Part of my love comes from my perfectionism and the other part from my love for being stealthy as shit. The Hitman series has always sated my thirst for both and I can safely say the hundreds of hours I have spent on this series alone has been deeply satisfying.
With that being said, let's proceed to the first Hitman game that's not a Hitman game.
Das Story
Absolution takes place sometime after Blood Money ended, Diana your handler suddenly goes rogue, blows up the Agency you work for and steals some very important stuff.
Cool your shit Diana.
Of course the Agency don't take kindly to their employees blowing up their shit. So they send in The Hitman. In this first mission, cleverly disguised as a tutorial, you are tasked with killing Diana. After doing so, you find a girl that Diana had kidnapped liberated from the Agency. 47, being an assassin with a heart of gold, attempts to fulfill Diana's final wish of keeping this girl safe from the Agency. Sounds sane right? Well after that, the story goes balls to the wall mental.
While the previous games had some kind of story thrown in the mix of an assassin simulator, Absolution is all kinds of serious about its story. The unfortunate downside to this though is how ridiculously over the top it all comes out to be. Filled with semi-memorable characters and doused generously with cheesetastic dialogue, you can't help but feel the immersion slipping away as you kill too-serious-for-their-own-good caricatures. We got your sadistic looney who enjoys killing random people for the hell of it. A crazy and omgsorandum westerner guy who to me felt almost like the Texas Guy from The Simpsons.
In-game Model
The hits you have to take out felt slapped on as well. One moment I'm evading cops, punching hippies, and eating donuts while dressed up in a chipmunk suit. The next moment, I'm suddenly trying to kill three random guys who... wants to kill my new Asian handler for some reason? In all honesty, if you don't pay fairly close attention, you'll probably miss out a lot on the ongoing story. But even when you do pay attention, it still feels like a middle school creative writing piece with tropes thrown about all willy-nilly.
Dat Gameplay
Writing about the gameplay for Absolution is a conundrum for me and will probably sound confusing to you. I love hate love hate love hate love hate love the gameplay. Controlling 47 can either be enjoyably smooth or OMGSTOPCROUCHINGYOUDUMBFUCK frustrating. The button layout is familiar, but my only complaint was the placement of crouch with the right thumbstick being clicked in. Sometimes during frantic firefights, I'll accidentally stand up and get shot to kingdom come.
New to the series are the ability to take cover and instinct. In olden times, hiding behind something just mean crouching behind a low wall or behind a corner. Now you just press B and 47 will stick himself to the wall like fly on flypaper. This is a godsend when attempting to be stealthy in Absolution. Sometimes when an enemy sees you from a quarter-mile away, simply dodging behind a car will make them turn the other cheek.
The new instinct mode comes into play when you hold down the right-bumper. While its held down, the world slows down to a molasses crawl, everything gets slapped a blue hue and (if you're playing certain difficulties) important items and people will have a nice sickly yellow or blood red glow to them.
This mode will also allow you to bypass people who are trying to see through your disguise. How you ask? Simple, 47 will put his hands near his face, looking as suspicious as possible. Years of training has proven that this signals to other people that 47 is not shady as fuck.
One last ability one can pull off in this mode is the ability to pull a Sam Fisher by tagging as many targets as you can and then letting loose an opera of gunfire. Simply put, you tag people and when you are done, you will systematically shoot whoever or wherever you tagged, all before the enemy can react.
The excuse the game makes for this EZ-MODE is that 47's years and years of hitman-ing knowledge allows him to be Neo for a short while. He'll miraculously know what patrol path enemies will take, and he'll even know that his target (again, glowing bright red) is a mile away, eating some donuts.
To the right of your health bar is your mana instincts bar. This drains when you do fancy things like being shady and Sam Fisher shooting. Seeing important people (again, based on the difficulty you're playing), hints, items and people's patrol path is free. This mode feels a little cheap and completely different from what you'd expect in a Hitman game, but as much as I would like to say it's optional, I can't. There are certain frustrating segments in this game where you will have to use at least a little bit of your instinct to bypass.
Which brings me to my first complaint. While there are a few, rather large open maps, Absolution detracts from previous incarnations by throwing in very linear missions. Previously you are plopped down in a level, given a picture of what your target looks like and the game says fuck you figure it out. Now we get a nice armful of levels where your objective is get from Point A to Point B. Every now and then the game goes OH SHIT I'M A HITMAN GAME?! and throws you some contract kills. It's during these missions where the world gets bit more open ended and you are rewarded with how creatively you can kill your targets.
