Dressed in a suit and tie and carrying a small briefcase, the Hitman steps out of the small service elevator and onto the roof of the Hong Kong building. He casually opens the briefcase, calmly pieces together his sniper rifle and then picks it up. As his target approaches, he follows them in the sniper sight, squeezing the trigger almost to the point of firing. The instant he has the perfect shot lined up he fires. The moment his target goes down, he is already leaving the scene. While he stands in the elevator, waiting for it to reach the side alley below, he receives word that an enemy helicopter is on its way, but he is unconcerned. In a few seconds he'll be safely driving away in the black car that's parked nearby. During all this his heart rate hasn't increased one iota and all he's thinking about now is how to go about his next hit.

What you just read is a brief (albeit intentionally rather fictionalised) outline of your first real mission in Hitman: Codename 47. For a game about assassination, it's the most stylish possible opening mission you could hope for, and the subsequent missions you'll complete in Hong Kong only get better. The final mission in Hong Kong tasks you with the assassination of Triad leader Lee Hong. Completing this mission is a much more complex affair compared to the first mission though; in fact, it's almost like a large real world puzzle. Sometimes you have to silently take out one of Lee Hongs lackeys (a fibre wire garrotte tends to be the best method) in order to take their clothes and impersonate them so you can make your way into “authorised person only” type areas. You're also offered a degree of flexibility in how you go about your work – you can first take out Lee Hong's bodyguard in a number of different ways to make your job easier, and you can either take out Lee Hong from up close with a silenced MP5 or from afar using a sniper rifle. It's reasonably open ended without making you feel lost and clueless.

During these Hong Kong missions you'll also notice a number of nice touches in Hitman – you can drag an enemy corpse to a sewer entrance and they will flop down the manhole realistically rather than bouncing down in the same, rigid position. I was also particularly amused by one instance where I sniped an enemy, their head flew back when the shot impacted, and the same impact forced their arm to swing up, release a rifle and send that flying up in the air. Gruesome, I know, but also pretty cool. Curtains will also brush aside as you walk through them and various details on characters like ponytails and ties will move about realistically as the character moves. Clearly they put a lot of effort into the skeletal animation system and the game physics, and it paid off.

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