The Hitman World of Assassination Trilogy contains three solid games that have unfortunately made a rough transition to VR.
VR ports of big triple A titles are an interesting concept. They are not crafted for VR, but games with good VR ports are some of the biggest on the platform, even over VR exclusive games. After all, who doesn’t want to play Skyrim or Borderlands 2 in VR? Unfortunately, the fact that these games aren’t crafted for VR means that a VR port could run into issues not seen in the base game. Hitman Trilogy is the newest game to receive a VR compatibility mode, and in many ways it falls short of its VR port brethren, and of its flat screen version.
Overview
The Hitman Trilogy hit Steam last week after a year of timed exclusivity on the Epic Games Store, and with it came PC VR support for all three games in the trilogy. The Hitman series itself is well established, and the first entry in the series came out all the way back in the year 2000. The three newest games are dubbed the “World of Assassination” trilogy, and were an attempt to reboot the franchise after the controversial and linear Hitman: Absolution. All three games also already had VR ports, but they were previously PlayStation VR exclusive.
Gameplay
The core gameplay of Hitman is about finding targets and assassinating them, as a bald assassin named Agent 47. These assassinations take place in massive sandbox environments, where many different things are taking place at the same time. While you are tracking down your target, an NPC on the other side of the map might currently be trying to find a bottle of whiskey that your target specifically requested. Each mission has a main “story” to follow that will allow you to complete all objectives, but creative players can find these side stories and use them to find creative ways to kill their targets.
The core Hitman experience translates well to VR. The ridiculousness of walking down a runway while impersonating a famous male model and then using that to get a meeting with your target, only to strangle them later, is fun, and definitely provides an experience currently unique to the VR world. The weird side stories are fun to execute, and killing your target in first person is mildly disturbing, but satisfying.
Unfortunately, the Hitman Trilogy VR adaptation carries a lot of problems with it as well. IO Interactive clearly did not take their time with the VR port, and while the core gameplay is fun, it has a lot of VR-specific issues that hold the port back from being great.
The very first issue I encountered was before I even completed the tutorial, where one section of my tutorial was bugged and locked me in place, which stopped me from completing the tutorial. Fortunately, I believe I was at the end anyway, but there were some things I figured out after at least five hours of gameplay that were probably in the tutorial anyway.
The most annoying issue overall is the lack of an autosave in VR. This is just baffling, as the regular version of the Hitman Trilogy autosaves after certain events to ensure that one bad move doesn’t ruin all of the progress made in your mission thus far. VR makes you manually save each time, so if you forget to save and make a mistake, you can lose a lot of progress. Considering missions in Hitman – for an unskilled player like myself – can take an hour or more, this leads to frustrating re-treading of all the actions you’ve taken in the past half hour.
The controls also feel pretty off, such as with sprinting. You can only sprint forward, and not forward in terms of where your headset is pointed. The game decides what “forward” is, and in order to fix this, you need to hit the recenter button to recalibrate what forward is. This leads to you constantly recentering in order to sprint in the direction you want to.
The grip feature also feels really janky. Even if you’re pointing and looking at the specific object you want to interact with, a lot of the time the game just randomly decides to have you interact with a different object instead. Look down, press RG to grab a body to pull it into a hiding space, then all of a sudden you have a screwdriver in your hand that you accidentally picked up from six feet away somehow.
The inventory system also suffers from the same issue. You have an inventory pouch on your chest that picked up items can be dropped into to save for later. Half of the time though, the circle indicating where you can drop your inventory doesn’t recognize that you want to use it, so you drop an item close to your chest and then your item just drops on the floor. If you’re hiding around a corner, this will alert guards to your presence. If you just have a screwdriver or hammer in your hand – which does not alert NPCs while carrying the item – and then drop it while trying to store it in your inventory, all of a sudden everyone around you is now suspicious, and your cover is blown.
