linear fashion.

Here, I’ll quickly sing the praises of both the Switch 2 hardware and the efforts of the development team. The games look good, sure, but they also look consistent. Bouncing from one entry to the next is not a jarring experience, which it absolutely could have been considering the source material was released over five years. It all looks modern and shiny, and it mostly performs fairly well on the Switch 2, especially if you’re comparing it to the cloud version of Hitman 3.

That’s impressive, because there are many wide-open areas to be explored, some with a lot of moving parts. Your job, as the enigmatic and (let’s be honest) rather goofy Agent 47, is to locate your target in these areas and execute that target. But you don’t want to just go in guns blazing. Where’s the fun in that? You need to be sneaky. You need to be smart. And that can be very hard to do.

Agent 47 has a radar-like ability to quickly locate and identify his marks, but getting to them is something else entirely. Most know they’re wanted, and therefore have some pretty elaborate security in place. Cameras, guards, the general public…there’s no shortage of obstacles in the way.

You’ll have to survey the scenery to find places to hide. Figure out when and where to eliminate the guards so you can steal a uniform, then decide what to do with the body. I was amused in the tutorial mission when I was able to knock out a cook by throwing a wrench at his face. Dude will live, right? Wrong. Only place to hide the body was in a freezer. Sorry, saucier; should’ve stayed at Steak ‘n’ Shake.

The thing about these missions is that they’re not just fun to complete, it’s also fun to chase your proficiency. There are multiple ways to complete them, and the games encourage you to find those ways. Considering the trial-and-error approach to success (I rarely, and I mean rarely completed a mission on my first try), you’d think I would’ve wanted to quickly move on after finally wrapping things up. But no. I kept replaying missions while the setting was still fresh in my mind. Could I have learned more? Could the execution have been more elegant? Could I have spent a little more time blending in with a fine beverage before getting started?

It’s all pretty violent, of course. Hitman has its gruesome moments, but it also has the awareness to include bits of comedy that lighten the mood. The story is trope-heavy and ridiculous, but by design. It’s never all that compelling, but it’s fun. At the least, it successfully finds ways to drop you in diverse and exotic locations in which to complete your missions. Agent 47’s travel itinerary is as interesting as Lara Croft’s, and his outfits are even more diverse. Cosplay is part of the gig, and Agent 47 takes it all on with a focused practicality that can’t help but amuse the player.

That player can enjoy the games in handheld mode. Things look good and performance is generally fine. But again, the online save situation makes that a hassle if you’re not connected to the Internet. I stuck with docked mode, and although that resulted in frame-rate drops, I preferred to deal with that so I could take in these locations at 1080p. This isn’t the best-looking and performing game for the Switch 2, but it would be unfair to expect it to be considering the most recent of the three included games was originally released four years ago.

However you play HITMAN World of Assassination – Signature Edition, you could be playing it for a very long time. In addition to the wealth of content spread across the three included entries, there’s also a ton of online mission challenges to take on. This is a game that could keep you occupied for years if you let it, but storage may make that difficult to do. I’m not one to gripe too loudly about the game-key card situation on Switch 2, but World of Assassination is going to take up over 60GB of your storage space. There’s no way around that, so you’ll have to account for it.

Is it worth doing so? Yes, I think it is. HITMAN World of Assassination – Signature Edition bridges the gap between action-based shooters and cerebral puzzlers the way few other games can. The stealth segments never feel slow, and the action moments are never too overwhelming (although I still end up fumbling with the controls during them). There’s just so much to do and so many ways to do it that you’ll continually seek new methods to make it all happen.