Hitman episode 4: Bangkok (and Bonus Summer episode)

One town looks very like another when your head's down over your target, brother.

So far, Hitman has taken us to an exclusive fashion show in a Parisian mansion, a secret lab located under an Italian seaside resort, and the Swedish Embassy in Marrakesh, so a hotel seems a little... ordinary? Certainly, it's the first location where an ordinary person could find themselves without being a high-flying international assassin for hire.

But the Himmapan luxury hotel is no ordinary venue; this is, after all, Hitman, and that means plenty of backroom areas rife for exploration and exploitation.

The targets this time are rock star Jordan Cross - a name you'll recognise if you've been listening to ambient conversations through the first three levels - and his rich dad's fixer, Thing "The Brick" Thingerson, an unscrupulous lawyer good at burying Jordan's... legally trickier activities.

After the more sprawling settings of Spaienza and Marrakesh, Bangkok feels almost claustrophobic; The Himmapan is the most compact and labyrinthine of Hitman's levels since Paris, a multi-storey maze of basements, kitchens, gardens, bars and restaurants.

Cross' band, The Class, have taken over an entire wing of the hotel to record their new album, and security is tight. Once you're past the hotel's own guards, you have to circumvent the band's own hired muscle - but succeed, and you're treated to the aftermath of a full-volume rockstar's party, with drunken roadies sprawled on stained carpets littered with empty bottles and cans.

It's a stark contrast to the pristine rooms on the other side, where the only people you'll bump into are uniformed housekeeping staff.

I'm at the point now where I can see most of the turning wheels under Hitman's surface, and I was worried that would start to take the shine off the thing, but that turns out to have been unfounded. Knowing how to use my tools, being able to predict the effect they'll have, just adds to that feeling of professionalism, of being a calm, collected, international assassin, in full control of my environment.

...until a guard sees me shimmy up a drainpipe, and the shooting starts, at least.

~~~

I didn't talk about the Summer Bonus Episode when it launched, but here's the short version: it's great, and much better than my initial impressions.

Each of the two missions offers a smaller section of their respective levels, which was disappointing about first, but the extra focus is actually kind of nice, and there are still plenty of opportunities for Opportunities. They even play around a bit more with some of the less-used sections of Sapienza and Marrakesh, and even something as simple as changing the time of day makes a big difference to the atmosphere of both locations.

The Icon is particularly fun, and has some really weird options to play with involving various bits of sci-fi movie machinery. In World of Tomorrow, Sapienza suffered a bit from feeling meandering - empty, even - what with most of the focus being on the villa (and the lab beneath), so it's nice to see the square get a bit of love, even if the lawyer's offices are still uninhabited.

It's also nice seeing Marrakesh's fortune teller back in his successful days; it's almost enough to make me regret stuffing him in that basket.

Almost.