In a game about assassination, the kill should feel tense and provide a relief that you got away with it after. Every time I pull off a successful assassination in the game, the music makes that kill feel shallow and unimportant, like it does not matter. These are all feelings the current soundtrack is devoid of and as such it makes me play the game more carelessly and less methodically as it never establishes any stakes for our potential actions nor does it provide anticipation or emotional payoff after a kill.
#Hitman go 4 12 ps2
The PS2 era hitman soundtrack established three core tenants of Hitman: Tension (to tell us to play carefully), anticipation (before a kill to provide a sense of achievement for that kill) and emotional payoff after a successful assassination. It eradicates tension (which in turn makes me play carelessly as there is no weight to my actions) whereas as previous hitman scores of the Jesper Kyd variety always established an excellent tension for the player, informing the player that your actions can have actual domino-effect consequences and your next move could spoil all your hard work.
I have genuinely found the music is detrimental enough to the game that I play the game better when I boot up spotify to play classic Jesper Kyd Hitman scores as they always put me in the mindset of a more slow, methodical and silent killer, improving my approach to the game whereas the current score is too light and grandiose for its own good. The soundtrack is incredibly generic and feels far more like a wannabe 007 game than a stalking, calculating, contract killer experience. The story takes a backseat as it should in a Hitman game, serving as an excuse to globe-trot from one level to the next but the music lets the game down moreso than anything else. These attachments should be interchangeable as you unlock them to encourage replay-ability with the new toys you get but instead that sense of discovery is sorely stunted due to a restrictive unlock system. Finally the weapon system sucks as it regresses back to a pre-Blood Money style of set/fixed weaponry without any customisation possible which is also exploited to artificially inflate the number of weapons you can unlock, as you will get the same sniper 3 times but with an alternative scope on one, silent ammo on another and bullet penetration on the next one. The levels are somewhat inconsistent in quality and oddly the game engine or some other element (unknown to me) seemed to prevent them from having working elevators (hotel mission stands out as it has nothing but staircases everywhere), fiber wire takedowns are only possible on standing npcs so no classic Blood Money seated kill animations anymore. This has some fundamental flaws in terms of its AI, the triggers for AI being over-reliant on proximity triggers which breaks the immersion This has some fundamental flaws in terms of its AI, the triggers for AI being over-reliant on proximity triggers which breaks the immersion (something I feel older games excelled at as all the cogs of the clock moved with or without you) as you learn to exploit proximity to certain characters to setup events in a very artificial and inorganic way which simply is not fun.