Yeah, I noticed the glue thing too. Like you can use coins on the jukebox to get P-power away but you can't pay a coin for glue? Also like you said a lot of stuff (almost everything) sits and waits for 47 to do everything in Colombia. Like you can't just give glue to the hippie (who asks you for it!), you can't just wake up the band and get the ceremony going on its own, you can't help get the sub stuff going without you, etc...
The only scripted event you can make do without 47 is the Hippo, which surprised me since nothing else scripted will run without 47 I never even thought to just toss a meaty bone in and see if the Hippo would play out on its own.
Funny enough it feels like the only reason they let that one play out is to give an easy Suit Only SA kill for Rico because otherwise it's pretty challenging to get inside his loop in SOSA and take him out. I stayed up kinda late last night thinking "what the hell, I've just spent all night finishing these tedious challenges, might as well give SOSA a try on professional & then master" and beat both after a few hours. I didn't know about the hippo thing so Rico was pretty tough, Jorge and that field with 360 vision from guards is pretty tough too, especially on Master with only one save. The problem with the field is it's just a big open space where everyone can see everywhere when you're not just ducking in foilage so since you can't see 360 at all times I had more than a few times getting spotted and losing 10+ mins on a master SOSA run.
Like you said Colombia just doesn't feel very organic, feels piece-mealed around 47's activities which is just off a bit. And the challenges by Sumo Digital just get it wrong sometimes. Like now that I'm done with master SOSA, all I have left is Sniper Assassin Professional/Master and Hero to the People challenge.
Now the Hero to the People challenge is kinda everything wrong with Sumo's challenges. It's an easy challenge to do all the scripted events in one run, but goddamn is that going to take a long as time just to check off a challenge box. There's no difficulty/challenge to pulling it off, it's just long and boring. The 3 Hippo one was the same, it wasn't particularly clever or challenging, it was just a long non-organic drag everyone around. Even the Fly Trap one where you knock down different types of guards, the street soldier one, at least going by the one youtube runs recommend is really inconsistent and I got seen like 20+ times in save/reloads before getting him in the water unseen with perfect timing. Same with Exit, Stage Left where you have to knock the statue down on both Andrea and Rico, the timing window is ridiculously tiny when Andrea walks by after Damnit Drumroll. I had to save/reload for like 10-15 mins over and over again before landing it. That's not fun, that's annoying and tedious to check off a box. I never felt IOI challenges in Hitman S1 or Miami were like that. Just feels like Sumo Digital while an alright B-studio for Hitman doesn't quite get what makes Hitman
so much fun and not a pain in the butt.
Will do the sniper assassin and hero to the people later today if I've got time and then off to Mumbai.
If anything, what's slowing down my playtime on this are the performance issues. But, I expect that to be addressed sooner than later.
So the oddest thing but the recent patch that came with the Sean Bean elusive really improved performance for my rig. Runs really smooth now.