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Hitman: The Complete First Season is out in physical release for Xbox One, PC, and PlayStation 4!

I was skeptical of the release schedule for Hitman. After five complete single-player releases, IO Interactive was going launch the new Hitman piecemeal. The original release details had three locations for launch in March 2016, with further areas releasing in April, May, and June. When January rolled around, Square Enix announced that the game was going fully episodic, with one location per episode coming roughly once a month. I felt the news was some clever spin to cover up the fact that the later levels weren't finished.

A year later, I must admit that being episodic not only worked, it may have made Hitman even better.

Hitman has always been a unique stealth series, focused on giving a player a complex sandbox and an objective. "Welcome to this mansion! You need to kill this businessman! Good luck!" It was from a different time, without hints, waypoints, or details on how you were supposed to complete your mission. The original Hitman games worked because they weren't really action games, they were freeform puzzles. The more linear nature of Hitman: Absolution is why long-time fans were unhappy with that title.

The first episodic release for Hitman was a great proof-of-concept. Paris is a huge, cosmopolitan sprawl, with Agent 47 attempting to infiltrate an immense party. The vast crowds, the neon blues and purples of the dance floor, the backstage of a fashion show, and the catwalk itself; it all feeds into this playground you get to explore. You know where your targets are, but you have to watch and observe them. You have to poke around and figure out how you'll gain access to them and how they're going to die.

Hitman's Paris episode offered up a ton of ways to kill Viktor Novikov, for example. Do poison him with cyanide? Simply push him into the river? Put a remote bomb in the camera of a journalist looking to interview him?

IO Interactive did make some tweaks for the average, more mainstream player. There's Challenges, which give you hints on all the various ways you can kill your targets. There's Instinct, the Detective Vision-like mode that shows you where your target is, even through walls. These are crutches that you can turn off or ignore if you're a veteran player: the experience you have with Hitman is largely up to you and even with those crutches, this is a difficult game.

Once you dispatch a target, you unlock more weapons, more equipment, new starting locations, new item caches. New toys for the toy box and new ways to shake the existing configurations into something new. It works because each level is so goddamn big, hiding new facets of the lives of the people who live and work there. New tools for you to use to end their lives.

This is where the episodic nature helps Hitman. It focuses you on a specific level. As a full release, I expect new players will finish a level, jump back into it once or twice, and then move onto the next. The month or more between episode releases encouraged players to really get as much enjoyment as they could out of each level.

You killed Viktor twice? Get back in there and kill him a few more times. Experiment a bit! What's the weirdest way you can take out Viktor and Dalia? Can you shave off your level completion time? What about finishing the level without using any disguises? Being episodic makes players really tinker with every level, diving deep until they understood the bones of the thing.

From there, Hitman took players to the warm, sunny coast of Sapienza, Italy. The level was even larger than the first, comprising a resort and the town surrounding it. The objectives became more complex, moving from just simple assassination to the destruction of a dangerous prototype. From quiet Italian streets to high-tech secret labs, IO impressed me with just how far they went to hide new ways in or new killing methods. Sapienza remains the best level in the season.

Then the studio stepped its game up with Marrakesh, whose dense market region was one of the more impressive uses of IO's modest engine. With the third episode, it felt like IO Interactive was learning, tuning the game even further. Your two targets are in two very different locations and many of the tools you only used sporadically before become necessary to move forward. Marrakesh was a testament to the growing trust between IO, Hitman's available mechanics, and the players.

Episodes four and five in Bangkok and Colorado represented a modest pull back for the franchise. While episodes 1-3 kept getting bigger and more detailed, both of these regions are on a smaller scale. Neither regions is bad, they just aren't as good as the opening combo. The level designs and environment art are less impressive, the kill methods are more conservative.

In hindsight, I would rejiggered the release schedule to alternate between "solid" and "amazing" levels: Paris, Bangkok, Italy, Colorado, Marrakesh. It's about a different kind of pacing, one of expectations. Paris, Italy, and Marrakesh sell us on a bigger and more expansive Hitman, whereas Bangkok and Colorado are just solid Hitman levels.

Which brings us to Hokkaido, Japan, the last level released. This review was initially all about Hokkaido, but I found that I kept dipping into the history of the series as I was writing. A lot of what's strong about Hitman is carried forward from level to level, so you find that you repeat similar thoughts from review to review. Episode six is the best of the series in a single level and it's a satisfying conclusion to everything IO Interactive has done this season.

