DLC #186 - Hitman 3 - Hitman

I'll do my best to try and make this less confusing than the title suggests.

Hitman has graced the collection numerous times over the years, and it's actually become more difficult to track the chronology of the series than you may expect. It's a series that's seen reboots, HD collections and expansions galore, and contained within the latest Hitman game - Which is Hitman 3 on the PS5, there are a series of DLC packs that allow you to replay the earliest titles in the Hitman series.

I've beaten Hitman 3, but before going back through for the Platinum trophy, it made more sense to return to where it all began with the Hitman DLC, which allows you to relive the entire first game in the whole Hitman series, which, from what I can tell amongst all the clutter, has never been done previously.

That's exactly what this content is. It doesn't really require an elaborate preface. The 6 levels that made up the original Hitman title are available to play through all over again as part of this DLC pack. They've been given the Hitman 3 facelift though, with challenges, mission stories and level mastery all allowing you to play through the game in ways you simply wouldn't have been able to back when Hitman was released on the Playstation 1 at the turn of the Millennium.

I did play the very first Hitman game, but I don't really remember much of it, and even this rush of nostalgia still left me trying to piece together the memories in my head. That's not always a bad thing though, and fresh experiences from old games can still be a blast to play through when you don't recall what's coming, and that's exactly what Hitman was. The story is fairly short and doesn't victimise itself with unnecessarily long-winded and complicated cinematics in the same way that some games do. It's very easy to follow and understand, and it's all tied together by the strongest suit of any Hitman game - It's cleverly crafted and creative levels.

Hitman's 6 levels take you through France, Italy, Morocco, Thailand, the USA and Japan - Assassinating plenty of targets along the way.

There are also 13 trophies on offer, and these can be broken down in very simple fashion. There are 6 trophies awarded for beating each of the 6 levels once, and a further 6 trophies for achieving Mastery of each level.

Level Mastery is a new concept introduced to Hitman within the main game, and is also applied to all subsequent DLC content. Each level comes with a range of different accomplishments, broken down into the following sub-headings; Assassination, Challenges, Discovery and Feats.

Each of these sub-sections will contain a variety of tasks, which, when completed, will contribute experience points that go towards levelling up the Mastery of a level. Once you reach level 20, you'll unlock the Mastery trophy relevant to that level.

Reaching Mastery level 20 isn't exactly difficult. It will require you to play through levels multiple times, ensuring that you're assassinating targets in different ways in accordance to the requirements set out within the menu, as well and ensuring you go round the map unlocking as many additional challenges simultaneously as you can. There is a certain level of tactful thinking required as you plan how you're going to go about each run of a mission in an attempt to complete as many challenges as possible during any given run, and it's a very effective method of adding replay value to the game.

It does get a little bit tedious eventually, but I do really enjoy how the Level Mastery trophies maximise the necessity to explore the environment and it was a joy to seemingly uncover new things every time you reloaded a level. New kill methods, previously hidden locations, little Easter Eggs. It all combines to prolong the fun and it genuinely feels like a beneficial learning experience, rather than just another tedious grind designed to draw out replayability. However, it is also responsible for my biggest gripe with the whole game - The Missions Stories.

Mission Stories are scattered around every level. They're a very specific timeline of events, triggered when you're within close enough proximity of their starting location. They'll tell you exactly where you need to go and what you need to do, with the outcome usually setting you up with a final scenario which opens up the opportunity to kill a target.

Hitman purists will hate this feature because it completely strips away the essence that Hitman is built on - Intuition. The mystery of figuring out every step yourself towards the ultimate satisfaction of killing a target knowing that you worked out exactly what to do all on your own accord, is where the real sense of achievement comes from. Completing Mission Stories awards experience that goes towards Level Mastery, so trophy hunters will have to view them as a necessary evil to progress. 

I don't completely dislike the idea, but I think they're way too generous in the information they provide, to the point where most Mission Stories will literally walk you through every step towards gaining direct access to your target, where the only thing it won't do for you is pull the trigger.

Some of the challenges come with redacted requirements, with just a name and a picture to help you work out the rest for those that want the balance of intuition, and you will need to beat the majority of the tasks to fully Master a level, so the purist experience isn't completely left out in the cold.

For me, it was simply a case of beating the game once to unlock the 6 progression trophies, and going back over each individual level to earn Mastery in order to unlock the 6 Mastery trophies. It's a very straight-forward process.

There is still a final trophy to declare, which is awarded for Completing Suit Only and Silent Assassin Challenges on The Icon, A House Built on Sand or Landslide. These 3 levels come as bonus missions to Hitman, and are objectives set on smaller scale variations of some locations within the main story.

Suit Only and Silent Assassin require you to assassinate the target(s) without being spotted, no bodies being found, removing the target(s) only and doing it all in Agent 47's suit with no disguise change. This can be a challenging feat within the main game, where the levels are bigger and require more steps to completion, but the bitesize levels in relation to this trophy make it a little bit easier.