To help you get closer to your target or reach Point B, you can wear a disguise. Wearing disguises has always been a staple for the series, but this time around the system has been reworked for the better and unfortunately, for the worse. When wearing a disguise, you can bypass some restrictions and blocked paths. For example, wearing a cop uniform lets you keep a gun out and allows you to access areas normally off limits for civilians. Sounds awesome right? Wrong. It works well, but wearing a disguise will make anyone who is wearing that uniform EXTREMELY paranoid of you. Wearing a chef uniform in the Chinese new years mission will make Every. God damn. Chef. suspicious of you, and great oogly-moogly there's a lot.
They actually say stuff like this.
This is where instinct helps you. But it really honestly shouldn't be necessary, unfortunately it is. I understand there has to be some difficulty in the game, but it's stupid when you can't blend in with other professions just 'cause you're not part of their union. What's worse is how overly dramatic guards can be. Cop asks the guy in the chipmunk to back up? HE'S NOT COMPLYING?! SHOOT THE FUCKER.
Another issue that comes to mind are the checkpoints. Previously we were given limited saves that we could place anywhere, usually before attempting a big and elaborate plan that had a high failure rate. Now you can find player-activated check points throughout the levels, or on higher difficulty, you will just have to start back wherever the game felt like checkpointing. The horrendous thing about checkpoints is they are placed so far apart, that if you fail and wish to fix you failure, you would have to do every other thing leading up to your last failure. This is annoying and it's frustrating. There were moments when I wanted to switch to an easier difficulty, but chose to stick to the one I had selected. Previous games did not do this, even on the hardest difficulties when you are given just one, it wasn't so mindblistering difficult to know when to use that save.
The last thing to complain about is this: Do you remember (for those who've played it) in Mirror's Edge and how much fun it was being taught to don't get in firefights and how it's better to run away and reassess the situation? Then suddenly the last ending missions had you constantly fighting for survival. Absolution kind of did this to the series. Previous games, 47 would not last long in a firefight and more often than naught, one would usually result in mission failure. This time around, shooting your way through a mission is viable but will give you a horrible score.
One saving grace to this game though is Contracts Mode. In this mode, you can create new contracts within the levels of the game. The process itself is fairly easy, press Y to mark a target, kill them with any weapon wearing any disguise and then make your way to the exit. Afterwards, it'll create a base score depending on the extra actions you take like not changing disguises, using a specific weapon, not being seen, ect. You can then upload this contract or send it to friends for people to play.
If you want interesting challenges, you can also play other people's contracts and figure out the best possible way to maximize your score, doing so awards you money to buy weapons, upgrades and disguises. This mode is very enjoyable, and some of the contracts I've played rank next to some of the more difficult contracts of prior games.
Presenting the Presentation
I will admit this, the game looks and sounds really good. I don't know of anyone who picks up a hitman game for the sake of graphics, but this time around it's easy to appreciate the graphics while waiting for your target to show up in your crosshair.
The entire game runs smooth and very rarely hiccuped or had its framerate drop. The wizards at IO did a fantastic job of drawing crowds. Some models are reused in these crowds, but at first glance it really appears varied and busy. One of the best set pieces in the game was escaping from the cops by waiting at a train station for the next train. During this time there are literally hundreds of npcs just hanging out and cops weaving in and out of the crowd searching for you.
During my playthrough, I did take note of how wonderful the game sounds. The ting of a silenced pistol going off, or the brutal sound of a knife plunging into the back of your victim was all so satisfying. The voice acting, even for the over the top characters, were well done and delivered with enough gusto to be believable. The conversations you can eavesdrop on were humorous at best, ignorable at worst.
OverallshittyOpinion
Despite its many flaws, the game itself is still fun to play. If you can overlook the frustratingly broken disguise system, it's still a blast sneaking around looking for your target or the exit. If you're a long time fan of the Hitman series, it's kind of a coin toss. You'll either like the game or you'll absolutely hate it. For a newcomer to the series, you're probably best of sticking with this and any future iterations, because going back to the older games will knock you on your ass and I highly doubt you'll enjoy the experience.
I'm giving it seven and a half angry glaring bald guys.
If you have the time and consider yourself a pretty cool guy/girl, then visit my friend's blog and read his review on the same game. DO IT NOW.
http://thebabyatemycontroller.blogspot.com/2012/12/hitman-absolution-aka-wet-dog-fart.html
Hey what's that? You can see through walls, but wearing the same uniform as the other guy allows him to see through your disguise? Oh okay then.
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