"[These] so-called "mission stories" are, frankly, the worst parts of the game; I think that's the revelation I finally came to after speeding through all the missions, getting hand-held through a linear sequence of objectives where I follow my intended victim around for a while until the moment they say, "All security guards, leave the room so I can have some alone time with my new best pal. Would you like to admire my new pit full of rotating knives? I thought it would make a nice centerpiece." It feels like Mum and Dad doing our homework for us, and it makes the bottom drop out of all the tension and immersion, especially since they very often hinge on Agent 47 disguising himself as someone famous or who the victim has already met, rather than a random background employee, and them somehow not noticing that this person they know is suddenly built like a gravedigger's shovel leaning on a tombstone and keeps responding to direct questions with veiled references to being an assassin. "Can I tell you a secret?" "Oh, I guarantee it won't leave this room." "Do you recommend the soup?" "I'd have to say it's... to DIE for." "Blimey, my verrucas are playing up!" "Perhaps you'd like to LIE DOWN... after I murder you completely to death?" Yeah, it was funny the first couple of times, but when it's pretty much the same routine for every mission story, things get a bit silly, and at odds with the story's tone when the cutscenes are full of slick behind-the-scenes manipulators controlling the world through growly phone conversations in huge, twilit offices, and then you meet them in gameplay, and they're standing over the shark tank at SeaWorld demonstrating their new line of tuna-flavored aftershave."