Your mate, the vicar has been kidnapped by some heavies, so you contact your old firm, who will help you find him, if you do one last job (more like ten actually). So it's time to get tooled up and get back to your bad old ways (did I mention you had caught religion and were living in an old monastery?) A monastery - a place of tranquility, where pigs roam, pigeons coo… and I get target practice.

   

Hitman 2 is a third person "thinking mans" shooter, the idea, now get this; is to not kill everything with a heartbeat. Instead you must creep around, using various disguises, (47 changes costumes faster than a Marvel super hero), and take out the target only. The makers say you can do almost every mission in the game in almost bloodless fashion, and that is hard. Hard because not only are there hostiles everywhere dying (literally) to get slotted, but quite frankly, going around slaughtering everyone terminator-style is infinitely more rewarding!

I just didn't have the temperament to play this game really well; you are rated at the end of every mission on performance. You can score in stealth and in aggression, no prizes for guessing what I was top of the class in. The game then supplies a helpful comment (expert, natural, iceman, cleaner, mass murderer, psychopath and my favourite…….... postal).

The first two levels or so, I completed the missions well (I thought); the target got tagged, job done. However I was labeled a psychopath and I was dimly aware that this was a criticism. So I tried harder not to kill anyone and got some good scores, but to be honest I got really bored, so for the rest of the game, I shot anything in my path. In fact near the end, I had just completed a mission, and was about to escape, when I turned around, went back into the building and hunted down the remaining guards that had managed to survive my initial rampage…YEAH!!! POSTAL MAAAN!!!

NB: I also shot a nurse to see if I could change into her clothes, do I need therapy?

   

The engine on this game is as good as any, which is to say the standard is good nowadays. There is the old flaw of TPS's where the collision detectors can get you stuck in a corner, and invariably you get shot in the back, but the answer is simple, stay away from corners. The AI is also very good some of the best yet, but still flawed.

Scenery, draw distance, locations are all marvelous - easily the best bit of the programming. You will wonder at skyscrapers, shiver in snow and almost smell market places, however this means you may have to tweak the settings a little, if you have an older PC.