did all the opportunities, mastery 15 so far
love that mission, easily one of the best in the whole franchise. I love how detailed and connected everything is, it feels a lot more polished than most of the others of the season. I'm glad they finished the first one with a highlight. I wonder how much work was put in every episode. all of them more or less the same? marrakesh and bangkok just feel pretty boring and empty.
I know that people demanded huge missions after the very limited settings of absolution, so I'm glad and understand why most missions in season 1 were massive, but it honestly got a bit boring fast. paris was great, sapienza even better, but marrakesh and bangkok just felt repetitive after them, Hokkaido on the other hand is such a perfect and memorable hitman level, to the point that I wish season 2 had maybe two huge missions at the most and more refined medium sized levels like hokkaido.
I feared the episodic release had shown it's downside because after marrakesh I felt kind of finished with the game and bangkok and even the pretty good colorado couldn't motivate me to play further after mastery 20, but hokkaido showed me that it was their subpar quality that was holding me back, I definitely plan to play hokkaido further than mastery 20, simply because the level is so much fun and there's so much to discover.
I also definitely like that the loadouts are limited at first, I think that's a feature I'd like to see more in season 2. I know it made sense here in this mission but I also think all missions would profit from that. but maybe it could unlock a bit earlier, say mastery 10 or 15. same goes for the opportunities, as I said several times before, I think especially in the important early exploration stage of each mission they make the game too easy. I know you can disable or ignore them, but the same could be said for the limited loadouts and I think the game definitely gets better because you are forced to interact with and explore the level a lot more.
still, despite the opportunities, I think season 1 is in many ways peak hitman, so many great features, I love that they kept the few good things from absolution, like the challenges and even improved those with the mastery system, which is just great for hitman and especially for an episodic release, it keeps players coming back which is a great thing. the other absolution feature is obviously contracts mode although I am a bit sad it's even now not yet on the level of absolution.
I also want to mention that, although I always defended the episodic release and still think it was experienced better that way, it did feel a tiny bit like early access because of all the general improvements the game received over the year.
still, easily in my top 3 of the year, maybe even the top spot. I love that franchise since codename 47 and Hitman 2016 is definitely a highligiht and highly recommendable.
