The new levels of Hitman 2 look like those of the series at its peak

The 47 officer is squatting in a meeting room, hidden by a door and waiting for a target to come in and be electrocuted by an elaborate trap that I've put in place. I exposed a live wire and caused a leak in the water machine. Now, I'm waiting for the right moment for my cartel goal, Andrea Martinez, to walk in, check the leak and end up in a scary situation.

Unfortunately, his guard notices the leak first and goes in to investigate. Stop that, I think. I will turn on the plug anyway. I electrocute the guard, take her outfit, and then file Andrea around her headquarters until she decides to go down to the meeting room again. When she arrives to investigate the half-naked guardian's fried body, I choke Martinez, slap his neck, climb through the window and jump over the cracked wall that I had used for the entree.

These messy encounters are the way Hitman levels usually play for me on the first attempt, while I learn the enemy 's patterns and how the level is structured. I can not promise that my next attempt at the Hitman 2 Colombian series, Santa Fortuna, would have been much better, but discovering a new setting is as much fun here as in the 2016 episodic affair.

I played a more or less complete part of the two revealed levels of Hitman 2, including the Miami circuit revealed at E3. If you liked the way Io was lavish last time – with totally different neighborhoods, opportunities, chatty NPCs and little stories taking place in the same space – then you are dazzled in the same way. The city of Santa Fortuna, located in the jungle, is divided into two main areas: a slightly dilapidated village, next to a huge mansion of Delgado cartel, where the other two targets of the mission await you. This mansion is separated by a bridge with a jabba palace-style sentinel and huge doors preventing you from entering. Fortunately, Agent 47 can climb vineyards around the right side of the wall, letting it get into the heavily guarded gardens.

One of the other two targets is Rico Delgado, who walks from the manor pool to his guarded office, and the other is Jorge Franco, who makes a new drug at his nearby factory. My sending of the latter was a very nice case. Five minutes from the end of the game, I tied him in a shed without realizing that the guard had spotted me through a window. I then had to fight my way, repelling the guards who wore this Breaking Bad style combination that I recognize as the uniform of the people who make drugs for a living (see the screenshot). screen above).

I see a bunch of escape methods: get out peacefully from the mansion dressed in the sicario uniform, which I wear for a while while I was following Rico, and another through the middle of it. a speedboat on a beautiful lake nearby. In a preview demo like this, it's hard to understand all the different ways to get in and out of the place, but like Sapienza or the other best Hitman levels, I see myself spending at least five hours to dissect all the methods, costumes and secrets associated.

This comes from a studio that knows very well its fans at this stage. If Hitman's 2016 gave you everything you wanted from the series since Blood Money, it's pretty much the same until now. This could be deliberate in the case of Colombia – some more important changes in the formula are waiting even more. "In Colombia, it's pretty traditional that you have targets and you know where they are on a map," says Travis Barbour, community leader at Io. "There are places where we mix things up a bit, there are more options in terms of approaching the level, and you do not always look for targets. elements involved in the locations. "

Not publishing the episodic levels means that it remains a welcome mystery in Hitman's other four sites barely a month before the release – we've only seen less than half of them yet. "We have a plan for how much we will reveal, but we will not show much more," says Barbour. "We [have] six places, and we showed two. Miami, people have seen a lot of things. Colombia, people will start to see it. And the rest, we do not really want to give too much detail. But I think it's important to let people know what awaits them, what awaits them. So we will have some things that will refer to the locations and show them very quickly. "

My remaining fear for Hitman 2 is that, given the drama around Square Enix that dropped the series last year, it is now stuck in the release schedule between Red Dead Redemption 2 on consoles and Fallout 76 when She will arrive next month. On the evidence of what I've played so far, the 47 agent will once again deserve a lot of attention, but it comes at a time that will probably be difficult for any game that do not be huge. I hope it does not get lost.