Io Interactive’s episodic Hitman experiment is over – or at least, the first season is anyhow. The end result has been slightly uneven (the season began with a strong pair of missions but subsequent episodes were never quite able to match them) but Io has managed to wrap up proceedings on a very positive note. Hitman Episode 6: Hokkaido has 47 flexing every one of his murderous muscles, and it’s easily the best ep since April’s terrific Sapienza mission

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“ It’s an interesting, atmospheric, and layered map

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“ 47’s final victim of 2016 presents a fresh and welcome challenge

Hokkaido’s remote mountaintop private hospital is a labyrinth of luxurious patient quarters, service areas, and high-tech medical facilities, and it feels a lot bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside. It’s an interesting, atmospheric, and layered map, and a huge step up from last month’s one-note Colorado militia compound In an added twist 47 can’t take anything with him into this mission, so any weapons or equipment you want to use will have to be procured on-site. This made total sense to me initially, as 47’s default way into the hospital is under an assumed identity as a new patient, but became a bit of an arbitrary and pointless hurdle later on, once I’d unlocked other mission starting positions. If I’m planning to sneak 47 into the building from the hiking trail, dressed as a ninja, I don’t know why he can’t carry a few coins or a lockpick.There are two targets in Hokkaido: ICA turncoat Eric Soders and a Japanese lawyer set to make public a list of current ICA operatives around the world. The lawyer is much like any number of targets over the past six months and can be liquidated in a variety of familiar ways, but 47’s final victim of 2016 presents a fresh and welcome challenge. The mission begins with Soders undergoing a heart transplant and thus he never leaves the operating table.A warning, though: stow any expectations that the final episode of this season will offer much in the way of closure for Hitman’s story to date as it does little more than set up seasons to come. It really is quite tough to get truly invested in the intrigue Io has been trying to establish here; it’s just too fractured.