Hokkaido gets tricky. The level takes place in a upscale hospital in the snow mountaintop of Japan. The hospital hangs of the side of the mountain, with a pastoral view of the celebrating town below. Modern Japanese architecture meets the cold, sterile tone of the hospital's operating rooms.

Hokkaido offers you no weapons on entry. Agent 47 sneaks into the place as a patient, meaning you have no clothes, no weapons, not even your trusty coin. You'll eventually unlock item caches in the level, but for your first few runs, you have to kill with what you find in the level itself.

The second twist of Hokkaido reinforces Hitman's disguise system. The hospital itself is controlled by an AI security system that locks or unlocks certain doors and regions depending on RFID tags hidden in personnel clothing. In previous levels, many of the disguises were optional: it was easier to infiltrate a certain areas with certain disguises, but a tricky player could survive without it. Here, a suit-only run seems damned hard.

One of the targets is also stationary for the entire level. Former ICA board member Erich Soders is undergoing a heart transplant at the facility, meaning he's in the operating room for the entire level. Instead of a wandering target, you have a stationary one and the puzzle is figuring out how to get in that operating room, past the doctors and extensive security.

Hokkaido succeeds where Bangkok and Colorado suffer: it's smaller than the first three episodes, but it ratchets up the tension in response. It delivers with interesting assassination opportunities. Killing both targets in Hokkaido feels rewarding, because of the unique puzzle solutions and general difficulty in infiltration. If IO Interactive can make sure future Hitman seasons alternate between huge towns like Sapienza and smaller, more tense locations like Hokkaido, the series is in a good place.

I'm walking away from Hitman satisfied. Not just because I've played a great Hitman game though. The sneaking, the disguises, the weapons, the general cosmopolitan and foreign feeling of the locations chosen: Hitman is probably the best James Bond game I've ever played.

I'm a huge James Bond fan. I own all of the Fleming novels and every film in the series on Blu-Ray. Racism and sexism aside, the character is result of another time. There's a feeling of jet-setting adventure, with Bond traveling to new lands and taking on their various aspects in order to complete his mission. The best of Bond is all about the mission: get in, kill your target, and get out in the coolest way possible.

Agent 47 doesn't have Bond's charisma, but he doesn't need to. In fact, his simple look and dry nature gives players room to project themselves on the character. And despite the fact that there have been Bond games, too many lean towards the action set pieces of the films, instead of the espionage that underpins the entire premise. In its lack of Bond bonafides, Hitman has somehow come closer to emulating the true feel of the character than any official Bond game.

It helps that Agent 47 only kills the criminal element in this game. He's a Hitman, but you never find yourself killing a schoolteacher or nun here. Everyone here is a bad guy and is being taken off the board for the general good of civilization. There's no guilt here.

There remain some general issues with Hitman 2016. From a mechanics standpoint, the game lacks the ability to pickpocket NPCs for items. You either need to knock them out, kill them, or wait for the them to put an item down. Pickpocketing would allow for more subtle options for infiltration.

And despite a recent update, the game is still strongly tied to always-online play. You need to be online to unlock new starting locations and equipment. This means if Square Enix' servers are down or your connection is spotty, you can lose a current playthrough or unlock. I understand wanting players to be connected, but Hitman takes it too far and lands on the wrong side of the line.

Despite that, Hitman is a treat overall. Kudos to IO Interactive. I was skeptical in the beginning, but the studio stuck the landing with the entire season. Taken together, it's one of the best titles in the Hitman series and one of the best games in 2016 that no one's talking about. Even at its worse, Hitman Season One is a solid, enjoyable game. At its best, it'll test you and make you really think about how you're going to get to your target. What IO Interactive has done here is very impressive and I can't wait to see where Season Two takes us.

Lasting appeal
Each level requires time to peel offer and get at the fruits of IO's labor. If you love Hitman, there's a lot to uncover here.

Visuals
The details aren't always as high-fidelity as they could be, but Hitman 2016 can be stunning when it wants to.

IO Interactive brings the Hitman series back in grand style. Not every level is Season 1 is amazing, but at it's best, Hitman contains some stunning settings, amazingly detailed level designs, and a vast number of ways to kill your target. It's handicapped a bit by its online implementation, but if you can get past that, you'll find one of the best games in the series.