Hitman 3's new free Starter Pack lets everyone try Dubai for a week

As they did with the two games before, Io Interactive have released a free 'Starter Pack' sorta-demo of Hitman 3. It currently offers the first game's tutorial mission, the second game's first mission, and—for one week only—the third game's first mission, set in Dubai. But it's also a barebones edition of Hitman 3, and lets owners of the first two games import their locations to play them in full with the benefit of Hit 3's new features. Something for everyone.

The Hitman 3 Starter Pack is available now free from the Epic Games Store. This means different things to different people. If you don't have any of the 'World Of Assassination' trilogy, hey, it's basically a demo. While the Starter Pack is sticking around, it'll only offer access to Dubai until Monday the 5th of April.

If you have Hitman 1 and 2, as well as letting you try Dubai, the Hitman 3 Starter Pack will let you bring them into 3. Io say, "Import the locations that you can already access in Hitman 2 and carryover your progress to start playing with the new features and improvements from Hitman 3, including updated lighting effects, animations and Agent 47's new camera item." That's nice. Previously, you need to buy Hitman 3 to be able to import.

And if you have 3 but not 2, hey, anything in the Starter Pack will be available to all Hitman 3 owners - so at present you'll have access to the Hawke's Bay mission from Hitman 2.

Sounds like Io plan to shuffle things around with the Starter Pack over time, adding and removing locations, Elusive Targets, and other things. That's nice and all, but when will they release it on Steam so people don't have to faff around with location imports and progress linking? I swear, every announcement which relates to the whole trilogy is more confusing for needing to dredge up that mess. An unfortunate stain on the game our Hitman 3 review called "as capable and pleasing as its trilogy-siblings".