Thank you to IO Interactive for sending us this game to review!

Good morning, 47. Your destination is the recently launched Nintendo Switch 2, the successor to a very well-regarded console. Your target is to provide an enthralling experience to millions of users who are looking for games to play on their new device. The parent corporation behind this, Nintendo, have reportedly targeted impressive, forward-thinking technological features, but ICA have learned of concerns that it was built upon an aging platform that may hamstring performance very quickly after launch. We believe that your presence on the console is technically possible, but suspect it will be incredibly difficult to achieve. Our client, the general public, is looking for us to ensure a stable and performant experience so that their investment is not wasted. To do so, you will need to hit consistent frame-rate targets, capture crisp images of our enemies, and be responsive to external communications. I shouldn’t need to mention that failure to function properly is grounds for termination. The outlook for our port is grim, 47, and I would ask you to take great caution. We have only one opportunity; either to impress, or to underwhelm. I will leave you to prepare.

Hitman is a long-running series beginning on the PS2 surrounding Agent 47: a clean-shaven and bald suited assassin whose sole objective is to infiltrate any region and perform contracted work on any target. In the most recent reboot of the series, you are an agent for the ICA, or International Contract Agency. The ICA is a global agency with ties to Mossad, Interpol, the CIA, and many more intelligence agencies. When the hands of wronged individuals, domestic organizations, or even entire countries are tied, ICA is willing to intervene for a contract; whether that be assassination, exfiltration of information, or termination of products or research. Hitman World of Assassination is the renamed title of prior Hitman 3, the third entry in the series since its reboot in 2016. Formerly released in 2016, 2018, and then 2021, World of Assassination contains content from all three Hitman games under one package. All weapons, all locations, all targets.

World of Assassination contains a prologue section and three campaigns you can chew through. Each campaign contains a series of missions all in their own unique locations, with cinematics bridging the story between each contract. At the start of each mission, you’re given a cinematic where your handler tells you about the location, your targets, what they are suspected of, why ICA took the contract, and what she suspects you will need to do to fulfill it. Once finished, you’re left on your own to figure out what comes next. Whether a show floor in Paris, a raceway in Miami, or a research company in China, there is always a target behind armed guards, locked doors, and watchful cameras that you must slip into (ideally) undetected. Each location is filled with sprawling passageways, dozens (sometimes hundreds!) of NPCs, and numerous pre-determined ways of fulfilling your contract–though you can still create your own! The world is your oyster, but each player must determine how they would shuck it.

In each location, there are numerous people who prowl about. Some of these are fake NPCs: bodies that animate that add to the illusion of bustling markets, populated hotels, and so on. But among these are real NPCs: characters that watch you and will react to your own actions. If you pull out a gun as an ordinary man in a suit, they’ll panic and run away, reporting you to any police or guards they find along the way who’d be more than willing to gun you down if you don’t surrender. Other illegal or suspicious actions like knocking someone out, poisoning a drink in the open, or throwing objects at people, will cause them to become suspicious or report you. Similarly, guards will ask you to leave if they find you trespassing where you shouldn’t be and will shoot you if you don’t surrender or leave the premises in a short enough time. But to get around these issues, there’s a simple solution: change your disguise.

There are numerous different types of NPCs in every level. Take a later level in Hitman 1, a hotel with a VIP, for instance. There are cooks, bellhops, cleaning staff, hotel security, and VIP security, to name a few. Each different type of NPC has its own security clearance, so to speak. Cooks aren’t welcome in guests’ rooms, but are welcome in the kitchen, where you could poison a target’s food before it goes to them. Cleaning staff are welcome everywhere in the hotel, except levels only security can access. Security can obviously access guard rooms, as well as all other areas, but they aren’t welcome in VIP areas who keep their own bodyguards. But that’s okay, because those bodyguards aren’t welcome in the camera room.

