Hitman: Codename 47

Hitman: Codename 47 is a 2000 stealth video game, developed by IO Interactive and published by Eidos Interactive for Microsoft Windows.

Good Qualities

 * 1) It has a very unique style of stealth people have called Social Stealth. Instead of staying out of enemy's sight entirely, you instead hide in plain sight. Something that would later inspire the Assassin's Creed franchise.
 * 2) Along with this is the disguise mechanic, which is one of the main mechanics of the Hitman franchise. If many NPCs are wearing the same clothing, you can blend in by killing one of them and then posing as their allies.
 * 3) The game was technically impressive for its time. Not only are the graphics good, but this was the first game to use ragdoll physics, cloth simulation, and foliage physics.
 * 4) Great soundtrack.
 * 5) You get a set amount of currency depending on how well you do in a mission. If the player allows Agent 47's bank account to go beneath $0, the Agency will "cancel" 47's account, making the player fail the game, thus restarts the mission.
 * 6) Decent gunplay.
 * 7) Decent voice acting especially David Bateson as 47.
 * 8) An interesting concept of a hitman that is actually a clone created by five men, all genetic donors. 47's creator Otto Wolfgang Ort-Meyer then has the other four murdered by 47 via ICA.
 * 9) Great assassinations with you killing people in various ways whether it'd be sniping or using fiber wire.
 * 10) You can customize your loadout. As long as you have enough money you can bring whatever gun you have the option of buying to bring to the level.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) This game has notably not aged well and is considered one of the weakest entries due to a number of mechanics that were introduced in later games and the design of the overall levels.
 * 2) * There are lots of foes standing between you and your target, and no way to dispose of them non-lethally. As long as you don't grease any civilians or police, which would dock some of your pay, then you could pretty much kill with impunity, unlike the scoring system of the following games, which favors much less lethality. It was when Silent Assassin rolled around that the series' trademark stealth style was being truly improved.
 * 3) ** The Colombian missions are fast-paced noisy action. They effectively force the player to gun down numerous guards in order to complete a hit.
 * 4) * The map is sometimes missing some important aspects, such as, oh....YOUR MAIN OBJECTIVES. Your first task in Mission 3 is to get to the Red Dragon negotiator before he reaches the restaurant for the summit. Since the developers didn't feel the need to put his location on the map (or even where he's entering from), you'll end up running all over the block like an idiot. It should only take about two laps to spot him, but it's still pretty odd not to include him on the map.
 * 5) * On every mission, you'll be able to purchase the compass. While this is a nice feature, it's really not necessary to spend your hard-earned funds on it on the earlier levels. It's likely that you'll never look at it and if you ever get lost, just check the map and reorient yourself to where you want to go. (Later on, when the maps get impossibly huge, you might find that constant map-checking gets tedious, but this is less of an issue in the sequels.) Silent Assassin added a compass in the HUD by default.
 * 6) * Guards are a lot more gullible around 47. The only caution when procuring disguises is that nobody sees the one guard in his boxers. If they do, you'll be under suspicion and you'll need to find yourself another uniform. Funny enough, the uniform can look exactly the same. It just needs to be fresh.
 * 7) * Unlike its successors, you don't have the freedom to assassinate people the way you want. Instead there is only one set way to kill targets.
 * 8) * Trial-and-Error:
 * 9) ** There is no in-game save feature. Instead, it has an odd life system where each mission would let you die and respawn a set number of times. Respawning doesn't reset the guards' alert status though, so if you died you'd either have to gun your way through the rest of the level or restart from the beginning.
 * 10) ** The worst offenders of this are missions like the ones in Colombia, the last half of "Plutonium Runs Loose", and "Meet Your Brother" require you to play the game as a third person shooter, which goes against the rest of the game. To be fair, "Plutonium Runs Loose" can be done stealthy, but it's VERY HARD. You can spend hours sneaking through all of the gates to the ship only to get caught by two guards over and over again.
 * 11) ***On top of that, the game was clearly not designed for it due to the bullet strafe and the fact that 47 doesn't have much health.
 * 12) The graphics haven't aged well along with the character models with most looking a lot like humanoid Minecraft characters due to how blocky they are.
 * 13) When firing a gun, the bullet will fire at a different angle. This is especially bad when trying to shoot an enemy that is 3ft in front of the player and is off by 5 inches! You also can't even shoot people that are too close unless you back up a bit.
 * 14) The characters in the loading screens look really ugly. So bad that they look like early CGI characters.
 * 15) While the voice acting is decent, there are some strange and stereotypical voices for things like Asian characters and Dr. Ortmeyer who people have gone on to say sounds like a vampire.
 * 16) The controls are not that good.

Game Tips

 * Use the knife to silently kill people as it's much faster.
 * In "Meet Your Brother", there's a minigun in the storage room.

Reception
Hitman: Codename 47 received "mixed or average" reviews, according to review aggregator Metacritic.

Jim Preston of Next Generation, rated it three stars out of five, and called it "A deeply flawed masterpiece that will, nonetheless, reward forgiving gamers."

Codename 47 received a "Silver" sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA), indicating sales of at least 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom. In April 2009, Square Enix revealed that Hitman had surpassed half a million sales globally.

Videos
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