Where Sapienza takes the pressure off, Marrakesh returns you to the heart of the storm. Going by a hands-off fly-through demo, it could be Hitman’s largest and busiest map to date. Your targets this time are a banker convicted of fraud who has taken refuge in an embassy, and a general who is on the verge of launching a coup d’etat. There is, it must be said, a sense that Io is leafing through the annals of espionage cinema at this point: if Paris was a Bond movie and Sapienza is The American, Marrakesh puts me in mind of Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana.
The most striking things about this map are its politically charged blend of styles and scales, and its probably illusory atmosphere of imminent crisis. The city itself is another nod to the daytripper in every player, thick with details plucked from the pages of the National Geographic – winding alleys hung with arabesques, stalls packed with gaudy faux-brand electronics and even the odd snake charmer. The initial spawn drops you by a crowd staring at live TV footage of the protest rally outside the embassy’s main entrance, a clever scene-setting device that makes the map feel even larger by placing one corner at a journalistic remove.
Inside the subdued and spacious embassy building, there’s an air of panic as staff peer through the turnstiles at screaming citizens waving megaphones and placards. The rogue general, meanwhile, lurks with his troops in an abandoned secondary school that lends itself to a classic base infiltration, with regularly spaced windows and long corridors. Other points of interest include a mysteriously well-protected shoe shop, rooftop gardens and an underground carpark.
The aspect of Marrakesh that intrigues me most is the protest rally, which looks like a riot waiting to be elbowed into action. If that’s allowed for in the mission design, it could be either a brilliantly callous way of invading the embassy – swept through the checkpoint by a tide of agitators – or a sad reminder that many of the new Hitman’s bystanders are just furniture, however responsive they may seem at a glance. Let us not forget the spectacle of the Parisian jet set pondering the dregs of their cocktail glasses while the party’s host bleeds out on the catwalk.
Assuming IO’s designers and programmers can do the idea of an NPC insurrection justice, however, Marrakesh could be a gripping departure. Most Hitman levels are clockwork dioramas waiting to be interfered with, whereas this map feels like it might transform under its own steam. Imagine having to backtrack across a city reduced to one giant pub brawl after collecting your bounties, or closing in on the general after he’s dispatched his guards to quell the rioters.
Marrakesh is also a chance to take a more searching look at street-level political dissent than is permitted by, for example, Tom Clancy’s The Division, which launched in the same week as Hitman Episode 1. Unwieldy though it is, the comparison fascinates me because both games are basically about dress code. The Division poses an authoritarian fantasy in which society’s discontents are marked for extermination by their hoodies, masks and baseball caps, to say nothing of an in-world HUD that has no patience for fine distinctions.