Every stage has its own set of skins 47 must don to achieve his objective. By finding isolated NPCs or creating opportunities to be alone with them, you can knock them out and take their disguises. Whether you do so peacefully or fatally is up to you. After knocking them out, you can even hide them in lockers, boxes, and other objects to ensure no one finds your victims. But disguises aren’t perfect. If you suddenly pull out an illegal weapon as a cook, your cover will be blown. No one can forget a tall, bald cook with a suppressed pistol. As a guard, if you suddenly knock out an innocent woman or shoot a target and are noticed, your disguise is compromised. And if you never hid those bodies from earlier, someone will be bound to stumble upon them, and then the area will enter a lockdown – a state in which security is higher and targets are protected more severely. Unless you’re very cunning, one disguise is not the be-all and end-all, and you’ll be frequently swapping between disguises as you navigate around these locations, piecing together a plan for assassination. Additionally, some NPCs known as Enforcers will remember who they expected to have on their crew, and will realize you’re not one of them and compromise your disguise if caught.

As you walk through busy streets or creep behind walls, you will inevitably pick up bits of information. Sometimes hotel attendants are a bit too loose-lipped, or perhaps a seller in a back alley has picked up on something they really shouldn’t have. This information will result in a Mission Story you can follow. Mission Stories are unique to each location, and each story lets you fulfill your objective in a unique way. Let’s use the first mission of Hitman 1 as an example, where you must infiltrate a fashion show in Paris to eliminate two targets. The first, a Russian oligarch and owner of the fashion brand, can be eliminated in three ways. You can choose to disguise yourself as his assistant, then ensure he is accidentally killed by a falling stage light; disguise yourself as a visiting reporter who has a scheduled interview with the man; or, finally, learn his favorite drink, disguise yourself as a bartender, and easily poison him. Each Mission Story requires you to learn the schedule and behavior of NPCs, which frequently roam around the map doing various things–and this can be your undoing. If you wait too long and the reporter leaves to do the interview herself, then that Mission Story is gone and you’ll need to find a new way to reach him. All oysters will rot should you leave them for too long.

Once you’ve finally managed to fulfill your contact by eliminating targets or gathering required information, you’ve got to extract. 47 needs to make his way out of whatever corner he’d trapped his prey in and swiftly escape. Similar to other things in this game, there isn’t just one way to escape on most missions. You’ll have a variety of options to make your getaway, and some may even require gathering key items during your exploits, like keys to a helicopter or a parachute for leaving a skyscraper.

Controls are relatively straight-forward with simple one- or two- button interactivity for items and actions, plus some other standard controls (bumper to run, triggers to aim and shoot). You can pick up almost any small object you find and add it to a revolving inventory easily accessible with the D-Pad, which is also used for concealing items and bringing them back out. Following a recent patch, controls feel much more responsive thanks to the 30FPS cap. That said, there are still some times where I feel like the controls can trip over themselves due to animation delay.

The sound design in the game is good. Environmental effects change as you go between rooms, and voices play in stereo to the direction and height you’d imagine them coming from, muffling with distance or when behind walls. Guns sound quiet and powerful while suppressed, while ordinary weapons rip through the air with blasting noise that alert civilians. Other interactions with doors, cans, glass, and such sound exactly as they should. The game is inspired by spy media, and the dramatic orchestral score that accompanies you only emphasizes this. Music largely plays quietly in the background, but you’ll still get small stings following the start of a mission, the discovery of a Mission Story, or the elimination of a target.

Visually, the game is very stylish. There’s a strong focus on elegance and style that fits its origin in spy movies and stories. The real-world locations the game bases its world from are recreated with care for the architecture, foliage, vehicles, outfits, and people you’d find there. Missions can range from luxurious art-house exhibitions, to dingy underground clubs, to cartel hideouts in the deep jungle. It’s an eclectic variety of locations that truly pull from a wide variety of spy tropes and narratives, while still having some creative ideas of its own. Models and characters are rendered in great fidelity, and textures are sharp and pop as you walk around the world. A lot of effort was also put into the lighting system, which is very impressive and atmospheric whether at night with starry skies or at sundown at the edge of a villa. It served well as a transition between last-gen and current-gen visuals, and I’m very pleased with how it looks.

However, that only applies to World of Assassination as it stands on other platforms, particularly PC. On Switch 2, well… It’s personally a bombing out, but luckily not as bad as it was. They managed to put a patch out just two days ago that’s improved my opinion of the game, but I still have some things to critique. Performance used to be incredibly erratic as the framerate was uncapped, but they’ve since capped it at 30FPS, making for a much more enjoyable experience. Even so, it can still go below that cap at times to the low- to mid-20s.

