HITMAN™ Sapienza Review

Hitman Sapienza managed to surpass the sheer brilliance of Paris despite some glitches here and there. During my gameplay, I disguised as a therapist and smothered my target to death with a pillow while he was crying about his mom, had an affair with a lab researcher disguised as a golf coach and poisoned her, roleplayed Heisenberg and dissolved corpses in acid containers in a Hazmat suit, stabbed my target to death with a ceremonial knife disguised as the Plague Doctor, shot a water plane my target was using to escape with a cannon (yes an actual medieval cannon), sniped my target through a telescope, disguised as a Priest and dropped a church bell on my target, played dead in a church morgue so on and on...

What’s even more amazing is that all these things I already mentioned hardly cover half of the things you can do in Sapienza. The level design is absolutely stunning, I found myself ignoring the mission and instead taking dozens of screenshots in my first playthrough. The level complexity is much higher than Paris mission. Paris had only 2 targets; however, Sapienza adds an additional task to complete on top of 2 targets you need to assassinate. One can’t help but feel overwhelmed once you start the level for the first time as the map is much bigger and more complicated. IT FEELS AWESOME!!!

I should also mention the most important change which came with Sapienza is that challenges don’t require you to complete the mission anymore. I spent about 20 hours in Paris cause you were required to complete the mission for challenges to register. Sapienza removes this requirement, except for the challenges specifying that you need to complete the mission, which aren’t that many (but they are the most prestigious ones!). Thanks to this change I actually managed to complete the game 100% in terms of Steam achievements in only about 7-8 hours. Although I admit that the briefcase to carry Sniper Rifles without alarming civilians is still missing :/

Regarding glitches, the most annoying one I ran into was when I started the game in the safe house to pick up my sniper rifle. There was noone to see me, I was in a safe zone where I wasn’t tresspassing, the whole building was empty and somehow my status was “compromised” until it became “hunted” for absolutely no reason at all. Another one was something that deeply upset me as a Pacifist; at the end of a level 4 escalation contract in Sapienza, I found out that my score had a penalty for a “non-target kill” which is impossible cause I only killed one person and that was the target I had to assassinate in the first place. I didn’t even pacify anyone (people on forums report that pacified people can randomly die)! The last glitch was a graphical one, as I was trying to snipe my target through the telescope he was using, the area became black and I couldn’t really see where the lens of the telescope was so I had to use earlier saves a number of times until I got lucky with my shot.

Apart from these glitches I had some problems with heavy fps drops inbetween saves. When I reload an earlier save, the game becomes impossible to play for a few seconds due to stutters and 2-3 fps until it goes back to normal after about 10 seconds. This is a known issue and there is already patch to fix it.

In final words, I actually enjoyed Sapienza a lot more than Paris and I can easily say that it's my favourite episode so far. If the episodes keep setting the bar even higher, I hope the later episodes will not struggle to reach the quality and standard of the earlier ones.