Why Hitman: Absolution Might Be The Best Installment Yet!

The award-winning, movie-spawning Hitman stealth game franchise returns for its fifth installment with Hitman: Absolution today!

It’s been five long years since gamers spent nights glued to their laptops sneaking through Hitman: Blood Money’s intricate levels, devising ever more cunning and elaborate ways to dispatch their targets. Now, everyone’s favorite shiny-headed, barcode-tattooed hero, Agent 47 is back – he’s been betrayed by his former employers, and is the target of a state-wide police hunt.

Powered by an all-new and next-generation-ready Glacier 2 engine, developed in parallel with the game, Hitman: Absolution will play host to an unprecedented number of people, props, and effects at every level. The downside is that game-play on this fantastic new engine will limited by the abilities of current generation consoles and PCs: levels will be shorter (around 15 minutes a pop) and a single chapter will be comprised of a number of segments. Hitman: Absolution may, therefore, be less of a cohesive, continuous experience.

The flipside is the amazing extent to which developer IO Interactive has been able to pack detail into every level. Hitman: Absolution is incredibly realistic, with a phenomenal amount of craftsmanship going into the most incidental of characters and events. Immersion has always been the name of the game in the Hitman series: the vibrant world that emerges from the supplementary detail in Absolution almost seems to have a heartbeat of its own. Advanced AI will create a level of complexity and engagement that’s difficult to achieve in any other way.

Of course, stealth will always be central to any Hitman game. Early previews of Absolution had commentators worried that it had devolved into a straightforward action game, at the expense of stealth. The truth is that new Glacier 2 engine has opened up a world of possibilities in this regard. In fact, although the game’s dialogue constitutes nearly 2,000 pages of script, the majority of this is conversation that is overheard while you sneak around.

In terms of game-play, gun-blazing – albeit neither a focus of the game, nor a particularly clever tactic – is one of the approaches players can adopt in Hitman: Absolution. As elsewhere – if effectively used – it can turn into a cunning ploy, eliminating a large number of enemies and disrupting their communication, making for an easier game later on.

Absolution also includes a new ‘instinct’ feature that gives Agent 47 an X-ray view of his environment, highlighting enemies and the path of their motion (similar to Batman’s ‘detective mode’ in Arkham Asylum or ‘eagle sense’ in Assassin’s Creed: Revelations). This new mode is optional and designed to make the game more accessible, though it can also be de-activated by purists wanting to retain the game’s complexity and difficulty.

A final little extra is the online gaming option that allows players to choose a target and set the parameters for a hit, which challengers have to match or do better.