This review contains spoilers.

4.4 Wet Hot American Bummer

There’s something perfect about Legends Of Tomorrow being at a summer camp. Could any other superhero show or movie, with their dingy and washed out colour schemes, fit there? I don’t think so. Legends belongs at summer camp. It’s fun, it’s silly, and in the best kind of quiet moments on the bus back from a field trip, can get really deep.

Seeing all these characters try and make it as camp counsellors was a treat. Ray was especially perfect for this, being such a boy scout, but I especially loved Ava. Getting to tag along with the team, Ava struggles so much being a counsellor to the kids because she never had a childhood. Her tearful admittance that she keeps a photo of her actor parents on her desk just hit home how badly she wants to be normal. No wonder she was so eager for Sara to move in during the season premiere, that’s what normal people do right? 

It should also be pointed out how damn good that exchange where Ava admitted that to Sara was. Ava apologised for running off but then Sara quickly apologised for not considering how she’d feel about not having a childhood. They don’t keep each other at arm’s length, they open up about their feelings and the minor conflict is resolved. It was a delightfully mature conversation and shows how perfect the two are for each other. Any couple where both people are willing to own up to their crap is endgame for me. It’s even better because it’s a queer couple! Look at you with the healthy lady couple, Legends! 

On the flipside we had Constantine desperately trying to keep Ray safe by keeping him at arm’s length. We’re seeing more and more why Constantine works alone. It isn’t just to be edgelordy cool dark and trench coats, it’s because he’s genuinely afraid someone else will get hurt. Constantine has clearly lost many important people in his life and he puts all the blame on himself (which started from a young age, as we saw last week.) He’s quite literally self-sacrificing when he gives up what appears to be some of his life force to a kid.

It’s here we really start to see why Constantine is so perfect for Legends. He’s deeply screwed up, hates himself, and lashes out at others because of it. In that way he’s a lot like the other members of the team. Perhaps he’ll learn, like the others have, that you need to embrace help because you can’t do it all on your own. Isn’t it wonderful how Legends slips in these great little morals while also doing silly Beetlejuice jokes and not so stealthy Swamp Thing references? (Nice one, Legends writers.)

Not everyone on the Legends team is feeling the team spirit, though. Mick has an unexpected bonding moment with Charlie when he quietly reveals he’s not quite as happy as you may have guessed. He hates that he works with people who would jail someone, especially spending so much time in jail himself. (It’s a credit to the series they took the one time Prison Break jokes and made them a big part of Mick’s character.)

How does he sleep with it? Alcohol. We’ve seen Mick struggling with his use of it before but now we get to see at least one reason why he does it so often. I can’t speak to how well or not this portrayal of someone who drinks is (is Mick alcoholic for sure?) but at least we know he’s trying to keep his true feelings inside. As much as Mick can be the live-action version of a cartoon bulldog, he still has layers he needs to peel back. Like Constantine, he has to accept help from others, no matter how much his pain wants him to just keep it all inside. Not everyone can be as open as Sara or Ava and I love that Legends was able to contrast these characters so well while still never sacrificing its trademark fun.

Legends continues to be a blast this season. Like a perfect day at summer camp it’s non-stop fun but in just the right moments when you’re alone with your buddy? You learn more about them than you ever expected. If Legends continues to mix fun and deep character work like this the fourth season will be its best.

Read Shamus’ review of the previous episode, Dancing Queen, here.

Contains spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has had a villain problem almost since it was first conceived, and this problem can be articulated thus: No villain it has produced is as sophisticated as Loki. As played by Tom Hiddleston, Loki is evil enough to root against, but enough of an underdog to root for. We love to hate him as much as we hate to love him. Apt stuff, for a character who thrives on contradiction and uncertainty.

Loki may have faced a rather ignominious and final-looking death on-screen during Avengers: Infinity War, but let’s face it: it’s not like Marvel to waste good IP. After a long rumour cycle, it was recently confirmed that Hiddleston will be back as Loki for a short-run TV show, expected to debut on Disney’s forthcoming streaming platform, Disney+.

