blueskirt42: I found Hitman 2 just as hard but for different reasons.
If you consider the proper way to finish every missions with a Silent Assassin rating on Professional difficulty, there are a couple of bullshit missions that will have you pull your hair out in frustration due to how unfair these missions are, notably:
The first mission where the guard disguise doesn't work in close and mid range (In close range, every guard will recognize you as soon you enter a room containing a guard, and at mid range, they'll start walking toward you to take a closer look at your disguise before recognizing you right away),
Then you've got two missions in Japan where you cannot be seen by the watch towers or any guard patrolling the area, and one of them has trucks that have the tendency to drive over guards, meaning people will find bodies of guards ran over and it will count against you in your "Bodies found" stats,
And last but not least, one of the middle east mission, where you got to haul a sniper rifle across town, avoiding the gaze of everyone, to land a perfect shot on a moving target, which may be even more difficult if your mouse sensibility sucked balls like mine did (I had to adjust mouse sensibility to max setting because mine was slow as hell during the whole game except during menu and sniping, so when it was time to land that perfect shot, the aiming was janky as hell)
The rest of the missions are great, but hindered by the fact the sedatives have a long animation, and do not last for the entire duration of the mission, and your sneaking speed is slower than a guard's walking speed, so the only way to catch up on a guard is to game the system by walking behind the guard, then, in a split second, toggling the sneak mode, drawing the sedatives and knocking the guard unconscious.
All in all, of the earlier games in the series, I always thought Silent Assassin had the best story, music and missions (excluding the bullshit ones), but Contracts had a much better engine, and while bullshit was present in both Codename 47 and Silent Assassin, I had a much easier time accommodating myself to the bullshit of the first game than the bullshit of the second game.
oh man, now am worried. I guess it will be a long play too.
Sufyan: Veteran Hitman player here, and my verdict is that Hitman 2 is brutally hard, especially the broken parts like the mountain missions in Japan. Codename 47 tests your patience frequently with it's loose game design, but Silent Assassin does it entirely intentionally. If you jog around too much within 20 meters of armed guards they go nuts and start shooting you and in this game, most of the time when one enemy is alerted the whole map descends upon you shortly after. It is further complicated by how most missions in Silent Assassin are more James Bond-like than the rest of the series that mostly takes places in public or civilian spaces. You'll be dead tired with Russian soldiers before the end of the second game.
Contracts is my personal favourite, mostly because of the art direction and atmosphere, but also because it is the last game in the series set entirely outside North America. The early Hitman games were European crime cinema turned into games, while Blood Money and Absolution are embarassing showcases of what many Europeans think American cinema is like. Contracts is a hard game with many situations where your 20 minute effort hangs in the balance in a split second window that must be used perfectly or the whole thing falls apart.
You must have the capacity and patience to memorise the paths of some 20-30 moving characters on each mission to make it through this series. That is pretty much what the games are like when you deconstruct them, it is just a memory excercise.
Codename 47 tests both your patience and your nerves all the time. Specially when missions fail because of a game glitch.