The last gameplay annoyance largely depends on your playstyle, but anyone who wants to use guns will be vastly disappointed. The guns feel terrible. The silenced pistol that Agent 47 starts with is okay, but pick up an assault rifle and you can immediately tell how bad it feels. Guns are inaccurate, have an insane amount of recoil, and tiny iron sights that feel awful to use. God forbid you pick up a sniper rifle. These require you to bring the scope to your eye, which will then shift to a theater mode, similar to how the cutscenes are displayed, showing the scope POV. The theater mode looks awful and immediately breaks immersion, and it rarely ever works properly, showing you somewhere completely different than where you thought you were aiming. The camera that you frequently use is controlled with the same method, making it a similarly frustrating experience.
I also tested this game on multiple controllers, first with the Quest 2 controllers, then with the Vive controllers. My experience with the Vive controllers was terrible. If you only have Vive controllers, do not purchase this game. The sprinting was, again, a major issue. For a majority of my time on the Vive controllers, I could not get Agent 47 to sprint. The input for sprinting is forward on the left stick, combined with holding the left grip button. If my left thumb was not in an incredibly specific position on the touchpad, sprinting would not work at all, and Agent 47 would move incredibly slowly.
The cherry on top that makes the Vive controllers even worse is that in addition to player and camera movement, each touchpad also simulates three buttons, activated by clicking each touchpad at the top, bottom, or center. The inventory button is assigned to the top of the left touchpad, the same place your thumb will be while walking forward. If you accidentally click while walking, the inventory will open, and if you double click, which this menu seems to be particularly susceptible to, you will drop whatever item you have in your inventory. I dropped a gun on accident and was promptly shot to death by every security guard who saw me do it.
Presentation
Even worse than the gameplay annoyances are the graphical ones. Even as early as the first training area, the game looks bafflingly bad. Everything that is more than a couple feet from your viewpoint is incredibly blurry. Even compared to other VR games, Hitman Trilogy just looks bad. This is such a shame too, because some of the textures up close look really impressive, hinting that this could be a really pretty game. As it stands now, Hitman VR just feels like a nearsightedness simulator. I tested this with multiple headsets as well, and while it did look slightly better on the Vive Pro 2 than the Quest 2, the problem still persisted.
Even for as bad as the game looks, there were multiple times when my computer warned me that I was running out of VRAM, leading me to believe that Hitman Trilogy VR has much worse optimization than other games on VR.
It would be nice if the presentation issues stopped there, but the menus and cutscenes also have their own issues. The cutscenes are displayed theater-style, with a flat screen in front of you. For some reason, some of the cutscenes cannot be adjusted, besides horizontally to the left or right. These cutscenes display perfectly fine. Oddly enough, others can also be adjusted on the Y axis and tilted left or right, and these always have issues with showing up tilted. While you should be watching an important story cutscene, you’re trying to tilt your head to the perfect position while mashing on the recenter button to watch the cutscene in a way that isn’t incredibly annoying.
The menus also show up oddly a majority of the time. I swear nearly every time I pushed the menu button, it showed up to my left or right, so I would have to turn myself 90 degrees to look at the menu I just pulled up. Even if you recenter right before opening the menu, it still has the same issue. It makes no sense and is endlessly annoying.
Final Impressions
I went into the Hitman Trilogy optimistic, excited to play a new series which I had never played before in a new and interesting way. The Hitman series had never particularly caught my attention, but the allure of doing Hitman things in virtual reality was really interesting. Instead, my experience with Hitman Trilogy VR led me to believe that I should have picked up the Hitman series far sooner, without virtual reality involved.
The fun and excitement I found with the Hitman Trilogy VR mode are all things I could have experienced with the regular version of the game, and the frustrations I found with it were mostly unique to virtual reality. Between bad controls and terrible graphics and optimization, the VR mode really added a lot of annoyances to an experience that otherwise would have been a lot of fun. If you’re thinking about buying the Hitman Trilogy for VR, just don’t. If you’re interested in playing Hitman in regular flat screen mode, go for it. It’s a well-made game that has a lot of content and is incredibly unique for a triple A game. Unfortunately, the VR mode just does not match that same level of polish.
As of the time of writing, Hitman Trilogy is available on Xbox Game Pass. Anybody thinking about trying the VR mode would be wiser to get a month’s subscription of Game Pass instead of purchasing the game on Steam, as you will likely realize fairly quickly that the limitations of the VR mode make it more trouble than it’s worth.
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