Played a totally legit copy of 007: First Light, because Hitman was pretty great... this, however is really not.

It's trying so hard to be The Authentic James Bond Movie Experience - But You're In Control!!!

As a result there's constant railroading and correction of what you are allowed to do. Hitman tries really hard to make the levels freeform, and that's its strength. This is taking that kind of level design and pathways and then just drawing a straight line across it to Next Destination.

You'll often get to walk for five seconds, cutscene, ten seconds of walking, cutscene, twenty minutes of shooting wave after wave of badguys, cutscene, cutscene, quicktime event (it's completely random if an action cutscene is also a QTE), five seconds of walking, end of mission.

It tries to mimic the Epic Bond Moments from the movies, but those work in the movie. In a game they can be fun, but either they last for five seconds when you wanted more or they drag out for ten minutes longer than the Cool Setpiece Idea can support. You hop in a Massive Dump Truck and drive in a straight line, with "auto drive" correcting mistakes, then you get a cutscene, then you drive it again for literally five seconds to get to the next cool cutscene. You get in the Bond Car and are forced to do donuts for five minutes holding the Kill Mook button while about a hundred guys charge in to stand by the respawning red barrels.

Bond dons a disguise for one room, then throws it away before entering the Sneaking Part. He picks up a hundred guns (each with three bullets) from the hundred guys he just killed (mostly by abusing invincibility during charging punch attacks to kill them all while they useless shoot you - because if you don't you instantly die and have to watch a ten second Intro To The Combat Scene thing again and again) and then chucks them away before entering the next cutscene where he needs to not have those things. And if you fuck this up the checkpointing system can send you back like twenty minutes of gameplay.

Young Bond is weighed down by the nightmare he is to become. He doesn't have character development, he gets the Solo treatment - this is where he gets Cool Scar, this is where he decides to have Martinis, this is where a genuinely traumatic experience is shaken off with a one-liner and a smirk. The only difference is that him being suave and cocky isn't taken seriously by the other characters - their character development is realising that he's just that good!

The best part is they do a really good playable montage sequence during Prologue 2, it was a lot of fun. The worst part is constantly seeing the shadows of far better Hitman levels reduced to a linear walking simulator between combat zones.

Oh and there's a plot. It's average, characters flit in and out of awareness, blah blah blah. The twist that the Plot Device is

spoiler

actually kinda shitty, an infallible AI that needs constant assassinations to cover up its mistakes

is a little refreshing, but undermined by the British Science Is The Greatest In The World stuff later on where Obvious Bad Guy Industries has a shit ton of random superscience.

The Final Boss