“Spoilers for Avengers 4!” we may hear you cry, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Marvel has shown a willingness to jump back and forth through its timeline of late (both Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 and the forthcoming Captain Marvel occur out of chronological order) while Disney’s own just-announced Cassian Andor TV series is planned as a prequel to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. We know the Loki TV show will star Hiddleston, but we don’t know how he’ll appear in it or when it’ll be set.

But what we can do is look at some of the best Loki stories told in Marvel’s comics and ask ourselves: what might the TV show take from them?

Journey Into Mystery

Created by Kieron Gillen and a variety of artistic collaborators, Journey Into Mystery was, notably, a story about a version of Loki who had just died. Resurrected in a child’s body and given guidance by his former self (inhabiting a raven named Ikol), this critically acclaimed run posed the question: How can anyone possibly trust that the God of Mischief has changed his ways?

The series saw Loki defending Asgard in his own less-than-heroic style, employing subterfuge and pragmatic dealings to set his homeworld’s enemies against one another. This Loki – aka Kid Loki – was kinder, gentler, and altogether more decent than his previous version, which is why it was such a shame that no-one trusted him no matter how far they could throw him. And make no mistake, he was a kid. They could throw him pretty far.

One thing that points to Journey Into Mystery as a possible influence on the TV show is an exchange that actually takes place in Thor: Ragnarok. As Thor and Loki fight, Thor says: “Dear brother, you’re becoming predictable. I trust you, you betray me, round and round in circles we go. See, Loki, life is about… it’s about growth. It’s about change. But you seem to just wanna stay the same. I guess what I’m trying to say is that you’ll always be the God of Mischief, but you could be more.”

That is, in a nutshell, the premise of Gillen’s series. If the Loki TV show is a sequel to Infinity War (and therefore Ragnarok) there’s almost no better place to go with it. Who doesn’t want to see a younger Loki striving for redemption? And, more importantly, going for milkshakes alongside Leah, a teenage goth version of Hela who appeared in the original run? Use Hiddleston in Ikol’s place – a spectre appearing as the new Loki’s most untrusted advisor – and we have a fresh, younger version of Loki who could appear in future movies (Young Avengers, anyone?) while maintaining the presence of the old one.

Agent Of Asgard

Although in the comics this story follows up Journey Into Mystery, there’s absolutely no reason a Loki TV show couldn’t jump straight into Agent Of Asgard. It would have at least one obvious benefit over the high-fantasy yarns Loki normally stars in: it would be a LOT cheaper.

That’s because Agent Of Asgard, by Al Ewing and Lee Garbett, sees the character assuming the role of an undercover spy: infiltrating, destabilising, and generally upsetting the current order in an attempt to wipe his moral slate clean. That’s not to say he’s exclusively hanging out in casinos and hotels, but it’s more about Loki doing precision work with his wits than charging into battle against a horde of trolls or making poison-pen bargains with fire demons.

Fusing genres, an Agent Of Asgard TV show could be an almost urban fantasy take on Loki as he uses his magical powers and silver tongue to nobler ends. We haven’t forgotten how good the character looked in his distinctly Midgard-wear suit during the opening sequence of Ragnarok, after all, and what better way to respond to the never-going-away rumour that Hiddleston could be the next Bond than by showing us what he might look like as a secret agent? Possibly for a reformed S.H.I.E.L.D.?

This take would be the perfect on co-star, as his earthbound backup, the MCU’s Asgardian experts Darcy Lewis and Dr. Selvig (who realistically speaking aren’t likely to turn up in a Thor movie again). It practically writes itself, and even if it doesn’t, I’d happily do it.

Put it this way: if Marvel does a Secret Agent Loki TV show, it isn’t just the Martinis that would be shaken, stirred, and extremely dirty.

The Lost Gods

On a completely different tack: it’s hard to escape the reality that most of Asgard’s gods (and the civilians) were killed during Ragnarok, which presents a slight problem in terms of giving Loki any kind of supporting cast. That’s not as big a problem as you might expect, because in Norse mythology (or in Marvel’s version of it at any rate) Ragnarok is a cycle of death and rebirth in which the gods die and are reborn. This has taken place multiple times in the comics, and will surely happen again.

