SHORT VERSION: What did you think of the 2016 episodic Hitman game? This is more of that, sometimes literally. Recommended if you like stealth games with silly-to-dark humor.

LONGER REVIEW: Like its predecessor, Hitman 2 features large, sprawling environments filled with people, disguises, weapons, places to hide, and especially numerous, hilarious ways to "accidentally" bump off your targets without anyone noticing (or you can just slip poison into their champaigne or drown them in the toilet). Plenty of snatches of overheard conversations add fun color, and sometimes offer clues about alternate ways through the level. You'll play most of the missions many times and find new things to do each run. A pile of achievements and story sub-missions unlock additional dead drops, items, and starting locations, encouraging this basic gameplay loop.

Many of the missions are multiple-target missions, which can sometimes combine in fun ways, but usually make the levels feel more like a succession of two or three sub-missions (which isn't good or bad, it just... is). Expect to spend upwards of an hour on each run if you're trying to stay completely unseen and max out your score, though generous saves and auto-saves at all but the highest level mean that you can always take a break and come back later.

The new camera and "body found" alerts, and a little zone that appears around Agent 47 when he's blending into a crowd or crouching in tall grass, are also really nice additions for those of us looking to play the game as it was intended -- as a master class in sneaking about. Combat, as always, remains pretty basic, but if you're getting into gun-fights with security guards you're not really playing Hitman like it was intended.

Additionally, for those who missed out on the 2016 game, you can add that entire game into this one, at two very fair price points (one for just the main story missions, the other with the extra "Patient Zero" DLC included). That's pretty cool, though probably worth waiting for a sale and with little reason to do so if you already own that game.

Two letdowns: the fully-animated cutscenes from the 2016 game are replaced with voiced comic-book-style storyboards, while the two "tutorial" missions (which are really just full-fledged missions, but with a funny cardboard-and-actor aesthetic) are literally ported whole hog from the previous game. These aren't big disappointments, but in a game that's already only a few missions long, these shortcuts are noticeable and hurt the presentation. It feels a bit cheap, frankly.

Also, the overall conspiracy plot continues to be utterly silly, hackneyed, and yet still more or less impossible to follow (the choppy storyboard cut-scenes don't help), but who cares. Nobody plays these games for their great overall conspiratorial worldbuilding, we play them so we can dress up in a chicken outfit and drop pianos on the heads of bad people.

While the game doesn't innovate a whole lot, and finds a way to give you a little less around the edges than you might feel like you deserve for a full-priced AAA game, the central gameplay itself is still really fun and rewarding, just like you want a Hitman game to be, and nobody else is doing what this franchise does, at the level it does it. Totally recommended.