Doing some testing with the PC version, I strongly suspect the game in Handheld is running with some kind of upscaling around 360-540p. I don’t know if it’s DLSS or FSR, but the results are oddly in-between, making it hard to determine which with no official confirmation. The game is more stable in motion than on PC with Performance DLSS at 1080p (roughly what Handheld would use), but image reconstruction is much poorer. Things in the distance would be blurrier and shimmer more on PC, but on Switch 2 the actual detail of them is lost and looks much closer to low-interference AI models due to what it hallucinates. Things in the distance look like fizzling watercolor paintings with a sharpening filter on top because of how low the resolution is and how much they’re asking from it. While this is somewhat noticeable on Handheld, it’s much more noticeable in Docked mode, where the output resolution increases and upscaling is required to do more. Most graphics settings seem to run at a PC-equivalent Low, while some like textures run at Medium and others even lower than is possible on PC. All-in-all, I believe it is visually worse in most ways than the PS4 port of the game–a console released over a decade ago. In my opinion, the detailed and realistic visuals of the game have only made the fizzling and ghosting of upscaling appear even more apparent than other titles like Fast Fusion, which mostly had complaints of grainy pixelation due to DLSS but otherwise looked good, leading me to believe it’s using FSR2 or a super, super low-res DLSS.

Beyond just resolution and frame rate, shadows, light effects, and some reflections are grainy and boil in most scenes. I imagine this is due to the extremely low resolution causing diffusion artifacts, but it is rather noticeable. There’s also constant ghosting around 47 and other objects while in motion leaving subtle trails. In some locations, I’ve also spotted something akin to animation stutter, where visible hitching occasionally occurs as the speed of moving objects don’t match the speed of the camera’s motion, almost seeming to be a frame behind.

Outside of Switch 2 specific issues, I feel that the game’s biggest issue has always been its online-only requirement. You can play the game offline, but doing so will immediately prevent you from gaining XP or leveling up. Every location has different disguises or places you can choose to start at on subsequent playthroughs, but you only earn them by beating the missions while connected to the IOI servers. If you lose connectivity and decide to switch to online, your save is as good as worthless for this. It no longer counts for progression and you would need to restart while connected to the internet to unlock new items. But beyond just progression, there are also different challenges and missions with new targets in existing locations you can only do while connected to the internet. This means while it isn’t pointless as a portable game away from the internet, you’ll be missing out on a majority of the game, and I wouldn’t recommend it.

Additionally, the gameplay loop can be a bit frustrating at times. Accidentally breaking disguise or trespassing when you didn’t realize you were will end your attempt at being a Silent Assassin, a qualifier best for earning XP. It’s also just not very fun to be an assassin who kills everyone along the way. The game does autosave at times, but they’re not frequent enough, and as such, I’d personally recommend saving often, because you’ll never know when you may need it. The Switch 2 release also introduced a number of bugs including your bullets not hurting anyone until reloading your save, phasing through doors or walls, objects occasionally turning invisible, Mission Stories failing to progress, and even some hard crashes, to name a few. The recent patch is said to have fixed most of the crashes and bugs, but it’s too early to say for certain.

Morally, the game is very much about assassination. You are traveling the world to kill individuals who, although definitely not innocent, are certainly not expecting you. You can kill them in many gruesome ways including point-blank headshots, screwdrivers thrown into their head, blowing them up with gas leaks, electrocuting them to death with rewirings, and even grinding them up in machinery. Blood can spurt and stain as you fulfill your contracts, and bodies never disappear. There is strong language, including strong blasphemy, and some occasional sexual remarks. No nudity is present, and the worst sexual content is bikinis and swimwear in the more resort locations.

All-in-all, Hitman World of Assassination is a very good spy series that gives you the true power fantasy of a globe-trotting assassin. With a strong gameplay loop that can at times become tedious, a solid score and sound design, and impressive visual design, it’s a fun title you’re bound to get many hours from. Going through the main content alone may take you 50-60 hours, and much more if you go for all the Mission Stories and dip your toes in the side content. That said, the Switch 2 port is rather disappointing and still in a rough state, and I wouldn’t recommend it for now until the remaining performance issues and bugs can be sanded down.