In the past, a version of this storyline was done as The Lost Gods, spinning out of Thor and Loki’s death. The premise is simple: Asgard is empty, and one man needs to refill it by locating the spirits of the old gods that have been trapped, amnesiac, in the roles of normal humans on Earth. In the 90s comic version of this storyline that man was Red Norvell, a former wielder of Mjolnir who found himself Asgard’s only hope. Later, Thor himself took on a similar role in J. Michael Straczynski’s reboot of the series.

But with the MCU Asgard empty and the gods dead, who better than Loki to be given the task of rebuilding Asgardian society? Especially because he, of all people, is the one who might think the universe better off without it. That’s the sort of contradiction that makes Loki sing as a character, and it’s a premise we’d love to see in action.

The opportunities are endless, especially if Thor dies in Infinity War and Loki becomes the only remaining Asgardian. Perhaps, in an inversion of Journey Into Mystery, Loki ends up babysitting a child who could be the new Thor. Perhaps he ends up with his only partner in crime being Sigyn, who you may know as his ex-wife from the comics – there’d be a certain hilarity in the first god he awakens being the one who hates him most of any of them, after all.

And if those ideas don’t grab you, how about Valkyrie? Tessa Thompson’s disgraced warrior quite definitely survived Thanos’ attack in Infinity War, probably because she was passed out drunk in the ship’s hold. Putting her on TV alongside Loki would give audiences what they want: a stereotype-defying buddy-god series with the MCU characters we want to see more of.

The Trials Of Loki

The MCU loves its origin stories, and while Thor gave us a reasonably clear look at Loki’s flip from selfish dick to megalomaniacal dick… well, we still don’t know how he became a dick. In the comics, the miniseries The Trials Of Loki, written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (of Riverdale and Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina fame) gave us the chance to see that happen in real time.

This story could be a prequel, revisiting Thor and Loki’s earlier years, and specifically – as in the comics – why it is that Asgardians loathe Loki almost as much as they love Thor? Of course, while casting Hiddleston in a prequel presents a slight issue: Asgardians live for hundreds of years – a lifetime could fit in the gaps that exist in their backstory and it wouldn’t take more than a cheap Instagram filter to make Hiddleston look younger than he was in Thor.

Think of all the dangling threads we could see tied up. Loki learning magic from his mother. The nascent attraction to Sif the comics have occasionally hinted at. His and a younger Thor’s prank-filled horseplay across the nine worlds. What’s not to like? Of course, the main problem with this idea is that it relies quite heavily on featuring other characters from the MCU. Expensive ones.

But trying to guess what Marvel Studios will do based on the comics is dangerous – they rarely use them as much more than a jumping-off point. You only have to compare the Winter Soldier movie to the Winter Soldier comic to know that. But if you want to get your fill of classic Loki yarns before Marvel Studios add another to the canon, at least you know where to look – and if you think you have any better ideas for where Loki might go on TV, let’s hear them…

Thanks to Kirsten Howard for additional material.

Why are we so obsessed with hitmen? Sure, you’ll find thousands of movies about cops, soldiers, lawyers and thieves, but is there another job where so few people do it, yet so many films are made about them? Being a real-life assassin isn’t glamorous. It isn’t even a nice profession. Where Hollywood and the video games industry could be celebrating doctors or teachers or engineers, they’d rather focus on people who kill other people in cold blood.

Yet it seems hitmen never go out of style. They’re hugely popular in books, TV programmes, comic-books, movies and games. They’re on TV (Killing Eve), and in the cinema, in action movies (John Wick, The Mechanic, Leon), comedies (In Bruges, Grosse Point Blank, The Whole Nine Yards), arty thrillers (Killing Them Softly, Collateral, The American, Hanna) and foreign-language breakout hits (La Femme Nikita, The Killer, The Villainess). Even when they retire and stop killing they still take centre stage – see the Bourne movies and Road To Perdition.

