Hitman 3 caps off the new Hitman trilogy, but I don't think it's the end of the franchise. This game and it's two predecessors are virtually identical, and thus part of this review is sort of a look at the trilogy as a whole.
Hitman 3 gets all the important things right. It includes 5* new levels, several of which add some kind of twist to the assassination formula, one example being a level where you must locate and kill 5 unmarked targets to strike fear into their organization, and another requiring you to investigate deeply gaurded agency secrets. Personally, I'm not the biggest fan of non-assassination objectives in Hitman because they tend to become a bit tedious upon replay, which is of course the best thing about the Hitman franchise. That said, I still like all 5* of the levels in this game. Hitman's design formula has always been and will always be good, and this game does it justice, no question. If you like hitman, you will like this game.
This trilogy is exactly what a hitman game should be, but it definitely still has some shortcomings that we should recognize. The first one is the story. It has some good moments that veteran hitman fans will appreciate, but it simply doesn't have enough plot points to build any intrigue, and the writing is flat. They pretty much did the bare minimum for what is expected in a hitman story and the only clever or surprising thing that happens (toward the end) is acctualy an idea that was clearly inspired by Blood Money. If you've played both these games you know exactly what I'm talking about. Mostly forgettable even though I do like the way 47 and Diana work in this story.
The other problems I have with this game and the new trilogy altogether are minor, but still need to be discussed to keep IOI honest and improve the franchise moving forward, because the truth is that these games are all just new levels to the same formula. To start, we all know the graphics are very average. Absolution's graphics are better, period. These games' gunplay is also inferior to Absolution. Guns feel much less weighty, sound pretty bland in comparison, and also have absurd amounts of bullet deviation for no reason. What happened to dual wilding pistols? What happened to taking people as human shields? This is compared to a game from 2012. I understand these games' budgets may have been tight, but with standards being raised more and more across the industry, and considering these games (2 and 3 at least) have been pretty financially successful, I expect improvements to these things in the future, even if that means just copy pasting all the upgrades from Absolution that they threw out the window. Finally, I will say that I've never loved this game's loadout system. It's always been pretty obvious which items are best and it's unfortunate that there was no weapon customization whatsoever like there was in Blood Money.
That was a lot of nitpicky criticism, but none of these things make the game less fun. They simply are ways the franchise can be improved upon in the future, something this franchise deserves.
