Stealth Games

Hitman does a great job of painting each target as a villain worthy of assassination. Even when the target is someone as unassuming as Jordan Cross, the lead singer of an indie band.

With Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Eidos Montreal once again shows it has a lot of great ideas of how games in this genre can evolve. It's just a shame some of the narrative choices don't quite match the ideal they were clearly aiming to achieve.

Deus Ex may not have single-handedly changed the way we think about choice in games, but it arguably opened the topic more thoroughly than any other game before it.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is a lot of things beyond simply being a good game. It was meant to be a definitive final chapter well after an assumed final chapter had been written. It was the intersection of over twenty years of complex plots, continuities and nods brought together in one place...

Despite straying lightly from its cinematic and espionage-centered roots, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker managed to be something uniquely interesting that would have an effect on future titles in the series. Today marks its release on shelves in North America back in 2010.

Hitman is shaping up to be the hit that no one saw coming. Despite the controversial decision to break the game into an episodic format, especially so close to its release, the format has served it well. If even just the few maps that have been released so far were released all at once, it would feel overwhelming. The time in between each batch of content is ample for digging into each of the incredibly dense environments and explore all of their nooks and crannies. Case in point, Marrakesh, the latest expansion for Hitman. This map is easily the most detailed and tightly packed so far.

The Hitman series has always been a series of duality. It’s a place where you can be as messy or as clean as you desire in your operation of the man known only as Agent 47.

Hitman’s first episode took place in Paris, but it really didn’t show much of the actual city as most of the action took place indoors. Not that it had to, since just hearing the name Paris inspires all types of mental imagery and the fashion show featured in the first Hitman episode really captured that modern high-fashion feeling. This episode takes place in Sapienza, Italy and unless you’re familiar with some of the lesser known towns in Italy this name doesn’t evoke the same icons that Paris does. Despite that, this episode’s mission features a beautiful and more fully realized environment than its predecessor.

When 2005 rolled around, we were already quite familiar with Sam Fisher for what he was at the time: a straight-laced spy that did everything by the book with a multitude of unique tools and suave covert moves to take on any mission with flawless grace...

Republique is immediately impressive, with its strong cast of A-list voice actors such as Jennifer Hale and David Hayter and its penchant for cinematic storytelling. The world oozes oppression, with posters reminding guards and passersby not to think too hard or too loudly, and to ignore contraband materials like books and video games. Hope, a "Pre-Cal" imprisoned by this totalitarian regime for experimental reasons, has been labeled "infected" due to coming into contact with such contraband materials. As both Hope and an unseen hacker, you'll slip past guards, collect information, hack everything, and use the regime's surveillance systems against it on Hope's quest to gain freedom for herself and the public.