Hitman: Absolution Review

Hitman: Absolution is two games in one -- a disappointing sequel to its predecessor, Blood Money, and a flawed but enjoyable murder simulator in its own right. Batman has his gadgets. Corvo has his magic. Agent 47 can kill you six different ways with nothing but his iconic red tie, and leave without anyone ever realizing. It's just a shame that the ultimate predator himself has to fall prey to his creators' thirst for mainstream appeal, in an overly cinematic adventure tied down by how much more it could have been.



At its best, Hitman: Absolution goes like this. Agent 47 isn't just a killer, he's a professional -- a silent assassin from the shine on his head to the genetically engineered code in his bones. An amateur might take out a target with a gun in each hand, one bullet spent on every problem. The professional, he waits. Observes. Spots the few seconds where a loop of wire around a convenient neck can replace his trusty black suit with newly pre-owned janitor's overalls. Disguised, he walks past the guards -- even past the target puffing on a disappointing last cigarette. In the target's office, a little rat poison borrowed from the kitchen spices up a tasty chicken baguette. By the time anyone notices, it's too late -- the professional, of course, is long gone, leaving nothing but rumor in his wake.

The No True Hitman Game Fallacy

It's important to remember this, because while Hitman: Absolution makes sweeping changes to the series, it is still a Hitman game. True, a Hitman game that sometimes itches to be something else, and occasionally vomits up bad stealth levels with all the grace of a regurgitating hippo, but a Hitman game nevertheless. Killing targets is mandatory; how you do it is up to you. In that broad sense at least, nothing's changed.


The individual elements work very differently though. In particular, Absolution isn't as concerned with realism so much as being realistic. It still offers essential elements like open-plan levels and varied entry routes. When a tricky choice has to be made though, it inevitably sacrifices subtlety and simulation in favor of clarity and flow.

Loose Dress Code

Take the new disguise system. Absolution sticks to just two or three types in most areas, and they all follow the same simple rules. Unless he's trespassing or visibly armed when he shouldn't be, everyone except the kind of character 47 is posing as will be fooled by any outfit. Slip on a labcoat for instance and guards will be oblivious, while scientists who get a good look will first challenge, then blow the whistle to unleash hell.

There's a little wiggle room here with fake surrenders and burning the new "Instinct" power to get past individual guards, but not much. That consistency helps, even if it is openly artificial and prone to silliness like a Chinatown fry cook rushing into a crowd to have 47 shot for daring to masquerade as a chef. At least you always know where you stand now.


Another example: in Blood Money, levels are littered with ways to complete your mission. They are simply there, to use or not. That's true here too, but now Absolution tells you (albeit cryptically) everything the designers want you to find, encouraging you to tick them off a list during multiple playthroughs. On the one hand, this offers a handy pointer to new things. The downside is that simply by including these pointers, the sense of experimentation is lost. I rarely felt clever, just thorough.

Professional Detachment

Blank out Blood Money's lingering spectre though, and Hitman: Absolution's decisions generally make sense on their own terms. Through experienced eyes for instance, the levels are indisputably cramped -- huge missions overall, but broken into small sub-stages like a hotel lobby and its upper floors. In practice, they're big enough for what they need to offer, and their individual size is made up for by sheer quantity -- 18 missions, most of them containing multiple areas that all offer a unique look and feel.


They play well too, at least when directly plying 47's dark trade. Hitman has always been its best when it draws inspiration from adventures rather than action games, and Absolution is no exception. It's imaginative. Its worlds are packed. The only real downers are that targets don't even pretend they're not just wandering between their predetermined fates, and making the magic happen is typically a one-step "use X on Y" affair.

Day of the Jackass

Absolution's regular forays into all-out forced stealth, on the other hand are groaningly bad. They're not the worst hide-and-seek ever, but they do throw out everything that makes Hitman special in favor of cramped, linear trudges through sub-Splinter Cell tedium. I suppose you could call a stage like Run For Your Life an interesting thematic inversion, but "utter crap" works far better. It's still one of Absolution's better stealth outings though, with the nadir being a penultimate mission bad enough to torture confessions out of rocks.


More than a few of these sequences are there in service of the story, and that is nothing to be proud of. It's not simply that it's bad -- though to be clear, it is dreadful -- but sleazy to the point of feeling coated with a sticky, oily film.

For starters, it should come as no surprise that those infamous latex-clad nuns from that Attack of the Saints trailer are just as dumb in the actual game. Actually, they're even dumber, since their mission involves them leading an army of soldiers who aren't under the strange delusion that murder for hire is best done in fancy dress.

From the Mouths of Pre-Teens

What you don't get in the trailer are the extra cutscenes that make it clear someone out there is far, far, too proud of this imbecilic concept. Likewise, you can't appreciate the rest, from gratuitous bondage scenes to the near-constant flashbacks of 47's handler Diana in the shower (a scene so vital, the main menu loops it!), and a script with all the wit and emotional maturity of a 10-year-old who just learned the word "tits."


If the aim of all this is to give Absolution a gritty or grindhouse feel, it fails. One particularly idiotic moment takes place in a strip-club where one of 47's targets takes a stripper to a private booth, unaware that 47 is on the other side of the less-than-subtle one-way mirror. If you wait for her to finish shoving her polygons in your face, she then politely leaves him alone and he makes a conveniently distracting phonecall. Skip the show in favor of waiting in the corridor instead, and he doesn't. Sigh. You could argue that this is purely to make sure the player found the mirror. I don't feel so generous.

Assassination Games

Along with the single-player campaign, itself offering lots of replayability via scores and secrets, Absolution offers a brand-new mode called Contracts. It's a challenge creator rather than a level editor, and limited even for that, but still a good addition.

To start, you load up any part of any stage and choose a weapon and default outfit. You're then dropped into the world, where you can tag up to three characters (all of whom will be named) as targets. You then kill them, and escape. The weapon you used, the disguise you wore, and a few other details like whether you were spotted and if you hid the body are saved as part of the challenge, and the whole thing can be wrapped up with a title and description and sent out to see if anyone can replicate or beat your score.


More options wouldn't hurt here, like being able to add or remove items to the world, force players to have a set loadout, change guard hostility levels and provide remote explosives and other toys if they're not already on the map. The ones provided are flexible enough to create worthy challenges though, and will stretch out Absolution's longevity.

Specialized Skills

Ideally, everyone would come to Hitman: Absolution without having played the previous games, and thus be spared from having to compare it to its clunky but beloved predecessors. Taken on its own terms, Absolution has too many flaws and frustrations to be a classic, but that doesn't stop it being very good at what it does -- sometimes even excellent. There's a real satisfaction to a clever kill going ahead, and even the terrible parts are limited to interrupting those moments rather than dominating them.


In case you missed the subtle hints though, I love Blood Money. I'm not blind to its faults, but my main memory of it is watching the credits roll and imagining how great the next game was going to be, now that Hitman had finally cracked its tricky formula.

I would trade Absolution for that imagined game in a heartbeat. A heartbeat.

Guilt and Absolution

Still, there's a huge gulf between disappointment and betrayal, and I did ultimately enjoy Absolution for what it is -- a game that still carries the torch of the Hitman series, but chooses to carry it down much less interesting roads. It pulls it off well enough to at least consider dusting off the old suit and tie though, and the level design and methods of execution are easily up to the earlier games' standards. It's just a shame that even at its best, Absolution has to be draped with a sadness that we're now unlikely to ever see that amazing Blood Money 2, and to a lesser extent, the odd twinge of guilt at appreciating when its simplicity actually improves on the messy ambition that came before.