Hitman 2 - Elusive Target 1 - Sean Bean Dies!

Poor Sean Bean. He's a legendary talent, and an incredible actor. But despite that, there's one thing that he's more famous for than anything else: Dying in almost every single role that he's done.

So when IO Interactive not only makes him the very first Elusive Target for Hitman 2, but gives him the code name "The Undying", they know exactly what kind of challenge they are giving to their player base.

And I, being a very prolific Hitman/Elusive Target player, had no choice but to answer the call.



First off, props to Sean Bean for being such a good sport about this, and to IO for getting him to agree to it.


As people might remember from the last time I took on these Elusive Targets, the following rules are imposed for them:

• An Elusive Target can only be attempted during the designated window
• The player may restart the mission as many times as they like, but once a single objective is completed, or the player dies, they may no longer restart the mission.
• Once the mission is failed or completed, the player may make no further attempts at the Elusive Target.

In other words, it is high-stakes Hitman, where every move counts.

This means it's all the more important to properly scout out the mission in dummy attempts, fishing for a viable strategy, before one makes their final attempt.

My attempt is no different. While the above is my final attempt, I spend a good 30 minutes before hand poking around before I found a winner. Though the footage is choppy due to my stream setup/graphical options, you may watch/listen to it here.



My first instinct was to find a way to poison the coffee or to get him to leave the meeting via my favorite coin. There wasn't a good way to sneak in the poison though. As for the coin trick, you'll see in the scouting video that it ends in disaster. That outside area is well guarded. (And by the way, it was a little chilling to have Sean Bean call me out for two different strategies I already considered when I actually sat down for the meeting.)

What tipped me off to the hallway was the realization that aside from those two guard, there wasn't a single person watching Sean Bean go down this hallway. This made it the ideal place for me to strike, if only I could get rid of those guards.

I kept following him looking for a way, but I didn't see anything. I got one of the guards with the coin trick in the lab area, but I couldn't safely get rid of the other. It wasn't until his walk back that I saw the bathroom, and since it had a closet I could dump bodies into, that became my best option.

But that still left one problem... the fact that I had been caught on camera during every single attempt while climbing up the stairs. To get Silent Assassin, the player either can't be caught on tape, or needs to destroy the evidence on CCTV. From playing the Miami mission proper, I knew that security room was on the top floor, and going for it was just too risky. That left one option: Shooting down the camera before it has the chance to see me. There were no other cameras in the section of the map I was working in, so dealing with it was no big deal.

And now that the stage has been set, and I had a viable approach to getting to a vulnerable Sean Bean, I only had to figure out a method. I could shoot him in head, snap his neck, or blow him up, but all 3 of those options led to the very real likelihood that the body would be discovered. When going for Silent Assassin, the player cannot have a body be discovered, except for a few scenarios.

What I failed to explain in the video is that if the death was due to a poison or and accident kill, it can be detected and not count against the "No Bodies Found" criteria, so long as there are no witnesses to the attempt. Since the target was completely away from prying eyes, this meant that the Modern Syringe was the best possible method to take care of him.

It's a deceptive simple contract, but it requires the player to be cognizant of their environment and aware of the options at their disposal. That's the key when it comes to Hitman.