Plus, you have the flexibility to choose a preference from 3 different levels. I chose the Icon, which is the first one, and didn't see the necessity to switch at any point. It helps that I already knew Sapienza quite well from the second mission within the main game, so used this intel to my advantage. I managed to beat the task within an hour, which turns out to be one of the lighter tasks in this package thanks to the fairly lengthy level Mastery.

It's not a brief experience, with reaching level 20 for all 6 story missions requiring a thorough playthrough of the whole game, but it never really feels terribly grindy, and turns out to be one of the more effective ways of padding a game's replayability. It helps that's it Hitman too, which is, and always has been, great fun.

DLC #185 - Cuphead - The Delicious Last Course 2

Question : When is a Delicious Last Course not actually a "Last Course"?

Answer : When a game, for whatever reason, splits some DLC content in half and creates 2 separate trophy lists for it.

The second part of Cuphead's Delicious Last Course includes just 2 additional trophies, both of which are awarded for a couple of very specific tasks.

There's nothing to preface about the content itself. This is simply an extension of a couple of Easter Eggs that can be found within Inkwell Isle IV, and will award you with a couple of trophies for your troubles.

The "A Horrible Night To Have a Curse" trophy, awarded for Surviving the nightmare, is achieved with a very specific set of steps, and will lead you directly into the other trophy within the list.

The Inkwell Isle IV map contains a graveyard with a series of tombstones lined up next to each other. You can interact with each tombstone, and if you do so in a certain order, you'll unlock a secret boss battle - The Angel and Demon. It's not a difficult fight, and once you defeat them, you'll earn a new charm - The Cursed Relic.

This is where things get a little bit trickier;

Paladin - Obtain great power.

The "Paladin" trophy, awarded for obtaining great power, requires you to upgrade the Cursed Relic to the Divine Relic.

The first thing you'll need to do is make sure the Cursed Relic is actively equipped into your charm slot. Once this is done, the Cursed Relic will be in your loadout at all times, and in order to fully upgrade it to the Divine Relic, you'll need to go back through and beat a certain number of boss fights over again with the Cursed Relic equipped, effectively levelling it up.

However, there are a couple of things to be aware of about the Cursed Relic.

Firstly, it will reduce your HP to just 1 from the outset of any fight. Secondly, your weapon choices are determined by a randomly changing, cyclical order. Each time you perform an action that involves dashing, parrying or if you stop firing your current weapon, your loadout will randomly cycle to the next weapon - and this will also be randomly selected. This point of note is the real game-changer here.

My initial plan of attack was to simply start from the beginning of Inkwell Isle IV, and go back through each of the boss fights I'd most recently tackled. They were still fresh in my memory from the first DLC pack so I still knew what to expect in terms of attack patterns and the different phases of the fight. It seemed like a sound strategy on paper, but I really struggled to make the adjustment to the randomly changing weapons the Cursed Relic bestows upon you, and I felt completely lost without the ability to tailor my weaponry to suit the strategy of the fight I was about to have.

I began this venture by going through an entire day without even beating the first boss, so I turned away for guidance and found some helpful background information regarding the Cursed Relic. Upgrading the Relic works off a background points-based system, whereby you need 16 points to achieve Divine status. These points are awarded for defeating any boss within the game, but each boss is assigned a specific number of points depending on their category. I could have switched back to the main game and beaten a handful of those bosses, but they awarded less points and I haven't played through them since I earned the Platinum trophy, so I felt like the learning curve would be too great compared to the more familiar DLC bosses.

I also found out that the Cursed Relic levels up in stages, whereby every time it reaches a certain number of points, it's benefits begin to strengthen. You can gain HP for successful parries, and dashing will also grant you bursts of invincibility, and picking up these snippets of information allowed me to go back and tackle this challenge equipped with some valuable knowledge.

So did I still continue to struggle? Yes. I generally fared better knowing I could accumulate HP by taking the time to parry attacks, and I slowly managed to gain an understanding of how to take a little bit of control of the erratic weapon cycles, but I still struggled to make steady progress. I just couldn't get used to how the flow of fights is constantly interrupted by the way the Cursed Relic makes your weapons cycle through the different options repeatedly. It created a challenging edge to a game that needs no such invitation to begin with.

Each victory felt like a big one, and in classic Cuphead fashion, there was nothing a bit of perseverance couldn't overcome. I did eventually get to a stage where I could master the weapon rotation a little bit, and effectively skip certain weapons that I didn't think were effective options in battle, and began to favour certain loadouts more akin to the normal strategy of planning for a boss fight with a pre-determined loadout.

It was a steeper challenge than anticipated, but perhaps could have been strategised better. I think it may have been more beneficial to re-learn some of the earlier boss fights and chip away from that angle, as this trophy took somewhere in the region of 10 hours in the end. All 5 Inkwell Isle IV main bosses beaten, with the Root Pack from Inkwell Isle I also beaten, as this would give me the single outstanding point needed to finally transform the Cursed Relic into Divine status.