Why? Partly it’s because the hitman covers so many narrative requirements. Watching doctors, teachers and engineers at work wouldn’t often make for exhilarating cinema; most jobs simply aren’t that interesting, hour by hour. The hitman’s job, in contrast, involves action by definition. It might have its long dull stretches, true, but nothing a good montage can’t fix. One man or woman killing another man or woman (or a whole bunch of them) is nearly always going to be dramatic, whether it takes the form of a long, well-planned mission or a fast-paced, deadly assault.

We also like professional killers because we like to watch an expert at work – and even more so when that expertise involves cool stuff. Think of all those scenes where a hitman has to extract a sniper rifle from an aluminium briefcase then twist and lock all the parts in place, or the sequences where the killer waits out of sight in an isolated high position, training their sights on a head half a mile away. Whether they’re planting explosives, donning a disguise or bursting into a gang hideout and killing everyone inside, we enjoy the hitman’s studied precision and superhuman skill.

In fact, we love it when they do something virtually impossible, or turn the toughest gangster into a pleading crybaby. You can see this in John Wick, Kill Bill, the Bourne movies or John Woo’s The Killer – and even in artier fare like Anton Corbijn’s The American. You could say we get the same buzz from a great hitman action scene that audiences had from watching Gene Kelly dance or Buster Keaton pull off slapstick pratfalls. When you’re watching John Wick tear his way through a clandestine nightclub, you’re watching a virtuoso performer at work.

And even when they’re up to no good, we identify with these figures. In a way, being the super-tough, unstoppable, pitiless professional is as potent a power fantasy as being a superhero. In some cases – Deadpool, Suicide Squad’s Deadshot, Black Widow, Angelina Jolie’s Fox in Wanted – there’s no real distinction between the two.

You can feel this sometimes when you’re playing Agent 47 in a Hitman game. His supernatural reflexes put him beyond the guards that try to hold him back. His ability to assimilate and hide in plain sight give him a chameleon like ability to get wherever he needs to go. The consummate assassin, he does what lesser killers can’t – and in more style. The normal rules do not apply.

Sympathy for the devil

Of course, with a hitman hero life isn’t always easy; when your protagonist’s main job is killing people, writers and directors have to use a few tricks to keep the audience on side. Often the killer is someone who wants out of the business, or who’s been dragged back in for one last hit. In John Cusack’s Grosse Point Blank, Martin Blank is an exhausted assassin on the edge of a breakdown, trying to reconnect with his ex-girlfriend and his childhood best friend. Jason Bourne has done some quite unsavoury things, but he’s a man in pain over his awful past. When he kills in the movies, it’s nearly always in self-defence. Even Chow Yun-fat’s Jeff in The Killer is only doing one last job to save the vision of the singer he blinded – and who he’s come to love.

Far from remorseless, the heroic hitman is often damaged by the past or secretly sentimental. Leon is a killer in his day-job, but a soft-hearted dreamer in his private life, crying at musicals and unable to resist Mathilda’s call for help. While the Hitman series’ Agent 47 is a colder, more calculating killer, he still abides by a code of honour, showing compassion, humour and a sense of irony along the way. And remember, who he is, is not his fault – he was made this way.

Notice, too, how rarely the screen hitman’s victim is an innocent or entirely undeserving. Criminals, gang bosses, thugs and hoodlums, there’s nearly always a sense that they have it coming. It’s a classic movie cliché, but if someone’s doing something evil in act one, you can be sure they’ll meet a violent demise at the hands of the hitman by the end of act three.

Killer style

Let’s face it: many on-screen hitmen are kind-of cool, following a template set by Alain Delon in Jean Pierre-Melville’s La Samourai of the monk-like loner, dedicated to their work and either possessed of a zen-like calm or riddled with stylised existential angst. They like cool music, wear cool suits and never utter two words where no words will do. That doesn’t just go for the men, either. Killing Eve’s Villanelle might be a sadistic and remorseless psychopath, never tired of playing with her targets, but it’s hard not to love her for her rebellious can-do attitude. And do you see the clothes she gets to wear?

Whether they’re heroes or anti-heroes, we admire the hitman’s cool detachment. Even when they’re villains, like The Jackal or Collateral’s Vincent, we find them fascinating. Take Javier Bardem’s horrific Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men. He says little and is completely psychotic, yet he’s utterly mesmerising on the screen. Who else could be that terrifying with that hair?

