Hitman: World of Assassination on PlayStation VR2 review

After the reboot of the Hitman franchise there were three installments that culminated in a package now known as Hitman: The World of Assassination.  Since March 11, 2016, the team at IOI has been adding new features, missions, targets, and challenges, offering a tremendous amount of content over the last decade.  The team even announced that they were done with the live updates of the game, but that’s proven to not be true.  Today we see the evolution of an element that takes all of that to the next level – virtual reality.  Agent 47 has come to VR before, with a limited mission set on the PS4 and PSVR1 and PC, and a very buggy and clunky version that suffered from some serious downgrades on the Quest 3. The team took a bit more time to cook for the PSVR2 and the PlayStation 5 version.  Could this be the Hitman: World of Assassionation virtual reality experience we’ve been waiting for?  Time to don the red tie and find out.

First, and most notable, Hitman: World of Assassination VR Access is the whole enchilada…well, sorta.  This addon will allow you to pop into any mission, special target, or location you’ve purchased.  Unfortunately, the publisher made a complete mess of the launch of this game back in 2016, to the point that there are guides on how to properly buy the game to get all of the content all in one place, and even then there’s a non-zero chance you’ll miss something if you want all the targets. Once you DO have everything linked, imported, and ready to go, it’s time to head back to the plywood yacht for training.

As you can see, moving to VR means a shift to first person perspective. Where you were once staring at the barcode of everyone’s favorite deep-voiced deep-sixer, now you’re in the shoes of the silent stalker.  Better still, the game has never looked better in VR.  

Unfortunately, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, the team seems to have forgotten to enable HDR, or the engine doesn’t support it. You’ll notice it during every loading sequence where the normally deep blacks are replaced by muted greys. You REALLY notice it when you do the new VR tutorial which puts you in what’s supposed to be a completely black room that ends up being a flat gray instead. If I were to hazard a guess, this is a limitation of the Glacier engine used in Hitman 3 and back ported to support 1 and 2.  That engine supports an 8-bit texture pipeline with a rec.709 color space, and to support HDR10 you need an 16-bit render pipeline to push the 10-bit color space in rec.2020 color space. It’s far from fatal, but it does mean that the IOI crew aren’t taking full advantage of the gorgeous OLED screens in the PSVR2.  This is the same thing that happened with several early PSVR2 games that ultimately got an HDR patch later, but that’s a fairly major overhaul so I can’t imagine we’ll see that happen here. 

On the positive side, the game looks pretty fantastic in first person. Being closer to the action means seeing details I’ve never spotted in third person perspective.. Walking up to somebody and being able to see their eyes dart around the room is more immersive as you can literally see where they’re looking. Seeing character mouths synched up with their voices, little details in clothing, the amount of work in simple things like trash on the ground, and other minutia shows just how much work the team has put into this game over the years. That said, there’s still work to be done for the PlayStation 5 Pro. 

One of the best parts of the PS5 Pro’s advancements is how PSSR upsampling can be used in VR to free up processing power for additional things like better detail, detailed shadows, improved lighting, and most importantly, a 90Hz native refresh rate without having to use reprojection.  At launch, none of these seem to be implemented as of yet.  The team has been updating this game far past when they said they would, so I expect that there will eventually be a PS5 Pro patch to allow players with the extra power to punch it up to the next level. In its current state it’s not quite up to the PCVR’s visual quality with a solid headset, but the interactivity is far better here.  Let’s get into that as it’s the most alluring part of the package thus far.

Hitman, going all the way back to the first game in the year 2000, is about creating opportunities and then exploiting them, preferably without drawing attention to yourself.  Thinking outside the box, setting up the perfect accident, and then triggering the trap so it looks like a tragedy rather than a trap or a murder takes a lot more time, research, and planning.  Sure, walking up and popping your target with a suppressed Hardballer is one thing, but everyone will know what happened . Using a screwdriver you found in the basement to jerry rig a power strip that happens to be sitting in a water puddle to provide a shocking solution to your target problem is much harder.  The key to all of it is blending in. 

