I'd be madder at what Hitman VR gets wrong if this were some hyped-up $40 side game dedicated to VR support, but this ain't Fallout 4 VR. I suspect your personal tolerance will be the biggest factor in enjoying Hitman VR or closing it forever the first time you try to pick up a wrench with your left hand and remember you're only allowed to do that with your right (a major VR sin). I have a high tolerance for VR jank-which is sort of required to enjoy some of the coolest VR things out there-so I'm hardly bothered by imperfect graphics, stubborn doors, and wonky controls. It's important that Hitman VR mostly works in these moments. Without a third-person camera keeping me hidden while I observe guard patrols from around a corner, I have to expose my bald head with an actual lean and retreat when I make awkward eye contact with the guy I'm fixing to punch. Living in 47's head gave me a new appreciation for how hard his job is. Half of the game is pretending to be a normal guy in a place you don't belong, a feeling that I can intimately relate to when I'm waving controllers around in an empty room with a goofy box strapped to my head. A faster, more acrobatic stealth game like Dishonored would probably be disastrous in a headset, but Hitman has the advantage of already being a game about slowly walking from place to place, holding down buttons to watch 47 do canned animations. Hitman's unique social stealth mechanics are also a great fit for VR. Once a headset kicks on you see a prompt to switch to VR mode, and the rest is (relatively) smooth sailing.

I had a weird thing where my Hitman profile wouldn't load if I tried to launch the game from the Oculus app, so if you have the game through the Epic Games Store like me, make sure you launch it from there. I did all my playing on a Quest 2 headset through the Oculus Link wireless mode.

One missed shot and my target will turn around, which inevitably leads to me awkwardly sprinting up to their face for a pistol whip.

In normal play I use 47's pistol like a human off switch that's nearly impossible to miss with, but having to manually line up iron sights and manage my shaking hand introduces tension to the most ordinary Hitman moments. Unlike standard Hitman, I've had a lot of fun messing with guns. Still, landing the shot by 'holding' the gun was way more gratifying than moving and clicking a mouse. I knew it would be a lot harder aiming with my actual hand, but it didn't help that the race cars only rendered into my view a few seconds before they sped by and disappeared again. I snuck up to the scaffolding above the race track and readied my pistol to shoot the car as she drove by. This is less noticeable on maps with shorter sightlines, but it was very noticeable as I was trying to pull off my favorite kill on Miami: shooting Sierra Knox's car. The game also seems to be running on low settings, which is fine and expected, but less fine is that all objects more than 30-or-so meters away are blurry and prone to popping in. This is clearly a VR mode happening inside a typically non-VR game-meaning you can't pick up most objects and there are plenty of textures that were never meant to be seen so close up. To be clear, Hitman's VR mode is several leagues below Valve's tentpole VR game.

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