Perhaps most of all, we love the hitman because he’s a vehicle for cathartic violence. The hitman doesn’t take an insult lying down or a grievance go unpunished – he or she murders whoever’s responsible, and usually in spectacular style. The hitman doesn’t get bullied without responding or taking revenge. And where other people see problems, the hitman sees simple solutions, usually involving a bullet, a knife or an improbable ‘accident’ that leaves the target dead. When we play one of the Hitman games, we don’t just love the game for the action or the story, but the way they allow us to play around with different, often comic forms of ultraviolence in a playground designed just for that. These works don’t play into our better natures, but you could argue that they provide a safe place for our worst natures to work themselves out.

Hitman 2 is available to buy now on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Why are we so obsessed with hitmen? Sure, you’ll find thousands of movies about cops, soldiers, lawyers and thieves, but is there another job where so few people do it, yet so many films are made about them? Being a real-life assassin isn’t glamorous. It isn’t even a nice profession. Where Hollywood and the video games industry could be celebrating doctors or teachers or engineers, they’d rather focus on people who kill other people in cold blood.

Yet it seems hitmen never go out of style. They’re hugely popular in books, TV programmes, comic-books, movies and games. They’re on TV (Killing Eve), and in the cinema, in action movies (John Wick, The Mechanic, Leon), comedies (In Bruges, Grosse Point Blank, The Whole Nine Yards), arty thrillers (Killing Them Softly, Collateral, The American, Hanna) and foreign-language breakout hits (La Femme Nikita, The Killer, The Villainess). Even when they retire and stop killing they still take centre stage – see the Bourne movies and Road To Perdition.

Why? Partly it’s because the hitman covers so many narrative requirements. Watching doctors, teachers and engineers at work wouldn’t often make for exhilarating cinema; most jobs simply aren’t that interesting, hour by hour. The hitman’s job, in contrast, involves action by definition. It might have its long dull stretches, true, but nothing a good montage can’t fix. One man or woman killing another man or woman (or a whole bunch of them) is nearly always going to be dramatic, whether it takes the form of a long, well-planned mission or a fast-paced, deadly assault.

We also like professional killers because we like to watch an expert at work – and even more so when that expertise involves cool stuff. Think of all those scenes where a hitman has to extract a sniper rifle from an aluminium briefcase then twist and lock all the parts in place, or the sequences where the killer waits out of sight in an isolated high position, training their sights on a head half a mile away. Whether they’re planting explosives, donning a disguise or bursting into a gang hideout and killing everyone inside, we enjoy the hitman’s studied precision and superhuman skill.

In fact, we love it when they do something virtually impossible, or turn the toughest gangster into a pleading crybaby. You can see this in John Wick, Kill Bill, the Bourne movies or John Woo’s The Killer – and even in artier fare like Anton Corbijn’s The American. You could say we get the same buzz from a great hitman action scene that audiences had from watching Gene Kelly dance or Buster Keaton pull off slapstick pratfalls. When you’re watching John Wick tear his way through a clandestine nightclub, you’re watching a virtuoso performer at work.

And even when they’re up to no good, we identify with these figures. In a way, being the super-tough, unstoppable, pitiless professional is as potent a power fantasy as being a superhero. In some cases – Deadpool, Suicide Squad’s Deadshot, Black Widow, Angelina Jolie’s Fox in Wanted – there’s no real distinction between the two.

You can feel this sometimes when you’re playing Agent 47 in a Hitman game. His supernatural reflexes put him beyond the guards that try to hold him back. His ability to assimilate and hide in plain sight give him a chameleon like ability to get wherever he needs to go. The consummate assassin, he does what lesser killers can’t – and in more style. The normal rules do not apply.