Agent 47 starts nearly all of his missions wearing some sort of outfit that can blend in to a degree.  He looks sharp, but that’s not going to get him into areas where he doesn’t belong.  Instead, he’ll have to procure different clothing to blend in with whatever scenario he finds himself in.  This can be very low-key like dressing up as the wait staff behind the bar, or you can literally be the DJ at a massive club, spinning tracks while you wait for your target.  Part of the fun in this series is finding out all the various ways you can quietly (or loudly) dispose of your target and still escape undetected.  In fact, the game keeps track of all of these various methods and suggests a number of them to try out, leaving the rest for you to discover.  

When you do find someone you want to knock out (or kill – there’s not often a parameter stopping you, other than the possibility of being caught or making noise), you can sneak up behind them and brain them with something heavy like a wrench, reach out with both hands and strangle them from behind, or use your fiberwire to garotte them, just to name a few.  You do this using the real-world action of reaching out and mimicking the movement.  You pull out these items by pulling on your “coat” on either side and then scrolling through a wheel to select what you want.  Throwing, flipping a coin, whipping a gas grenade, turning a key, typing on a keyboard (though you do type like Keyboard Cat), opening a door, lifting the lid on a trash can, or pushing somebody’s head into a toilet is all done by imitating how you’d do it in real life.  It’s a night and day improvement over previous versions of the game on other platforms, and one that really raises the immersion of the game.  Even missions I’ve done many times before feel different in VR.  

One thing that is also readily apparent is that Hitman: World of Assassination on PlayStation VR2 is a port of a pancake game.  Climbing over, under, or on top of environments is accomplished by walking up to the interaction point and pressing a button. Ducking through a window is a similar “press a button, fade to black, appear on the other side” affair.  The one thing that makes no sense to me is climbing ladders and certain interactive elements.  For reasons I cannot explain, the game flips to third person when you amble up a ladder or get in position to serve drinks.  You’ll eavesdrop from third person, and then pop back to first person when you walk away from the counter.  Worse, when you complete the training mission for Soder where you have him trigger the ejector seat, you get three different visual approaches right after one another!  You’re in first person to pick up the clipboard, then third person to have him run the checklist, then it goes to a floating movie box in black space to show the actual launch.  It’s worse for the social screen as they’re watching.  The interactive elements that cause those events can be somewhat inconsistent as well – sabotaging the plane means pulling the trigger to wrench on the plane, but for poison you just release the whole vial over the glass and it does the work. These moments are odd and in the case of the 3rd person view, seems largely unnecessary as it breaks the immersion it’s trying hard to build.

Ultimately these blips that remind you that this is a port are secondary to all the ways the IOI team has improved upon their previous attempts.  Active reloading on weapons means dropping a magazine, grabbing a fresh one, jamming it into the well, and then racking the slide release.  It means sniper rifle scopes are fully usable, holding the trigger slightly means getting a red dot laser to help you nail your target, and thrown objects have heft. It also means you have to grab and kinda yank the clothes off of enemies before sort of dropping them onto yourself to get changed.  You’ll want to grab and hold onto their neck as you yank them to a nearby box.  Grabbing the lid and then opening it does the fade to black trick and stuffs the body in.  It’s endemic to the whole enchilada, really – some great, some just ok, but overall it’s good fun.  

 One of VR’s best aspects is fully embraced here, the ability to poke your head around a corner.  Obviously in third person it’s not a thing, but it’s a game changer in VR.  In the training mission it means being able to peek around the corner and observe the meeting between Kalvin Ritter and Terry Norfolk. Instead of leaning up against the edge of the wall you can poke your head around the corner.  You can then follow this up with a shot with your suppressed hardballer.  It adds a new dimension to the game for me, even after I’ve spent more than 100 hours playing these missions.  

