Hitman Absolution

A Hitman game is a special type of beast. It's practically a genre all by itself and being a fan of the series I really struggled to understand Hitman Absolution at first. It reviewed pretty well upon release, mostly getting between 7-9/10 across the board. How high the score seemed heavily dependent on how familiar you were with the previous entries on the PlayStation 2. Hitman Absolution was the 5th Hitman game in the series, but the only mainline entry on the PlayStation 3, and the Hitman formula was well established by the previous entries. So to really understand some of the criticism of this game you really need to understand its predecessors and If you have never played a Hitman game before, I am going to do my best to describe the formula for you.

In a Hitman game you play as Agent 47, a bald-headed assassin who wears a nice suit. Typically a game will feature a small number of incredibly rich, sandbox levels where you will have to assassinate one or more targets. The core mechanic of the game is stealth, not action. Levels often feature hundreds of NPCs going about their daily business. For example Agent 47 could be called to assassinate a rich person hosting a big garden party in a country house estate. Upon arrival there is no immediate threat to you at all, you can just walk around and soak up the atmosphere. But as you progress through the level to find your targets you will often find there are areas that you cannot enter without raising suspicion. In our garden party example, you probably cannot enter the house without raising the alarm, unless you are part of the catering team. Another essential part of the Hitman formula is wearing disguises, you could take out a member of the catering team and wear their outfit which lets you into part of that house without suspicion. Then you still need to find your target, ideally get them isolated, work out how to kill them, how to hide the body, or perhaps interact with the environment to create a trap, assassinating them and making it look like an accident. As the game likes to remind you, how you do it is completely up to you and there are so, so many possibilities.

Typically a Hitman game does have weapons, in fact it often has a lot of weapons, you can find vantage points and snipe your enemies or use silenced weapons, but the games very much do not want you to go out all guns blazing, and if you find yourself in a shoot out, you don’t usually manage to take out more than a few guards before being gunned down yourself. You can race through these levels fairly quickly but the true joy of Hitman was mastering the levels, coming back and replaying them again and again trying to be the perfect assassin, and the game encourages this by giving you a bunch of challenges to try. It was, and still is, the pinnacle in emergent gameplay and it is incredibly impressive. The series was successful on PlayStation 2 but also kind of niche, and in the PlayStation 3 era we saw a real push towards commercialisation in a way we hadn’t in the previous generations, so the formula for Hitman had to change.

There was a barrier in the old Hitman games that put off a lot of people. It was considered too repetitive and too trial and error. This was intentional, these games wanted you to experiment, “What happens if I press this lever?” or “What happens if I walk through this door?”, and sometimes you will get spotted and your cover is blown and as we discussed, fighting your way out was usually not an option so you’d often be reloading a save or starting again. If this wasn’t frustrating enough for some people there was also a lot of standing and waiting. If you have set up the perfect trap for your target you may just have to sit patiently and wait for them to walk to it. That’s enough about the original Hitman games for now.

Hitman Absolution attempts to address this “problem” and appeal to a wider audience. Their specific goal was to try and keep some of the original elements, but condense them to keep the pace of the game moving forward in small bites and to also give you a viable option to shoot your way through a level if things go wrong.

Hitman Absolution, on a departure from the original formula, is a more linear game, focused on a mixture of micro sandbox areas followed by more linear A -> B sections, which still keep the same core mechanics, but aren’t focused on targets and are more focussed on escaping. There are a few sections early on where you are simply escaping the police in a series of sections that have a few interesting moments but overall these sections can drag and I think putting them at the start of the game was not a great idea.

This game is usually one of, if not the, lowest ranked Hitman games amongst fans, due to this change and reduction of complexity but I actually think they did a really good job at setting out exactly what they wanted to do. As a veteran of the Hitman series I did find this change to be quite difficult. I wasn’t sure how to approach the game and everything I was doing felt difficult. Hitman can be like this sometimes, you really need to experiment and accept that you will just be learning for a little while.

As a Hitman enthusiast the new combat mechanics made the game a bit too easy, and I was even playing on Hard. I wanted a more traditional Hitman experience and tried to remain hidden, take out a small number of people and hide their bodies and try and find some interesting ways to take out targets. This approach can be slow, as it requires learning. But on some occasions when I got caught I decided I would start trying to shoot everyone and found I was able to dispatch a whole area fairly easily and then just move on. Whilst this isn’t my play style, this is exactly what the designers wanted. To give people who wanted it, an ability to just move on.

Hitman Absolution still looks good on the PlayStation 3, being a relatively late title they had the time to optimize the game to work well. There are levels with an impressive number of NPCs all doing their thing and the graphics are decent too. All of this combined with a story that is really interesting in my opinion and told pretty well. The story does impact harder for fans of the series due to the characters, but it still works as an introduction and stand alone story for new players.

I think that Hitman Absolution is a really fantastic game. As a fan of the series I agree that some levels feel a bit small, but I can appreciate this as something different. It’s like a kind of micro-Hitman, where you can engage with the fun aspects in smaller localized areas. I think it’s also a really good entry point to the series because you can try and engage with the core Hitman mechanics of stealth and disguises, but if all goes wrong you do have a solid plan B. There are still a good number of challenges and difficulty settings that give you plenty to do and experiment with. The game is also very cheap on the second hand market and well worth picking up whether you are a hardcore fan or not. If you have never played a Hitman before, start with this one, watch some video guides if you get a bit stuck and if you find you like the cycle of watching, learning, perfecting your play style, then you can also pick up the Hitman HD Trilogy on PlayStation 3, which is a HD port of the PlayStation 2 games which are much more like the modern Hitman games also.