Sympathy for the devil

Of course, with a hitman hero life isn’t always easy; when your protagonist’s main job is killing people, writers and directors have to use a few tricks to keep the audience on side. Often the killer is someone who wants out of the business, or who’s been dragged back in for one last hit. In John Cusack’s Grosse Point Blank, Martin Blank is an exhausted assassin on the edge of a breakdown, trying to reconnect with his ex-girlfriend and his childhood best friend. Jason Bourne has done some quite unsavoury things, but he’s a man in pain over his awful past. When he kills in the movies, it’s nearly always in self-defence. Even Chow Yun-fat’s Jeff in The Killer is only doing one last job to save the vision of the singer he blinded – and who he’s come to love.

Far from remorseless, the heroic hitman is often damaged by the past or secretly sentimental. Leon is a killer in his day-job, but a soft-hearted dreamer in his private life, crying at musicals and unable to resist Mathilda’s call for help. While the Hitman series’ Agent 47 is a colder, more calculating killer, he still abides by a code of honour, showing compassion, humour and a sense of irony along the way. And remember, who he is, is not his fault – he was made this way.

Notice, too, how rarely the screen hitman’s victim is an innocent or entirely undeserving. Criminals, gang bosses, thugs and hoodlums, there’s nearly always a sense that they have it coming. It’s a classic movie cliché, but if someone’s doing something evil in act one, you can be sure they’ll meet a violent demise at the hands of the hitman by the end of act three.

Killer style

Let’s face it: many on-screen hitmen are kind-of cool, following a template set by Alain Delon in Jean Pierre-Melville’s La Samourai of the monk-like loner, dedicated to their work and either possessed of a zen-like calm or riddled with stylised existential angst. They like cool music, wear cool suits and never utter two words where no words will do. That doesn’t just go for the men, either. Killing Eve’s Villanelle might be a sadistic and remorseless psychopath, never tired of playing with her targets, but it’s hard not to love her for her rebellious can-do attitude. And do you see the clothes she gets to wear?

Whether they’re heroes or anti-heroes, we admire the hitman’s cool detachment. Even when they’re villains, like The Jackal or Collateral’s Vincent, we find them fascinating. Take Javier Bardem’s horrific Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men. He says little and is completely psychotic, yet he’s utterly mesmerising on the screen. Who else could be that terrifying with that hair?

Perhaps most of all, we love the hitman because he’s a vehicle for cathartic violence. The hitman doesn’t take an insult lying down or a grievance go unpunished – he or she murders whoever’s responsible, and usually in spectacular style. The hitman doesn’t get bullied without responding or taking revenge. And where other people see problems, the hitman sees simple solutions, usually involving a bullet, a knife or an improbable ‘accident’ that leaves the target dead. When we play one of the Hitman games, we don’t just love the game for the action or the story, but the way they allow us to play around with different, often comic forms of ultraviolence in a playground designed just for that. These works don’t play into our better natures, but you could argue that they provide a safe place for our worst natures to work themselves out.

Hitman 2 is available to buy now on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Hitman and its hero have come a long, long way. Born eighteen years ago, the original Hitman: Codename 47 was – like Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid – a pioneer of the stealth action genre, but where Metal Gear Solid went for sneaking and shooting and Splinter Cell for acrobatics and hand-to-hand combat, Hitman took a different path.

The point of Hitman wasn’t to infiltrate sci-fi bases and rely on gadgets, but to work your way through more open, real-world scenarios, using your own wits and whatever tools you could get your hands on to reach and kill your target. And why wander around in some super-high-tech camo-suit when you can disguise yourself as a guard, hotel busboy, waiter or dentist. Hitman: Codename 47 was not a shooter – you had to think your way through each mission if you wanted to get your man.

Codename 47’s cool style and unique approach soon won a following, but the gameplay wasn’t perfect by any means. The lack of in-mission saves made progress infuriating. The AI was cutting-edge for the time, but simultaneously dumb and supernaturally perceptive. Most of all, Codename 47 got a reputation for being the kind of game where you had to do what the developers intended in the order they intended or fail miserably and die. And while our hero had an interesting killer clone back story, there wasn’t much warmth or interest to the character.

