The Wrath Termination is the final Escalation to be added to Hitman 3 with the Seasons of Sin Collection. It concludes what has been a very experimental collection of seasons, each with its own unique twist on the Hitman 3 formula. In all honestly, I think every past season has stuck to the source material, that is Hitman 3, fairly well. With Season of Wrath though, I think Io Interactive went off the deep end a bit. Every other premium Escalation has stuck to what Hitman as a series is all about. You need to kill your targets, and you have the option to be stealthy and unseen in every way. With The Wrath Termination, there’s no point to stealth, because it’s all about killing enemies as quickly and efficiently as possible.
The mission is set in a revamped Dartmoor map. There are traps everywhere, and you need to kill off waves of enemies. These enemies will march in after a short period of time, and you need to ready the mansion before they arrive. You can use traps, but you’re also able to grab lethal weapons to take the enemies out yourself. However, there’s almost no way to do this without being seen by at least one guard. By the end of each wave, you’re left with loads of them if you only kill targets as in normal Hitman mission.
The difference here is that you can get a Silent Assassin rank just by killing everyone. It makes stealth feel pointless, but this game wasn’t built for hardcore action like this Escalation demands. It goes against the essence of Hitman, and I think the community is right to be pretty annoyed about it. If the traps were more plentiful and it was possible to kill every enemy just with them, then this Escalation would be much more Hitman. It would fit with the franchise as a whole, and I’d have no problem with it.
However, I do understand that this is a take on Hitman 3 through the lens of Wrath, and it certainly fits the theme. I just hope that this sort of content is kept to a minimum because it’s not really what I play Hitman 3 for.