Attempt eight … cross bridge and stab guard with back turned. Immediate right and slice ninja waiting by exterior lift. Leap on lift and ride to roof, bypass countless foes and prep grenade for patrolling bodyguards. Unleash.
Next reach roof and snipe fleeing target before he reaches exit. Jump 30 flights to ground below and run for cover. Shoot sword-juggling ninja in path with pistol – hat-tip to Indiana Jones – and rush to save point.
I’m going to make it this time. I need to make it this time! Nope, I’m dead. Downed by a bullet fired half a map away by an unseen enemy. The rage builds. I respawn and on to attempt nine.
At its best, Tokyo 42 is a stunning, exquisitely crafted assassination puzzle that you learn to master via repetition. You’ll make many stupid moves and perish multiple times, but it’s worth it when you execute your actions perfectly like Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow. If the enemy count remained manageable, leaving you free to sneak and stab, the game would be a classic, but unfortunately its slick promise gives way to crippling difficulty.
It begins brilliantly. You’re in your Tokyo apartment as a news broadcast announces that “the first murder of 2042 has been confirmed by police”. Cut to a live feed of the culprit’s face: yours. It transpires people can’t die provided they take Nanomed, but you’ve been framed for murdering an unfortunate soul without the drug. You’re forced to flee in your friend’s flying car, and he sets you up with assassination contracts so you can work your way up the criminal underworld and find the real villain.
Early missions offer exciting variety while keeping the difficulty manageable. Skulking up the Nakatomi hotel unseen, sniping a mini-golf magnate across the rooftops, timing your shot between Fifth Element-style flying cars zipping past, or tracking and dispatching a Where’s Wally lookalike while wearing your badass Deckard coat. The game flaunts such cultural influences, underscored by irreverent humour and a fondness for bad puns, making for a charming first few hours.
It’s told from a minimalist, isometric perspective that harks back to the Amiga era and classic titles like Cannon Fodder and Syndicate. A more modern touchstone is Hotline Miami, with its one-hit, one-kill mechanic and multiple attempts at each level, but this lacks that title’s brutality, with light jazz as likely to accompany your takedowns as techno. Visually it’s every bit as striking; a large open world bursting with neon and reflective surfaces, and the character of the world weaved with giant Hello Kitty-like heads that serve as streetlights, or workers doing yoga in the park as you jog through to your next target.
There are 25 main missions and the campaign will take you about 10 hours to complete, but it’ll require oodles of patience in the latter stages. The humour and diversity that define the early game give way to missions that force you to kill everyone and a rudimentary plot of future-corp corruption. Enemy numbers and arsenals are ramped-up, meaning you’re more-easily spotted, and this is compounded by control bugbears that makes returning fire contrastingly hard.
You must manually rotate the camera in 45 degree increments, but it’s tricky to do while simultaneously controlling the character, particularly when turning corners. It’s also fiddly to judge elevation, meaning in the heat of battle you’re as likely to fire an RPG into an adjacent wall as a far flung enemy. Add the infrequency of save points and you’re left with a recipe for crippling caution, conscious a single misstep could mean replaying chunks of the level.
Thankfully, when not on a mission it’s great fun just to leap around the world. Free-running across the skyline of a futuristic Asian-cityscape inevitably evokes Mirror’s Edge, but mistiming jumps is less common because you can move around in mid-air and the game shows precisely where you’ll land. You can also teleport to discovered locations and fall vast distances – it doesn’t bother with a Gunpoint-style explanation – which alleviates the annoyance that everyone else can take lifts but you can’t.
Like Agent 47 from the Hitman series, you feel removed from society. Hundreds of sprites populate the levels, but you can’t talk to them and only the odd one has barks like “it’s been years since I’ve seen the moon”; a glimpse of personality for the character and world.
Your only interaction comes via projectiles and here the AI is erratic. Guards don’t notice dead bodies or bullets landing in the wall next to their eardrum, but snipe a colleague hidden from his friends a mile away and they’ll instantly go to Defcon 1. In contrast, civilians will run away with amusing jaunt, but won’t alert guards, and you can mow down an eyebrow-inducing number before the cops show up. Once they do, your wanted level escalates until you can escape their search area and change your skin. Each change costs a little power, but makes you unrecognisable, allowing you to slip away.
Alongside the main campaign there are 67 side missions, seven Far Cry-esque guard posts to liberate and numerous collectibles. Then there’s multiplayer deathmatch. Matches were hard to come by pre-release, but the setup holds promise. You must use your wits and toys to seek and destroy rival assassins in a lower-poly Watchdogs affair. Matches can be heavily customised, right down to the amount of starting ammo for whichever weapons you choose, and against more fallible human opponents the game should get a second wind.
The single player campaign remains immensely enjoyable but it’s a shame it can’t sustain early success. Refined controls and a focus on more crafted stealth missions, rather than turning everything up to 11, would have meant fewer rage-quits and a higher score.
Mode 7; PC (version tested)/Xbox One/PlayStation 4; Pegi rating: 16