Released two years later, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin went a long way to fixing all such grievances. Agent 47 became a man in search of peace in a remote Sicilian monastery, pulled back into the business when his friend and mentor is kidnapped. The AI was still challenging, but also human, while the level designs were more open and forgiving. Where Codename 47 often seemed to punish you if you hadn’t found the right solution, Silent Assassin gave you more routes, tools and disguises, giving you a chance to think through each mission your way. Agent 47 was still pretty useless in a gunfight – and worse hand-to-hand – but he was easier to control and more effective while sneaking. Silent Assassin felt more like the game that Codename 47 had wanted to be.

Silent Assassin pulled new fans into the franchise, but for many Hitman was still something of a marmite game. You either loved its slower-paced, methodical approach to action, or you yearned for a more easy-going action hit. 2004’s Hitman: Contracts was part sequel, part remix, reworking elements of Codename 47 with the polish of Silent Assassin. It showed the series moving in the right direction, but maybe not quite fast enough. Agent 47 deserved to go bigger. Hitman needed its breakout hit.

Hitting a high note

It got it with 2006’s Hitman: Blood Money, still revered as a classic stealth game. Where even Contracts’s levels had felt restrictive, Blood Money gave us more expansive areas to explore, each crammed with interesting characters and situations you could exploit to hit your targets. Here was a team firing on all cylinders, creating rich scenarios where a hot-tub can become a death trap, a barbecue a time bomb and an opera performance an accidental execution. The more you explored each level, the more opportunities you found for mayhem. Meanwhile, a more intelligent control system made it easier to slip in and out of windows, pull unwary guards from a balcony or tuck a body into a chest freezer.

Running on the relatively new Xbox 360, Blood Money didn’t just look amazing, it played superbly too. It felt incredibly ambitious, with sequences involving dozens of characters, crowds of bystanders and massive, fully-explorable locations. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s with Blood Money that Hitman hit a richer vein of jet-black humour, with often hilarious dialogue to be heard if you listened in to the supporting cast and some darkly funny killings to be carried out. You might have felt guilty, but your targets always seemed to deserve what was coming to ‘em. Agent 47 no longer felt like a cold, psychopathic killer – he’d become the assassin who appreciated irony; the hitman with his own twisted humour. His world had changed to embrace that, each level a playground of murderous possibilities.

Gone to Earth

For the next eight years the Hitman series went into hiding, as the team at IO Interactive worked on its darker, ultra-violent arthouse shooter, Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, plus its even stranger sequel, Dog Days. By 2014, though, the studio was back with a new take on hitman, Hitman: Absolution. Absolution gets a lot of stick from fans, but it had some strong idea, adjusting the disguise system to make it more realistic, creating areas that felt alive with busy people and background detail. Agent 47’s shooting had never been sharper, his close-combat skills more impressive.

Yet Absolution felt like a game where the ambition wasn’t matched to the hardware trying to run it, and where IO’s desire to make a more cinematic Hitman ran contrary to what players loved most about the series. Levels were sliced into pint-sized portions with frequent check points, and you couldn’t help but get the feeling that you were being railroaded along a narrative track. Agent 47 was as strong a presence as in Blood Money, but where that game let you create your own Hitman horror stories, Absolution seemed more intent at making you an actor in one already written. Its world looked amazing, but felt curiously hollow.

But Absolution also pointed towards Hitman’s future. Its Contracts mode opened up the levels, the cast and the props of Absolution for players to create their own scenarios, add their own objectives and conditions, then share them with the community. In doing so, IO created a near-perfect assassination sandbox. Hitman was ready to take the next step.

Back in business

2016’s episodic reboot gave us that and more. Each expansive level became a theme park for snipers, saboteurs, poisoners and stranglers, designed to be played repeatedly in search of different targets. Now that current console and PC hardware allows for levels as big and busy as Agent 47 deserves, there’s a sense that we’re finally seeing Hitman as its designers envisioned it: a sometimes gruesome, immersive playground where you can play the silent assassin or an artist of ‘accidental’ death, making macabre use of every toy in the sandbox to tell your own fiendish fairly-tale.

Can we expect even bigger, better and more brutal stories from the next game in the series, Hitman 2? Well, things are definitely looking up. Agent 47 is back in business and on top form, and his series has momentum on its side. The target’s in his sights and his finger’s on the trigger. There’s almost no way he can miss.

Hitman 2 is available to buy now on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.