Yoooo, so with The Bore down and all that I had a free day and spent like 7 hours straight playing that last map in Hitman 2 and clearing out everything I wanted before I said "fuck off!"
91 or 92 hours in, got 100% of the challenges on the rest of the stages, but I did the assassinations/discoveries and the non-stupid feats and the main set (SASO, Sniper, No Evidence) and I'm calling it good on this one.
Like I thought Santa Fortana/Colombia challenges were bad and blamed it on Sumo Digital, but while I like S'Gail much better as a stage (and the scripted opportunities are pretty great), the challenge list has so.much.bullshit. So many challenges require you to essentially spend 1-2 hours killing everyone on the entire map to accomplish them. That's not fun. I did that twice, once on my first run f'ing around and once yesterday in in a 2 hour run and the game glitched and I couldn't even get one of the challenges I wanted. I'm soooo never doing that again. Life's too short. Also going around collecting 30 coins is zzzzz, and even one of the assassination challenges is a stupid ass brute force challenge that requires you to drag one of the targets bodies up the entire level which again means you've just got to kill everyone on the stage first.
So.lame.
Couple that with a really really restrictive Suit Only SA situation because the stage is sorta Colorado, but better in that it's almost totally hostile in that the targets never really come to the non-hostile portion of the map.
Also it has the same problem as Santa Fortana where like none of the mission stories can happen without you being the one to make them happen. This is so bad because it means unless you go down the mission story the targets simply run on their own scripted route like an elusive and that's it. The whole fun in Hitman maps is being able to do stuff to change up their patterns and re-direct them to your death trap spots.
While visually it's very cool being a castle on the sea, and the way everything is connected is nicely laid out, I feel like S'Gail is a miss in the actual targets/assassination gameplay. Yeah if you follow the opportunities they're fun. But how much of that is really gameplay when you're just following a script? The non-scripted gameplay feels not so good in this map. Maybe Elusives on it will change my mind later.
So I'm calling it good/done on Hitman 2 at this point. Will come back for the Elusives and then when I'm not burnt out like now I'll mess around with the sniper mission achievements and whatever escalations they add in the mean time. Will be back for the DLC locations of course.
Overall I still think Hitman 2 is a great game and my favorite game of last year, but personally I feel the game is pretty uneven. It has highs that outdo Season 1 like Mumbai, a really good map with Miami, but then it's only got 5 locations (NZ is tutorial) compared to 6, Whittleton Creek feels really small/basic (it's still good, just could be bigger), S'Gail has the above annoyances and Santa Fortana is overly big and kinda tedious. I'd probably rank the stages.
Mumbai > Sapienza > Paris > Hokkaido > Miami > Bangkok > Whittleton > Marrakesh (at night) > S'Gail > Marrakesh (day) > Santa Fortana > Colombia
Basically I'd say everything from Miami up are GREAT, and everything from S'Gail down is a little weak.
I hope the DLC maps end up being more towards the higher end in quality than the lower end.