Hitman: Absolution

Picked this game up again after a year over the weekend and accidentally finished it with a total of 17 hours in the game. It's a bit short for Hitman, especially compared to the 200+ combined hours I have in the new and infinitely replayable trilogy. I enjoyed that it had a bigger focus on the storytelling, but I felt the fun curiosity to find new ways to kill your target you get with other games in the series was absent because of this. At times the combat feels incredibly unfair, but it is pretty fun. Not the best nor worst Hitman game. Fun.

Oh and Square Enix shut down the servers so it's impossible to 100% the achievements now. Thanks guys.

This game was disappointing in hindsight. Very grungy locations, an immensely unfun mechanic in the breath system, and (to be quite frank) an all-around Meh ass game. They had some good ideas, such as having better shooter mechanics and focus (which would be done much better in the world of assassination trilogy), but failed to make the game particularly enthralling in that same way. Wouldn't recommend this one, because its unique elements that got dropped between this one and Hitman (2016) got dropped for a reason.

i'm not sure if i played it properly cus i put it on Normal difficulty then basically played it like a third person shooter. didnt give a shit about the score system so i just did whatever beat each level fastest. i usually tried to be sneaky until i got caught then just kind of blasted everyone. its kind of stupid how in a stealth game you get Wall hacks *ctrl button* and a minimap, i bet you have it all the way up until hardest difficulty too, the story was ok, also there was a lot of bullshit levels that took like 10 seconds to complete and felt pointless lol. didnt play contracts

6/10

As loathe as I am to agree with cynical gamers that tradition rules above all and modern reboots are inherently bad, Absolution is one of those games whose structure absolutely misunderstands what makes the series unique and fun. Gone is the sprawling playbox set-up to each level, in are cheeseable checkpoints and an over-reliance on cover shooting and stealth gimmicks that belie a much more uninspired adventure with a poor attempt at a proper narrative. The final boss is not some rich white guy with hundreds of guards that threatens everything, it's three non-descript snipers in a courtyard. A legitimate betrayal of the IP.

The hitman series is so damn unique, and yet on this one its seems that for every improvement they made 2 errors. Visually its impressive, but the excessive bloom makes shinning objects blind me (like a knife for example). They finally added a sneak function, but unfortunatly a lot of levels are based around this mechanic solenly. Its like for every level they design well which would fit in Blood Money, they made one which is too focused on pure stealth, or is too segmented, or is there just for a cutscene basically.

They broke the disguise system completly. The disguise system! The main recognizable mechanic about this series is altered beyond function in this one. Basically you can wear customes, but other people in the same custome can recognize that you are not part of the staff. It makes sense in a realistic way, but gameplaywise it alters the flow and mechanics of the game completly.

Story and characters are laughably bad.

There are still a lot of individual moments that are great, but on the whole this is a huge stepdown coming from Blood Money. I hope they can improve on the sequel, but there just isnt anything similar to this series of games out there.