As you get into the more complex missions you’ll uncover more of the interactive elements than you’ll find in the earlier ones.  If you take somebody out with a box cutter, you might want to wash the blood off your hands in the sink.  If you plan on killing somebody with emetic rat poison, just pop it into the glass as you walk by.  Handing over a keycard or some other physical object is now a more tactile moment.  On the other hand, all of these beer bottles, soda cans, and other detritus that dots the landscape remains background noise.  I get it – making every element interactive is a near-impossible task, given the scale of a game this large, but a guy can wish. Still, snagging a pass card and then swiping it over a badge reader, shoving somebody into a wine press, or kicking somebody off a balcony so they can bounce off a formula 1 car is pure murdery catharsis.  Sure, you aren’t actually kicking - it’s another button press, but doing it in first person is just tons of awesome fun.  It’s more interactive than ever, but I can’t help but wonder what a VR game that was built around VR from end to end would look like.  In the meantime, this is a pretty solid middle ground.  

I want to call out the fantastic eye tracking in this game.  Throwing with precision is absolutely required in Hitman as you’ll need to react in a second to whip a screwdriver into a guard’s eye before he alerts his buddies.  Eye tracking makes that not only possible, but transforms everyday objects into absolutely lethal implements more than they ever were in the pancake version.  Rooms I’ve struggled to clear quickly enough became almost trivial with enough throwables at hand.  It might not be your preferred method of quietly dispatching foes but I encourage you to give it a try – it’s something you can only really experience in VR, and you’ll never feel more lethal.  

Despite the IOI team saying they’re moving onto their next project, you wouldn't know it from the extensive roadmap they’ve announced year after year.  For 2025 they’re debuting “Season of the Awakening”, including the return of the Undying Sean Bean mission and more than half a dozen elusive targets.  Even if you’re revisiting an existing location to track these folks down, doing it in VR is practically a whole new experience.  

While there is a lot to like going on here, there are some bugs that have crept in at launch.  I’ve shot targets and had the NPCs react, then just sort of forgot that a murder happened and that a dead body was laying in front of them.  Dance is life, I guess.  I’ve also had a few crashes in the Paris level that dropped me back to the PS5’s main menu.  It’s not egregious or game breaking, thankfully, but I’ll suggest you use the save function every five or so minutes, at least on the Paris map – that’s the only area where I’ve seen the crash happen.  Sometimes the interactive elements that IOI have added don’t want to work, no matter how many times you try.  For example, during one mission I’m supposed to place a bottle of Pinot Noir on the table, but the action circle won’t “fill” to tell the game that placing it is what I’m trying to do, resulting in a busted bottle of wine and a failed objective.  

Finally, the alignment on the pistol (and less importantly, the little camera in your inventory)  isn’t as precise as it should be, so I find myself making less snap shots and more using the laser to ensure those shots land.  Similarly, you end up smacking your headset when trying to use the camera to take a picture. Undoubtedly these little things will get patched, but it’s a wobble on immersion.  

There are a handful of VR comfort options available.  You can put on VR Blinders (that is to say, vignetting), as well as adjust the strength of them.  You can adjust between smooth and snap modes, as well as choose your degrees of motion and turn speed.  Toggling VR head-based movement, enable a VR fade on collision, switch your dominant hand between left and right, and toggle the laser pointer on and off.  

Sadly there aren’t any graphical options, even on PlayStation 5 Pro, to adjust to fit your comfort levels.  It’s not that there are only a few – there are none. The game appears to be using a 120Hz refresh rate through reprojection, but there aren’t any levers to make adjustments like performance mode versus quality, but despite that, I’m very happy to report that even without PSSR or the power of the PS5 Pro behind it, it’s a nausea-free event.  While you are in the options, however, you might want to turn on autosave for VR – it’s turned off by default for some reason.  You don’t probably want to find that out the hard way.

Given that you need something approaching a serial killer string map to figure out how to purchase all of the content for this game, I was very happy to see that IOI made this VR upgrade purchase extraordinarily simple.  If you own the PlayStation 5 version of the game (World of Assassins Part One is enough to get you into the game), you can buy the “VR Access” portion for just $9.99.  Frankly, that’s impossibly cheap, and given the staggering amount of content on offer here, and with all of the ways you can replay missions, it’s a steal.  If you’ve not picked up the game for PlayStation 5, then you can nab both for $39.99, which again is a solid discount over the normal combined price. I’d suggest you try to follow this thread on Reddit to try to pick up the rest of the content, if you are so inclined, as I’m unaware of an “all the things” purchase option at this point.