An unpleasant grind through a clunky PC exclusive that has not aged very well

Got this in a Steam sale bundle a while ago and have been putting off playing it until now because I played it back when it came out originally back in 2000 (13 years ago now?!?!) and was put off by how unintuitive and hard to get into it was. 13 years on and it's even harder to get into and even less intuitive sadly.

I knew that it was primarily a stealth game but was still hoping that there would be room for some brute forcing if done properly. This was doable in the first 2 levels and beyond that the objectives became too complicated for it to be at all feasible. The basic premise of the game is that you are a Hitman, shockingly, and you have to get into places silently, usually kill a target of some kind and maybe get something in and/or out on the way. Almost always without being detected. There are usually numerous ways to go about this by sneaking into places, playing identity theft, poisoning people rather than stabbing them and generally a lot of sneaky underhanded tactics. Unfortunately, despite there being apparently multiple ways of doing things, these things are very rarely clear at all and it will often many many failed attempts before you will even have a clue of what kind of approach to take. And even then, it's so easy to fuck up something as simple as forgetting to put a gun away or leaving a foot poking out a door and then youre spotted and its all bust.

One particularly maddening thing is that there are no mid level save points. And if you take your time and do things carefully, some of the bigger levels can take upwards of an hour. So a fuck up towards the end is quite an irritant. You do get the mercy of 5 respawns per level if you're killed but these are of little use if you've failed any of the objectives which are usually harder to do than simply staying alive. The controls are also incredibly clunky. Which is bad because speed is often of the essence for example in order to grab someone and strangle them in a brief window of no one seeing it and then hide the body before anyone comes back. But many manys a time I would be left fumbling with the controls trying to drag the body out of sight and failing only to have another guard walk in and start ventilating me.

The shorter simpler missions were the more enjoyables ones where there were less variables to contend with such as time limits and objectives and if you fucked up it wasn't too much to repeat. But some of them were stupidly long to have no way to save in the middle. Just seemed to be a lot of broken mechanics in this game through and through. The 2nd game, which will be next up, must have been a huge improvement because it's hard to see a series that now has 5 entries in it spawned from this buggy (I also had to restart many times due to getting stuck in shit or respawning into objects) glitchy infuriating mess of a game. I had to play it because I bought it on Steam and it was on the backlog, but I'd recommend anyone that wants to play some of the Hitman series not to start with this one. Skip it.

Here's hoping the 2nd one is better cause I still have it and Hitman: Blood Money to play. I'm unsure of what #2 is like but I have heard many excellent reports of Blood Money's awesomeness so at least that one should help get the sour taste of this one out of my mouth, right? Right?