Review: Hitman: Absolution

Hitman: Absolution is a stealth-action game for the Xbox 360, PC, and PlayStation 3. It was developed by IO Interactive.

Agent 47, in disguise, sneaking past some strip club goons.

Agent 47 has started protecting a teenage girl, Victoria, at the request of his former handler, Diana. Unluckily for 47, Victoria is kidnapped by a weapons manufacturer named Blake Dexter, and 47 has to chase him up and down the American Midwest while avoiding his former employers the Agency, who want Victoria for some secretive purpose.

Levels are a combination of several different kinds of sections. There are the open sections where you assassinate people, more linear sections where you just have to sneak past guards, and combination that are still linear, but you have to kill a few people along the way. You often have a secondary objective, like destroy evidence, and after you complete all your objectives you have to get to the exit.

You have a couple of options when assassinating people. You can shoot them, strangle them, or make it look like an accident by sabotaging something. The game encourages you to use stealth and avoid guards when approaching a target, which you can do just by memorizing their patrols and avoiding them, throwing things to distract them, killing them too, or mugging people for their clothes, though you have to hide the bodies afterward and make sure people in similar outfits do not get too close to you.

The yellow area indicates that someone in that direction is suspicious of 47.

The best sections are the ones where 47 has to actually assassinate one or several targets in a big, open, not linear area, and can get to his targets any way you want, You can be creative in your assassinations, which is more rewarding and a lot more fun than the limited options that linear levels with tons of guards give you.

The linear sections though outnumber the open world sections and are not nearly as fun. The short sections that just get 47 from one place to the next are tolerable, but the ones that take a while and have lots of guards to sneak by can get boring, even the ones where you have to kill someone along the way. I would have rather played more of open sections, regardless of what it would mean to the story.

The game needs a better save system. When you are planning an assassination, you usually only have one chance at reaching your target before the guards see you, and often have to repeat the same steps over and over again. It would be far less tedious if I could save right before I perform the assassination, or at least after I complete a step, so I do not have to do the same repetitive task just because I did not count on the guard turning to his left that one time. Instead it only saves at the beginning of a section.

I do not like the scoring system either. You get a ton of points for killing your target, and get penalized for everything else. While I can understand getting penalized for being spotted killing someone, I do not like that it deducts part of our score for killing people, and gives you more points for killing a target a certain way. I should be able to methodically kill every guard in the area without them noticing and get something besides grief from the game, and it should not give you tons of way to get through a level and then insist you go about it one way. I suppose I could ignore it, but Absolution makes such a big deal out of it.

The whole game has this over saturated coloring that makes everything looks sickly.

The story is perpetuated in the laziest possible way: Agent 47 acts competent until his intelligence plummets at the worst possible moment, making the story go on longer than it should. The entire middle of the game is pointless, all 47 does is run around Hope, South Dakota and accomplish absolutely nothing, the story does not move forward at all, but it makes up half the game. The only saving grace is getting to watch those times when 47 acts badass.

Absolution comes with a multiplayer mode where you set up your own missions and upload them for others to attempt, and I think IO handled it in an interesting fashion. You go through levels you have completed and mark an NPC that you want killed. You decide what weapon and outfit you would like the other players to use, and other requirements like not being spotted or not switching costumes. While the other players do not have to follow all the requirements you set, doing so gets them more money. The part that I like most is that the person who creates the assassination contract has to pull it off themselves first before they can upload it, so no one can create impossible scenarios.

You can target up to three NPCs.

I enjoyed trying to make more money than other players, but I found the contracts themselves just okay, because you were still going through areas you had already seen and most of the contracts just wanted you to use weapons that were in the levels normally. It was mostly about showing off, and not exciting on its own.

The assassination aspect of Hitman: Absolution is enjoyable, both in single-player and multiplayer, but the game makes it so hard to enjoy those parts, burying them under boring non-assassination levels, a bad story, and s terrible save system and scoring system. Even if those parts are great, I am not sure if the game is worth it for those parts alone.