Hitman: Absolution

Rating: C-

Playing Time: approx. 65 hours

Hitman: Absolution (hereafter shortened to HAbs) is a game that I very much wanted to like. I'd been having a great time with the previous three Hitman games, and while I'd heard that HAbs was the bad one of the series, I'd heard the same things for years about Dark Souls 2 despite that being my favorite of the trilogy, so I approached it with an open mind to try meeting it where it was at. Unfortunately, where it was at was (for me) a game that struggled to be average overall.

The game starts out reasonably enough; Diana did something to betray ICA, so 47 is sent to kill her and retrieve a girl she kidnapped. After the high-stakes long game to disrupt a conspiracy attempting a shadow coup in HBM, this felt like a return to the personal angles that H2SA and H3C went with, so I was on board to roll with it. The prologue continues the Hitman tradition of having terrible tutorials that teach bad habits, but to its credit, it does somewhat introduce the three main gimmicks of HAbs.

First, unlike HBM, disguises are back to being fallible. Most disguises have certain NPCs on the map who can see through them if given some time, which always includes anyone else wearing the same clothes (since they presumably know everyone who they work with well enough to not be fooled by just a set of clothes). I like disguises being fallible, but the way it was implemented leads to several weird situations where the best disguise on a given mission segment is the most unique one, despite how counterintuitive that sounds as a concept. As a result, I tried doing most of the missions suit-only, which ties nicely with the second gimmick.

HAbs has a collection of in-game challenges for each mission, including some generic stuff (find every disguise, find all of the collectible "evidence" items, clear each mission segment suit-only, clear each mission segment unnoticed, etc.) and several unique to each mission segment (killing targets in specific ways, finding certain unique disguises, triggering certain accident kills, etc.). For each challenge cleared, there's an additive multiplier on your overall total score for the mission, with the idea presumably being for players to do as many challenges as they can and then do a high-scoring run of the mission for leaderboard ranks. The leaderboard servers are no longer online, though, so even if I cared about that (which I don't), it's a non-factor these days. I actually think the challenge system was a good idea as a way of giving players an organic way of setting their difficulty, but since there was also an actual difficulty mode system still in the game as well (with its own score multiplier as well), the two clash and end up being less than the sum of their parts. There is further weirdness with the scoring system that I'll get into soon, but even setting that aside, challenges ended up being more of a chore than a rewarding subsystem to engage with.

You might notice a pattern of "nice idea, jank implementation" with the previous gimmicks, but that doesn't continue with the third one: instinct. Instead, instinct is just all jank. In short, the idea is that 47 has magic powers now that let him facepalm to avoid detection and highlight important things like enemies and environmental interactions. In practice, facepalming only works if he's wearing a disguise, so it's clashing with the first gimmick, the highlighting doesn't actually work on higher difficulties, and even if it did, it's entirely redundant with the minimap showing enemies in proximity already and the giant button prompts that appear on stuff when 47 gets close enough to interact with them. The one other thing instinct does is let 47 shoot magic bullets in slow motion for more damage and explosions, which feels completely out of place in a game that encourages the player to be a professional and silent assassin (and, as one might guess, it's something that can be ignored pretty freely aside from the one scripted use of it).

Now, I need to talk some more about the scoring system, because it's a mess. Each mission is broken up into segments, which are scored individually. Getting above a certain score threshold on a given segment will unlock minor power-ups like having more health or using less instinct juice to shoot magic bullets. Really, aside from the ones that make 47 move faster or have more time for the unarmed combat quick-time events, they're largely useless in a game that's supposed to be about sneaking around and killing only your targets. Speaking of which, the criteria for a silent assassin rating is just getting a high enough score, but the only way to actually do that is to get the "silent assassin bonus" effect, which is done by killing all targets without being noticed and without killing any non-targets. That sounds fine, except that the majority of mission segments don't have any targets, so it's impossible to get a silent assassin bonus on them, which in turn makes it impossible to get a silent assassin rating for the mission as a whole if even one segment doesn't have that bonus. People have figured out the maximum ratings possible on each mission, but it's so bizarre that the developers decided to take that approach instead of having a silent assassin threshold for each mission and then set cut-offs for lower ratings as some percentage of that.

I don't mind the scoring system as a concept (it actually makes sense to me if taken as 47 judging his/the player's performance against his personal standards), but the way HAbs went about doing it was bad.

Oh, also, there are a handful of mission segments that have no score at all, so 47 is free to get spotted and/or murder anyone without any repercussions during those. To say that this feels half-assed is giving too much credit to the fractional ass.

Anyway, the prologue ends with obvious weird tension between 47 and Diana before he shoots her (fair enough), and then he kidnaps the girl (at Diana's request) and goes rogue. This is followed by the game's first real mission, King of Chinatown, in which 47 is tasked with killing some random dipshit to earn a favor with a former ICA operative who can help give him intel to deal with ICA being upset about how the prologue went. It's pretty clearly inspired by a mix of HC47's Kowloon Triads in Gang War and H3C's Slaying a Dragon, but it still manages to be its own little mission. Honestly, I have no real complaints about it.

Sadly, things go off the rails from there. For some reason, a defense industry big-wig from South Dakota is also secretly involved in supersoldier research and somehow got intel about the girl, who's quite obviously an attempt by ICA at making another 47. This person (Blake Dexter) is the game's actual main antagonist, but the writers seemingly couldn't figure out a sensible way to make this all work, so when the second mission has 47 infiltrate the hotel that Dexter and his goon squad are holed up in (despite also having a penthouse in a high-rise in the same city with its own dedicated security force later in the game), it ends with a cinematic of 47 getting his ass kicked by Dexter's one supersoldier and then framed for killing a maid and setting the hotel on fire, setting the Chicago police on 47's ass. It's a clusterfuck that does not attempt to make sense.

Admittedly, what follows is one of the best parts of HAbs, Run For Your Life. It's a mission that's basically all about trying to evade the police, and the gameplay of avoiding detection by NPCs hunting for 47 actively actually works quite well in HAbs. It's also something that didn't really happen in the older Hitman games (outside of H3C's final mission), so it felt like a fresh new angle. I liked it a lot, which is why Run For Your Life and a pair of similar later missions (Attack of the Saints and Operation Sledgehammer) were among the few missions in HAbs that I'd actually consider good.

Sadly, though, in between Run For Your Life and Attack of the Saints, HAbs goes on a massive detour of 47 trying to kill a bunch of homophobic losers who kidnapped the girl on Dexter's behalf. The leader of the losers is Dexter's son, who was so forgettable that, when Dexter is later upset at 47 for killing his son, I honestly thought he was talking about 47 killing the supersoldier.

Which...oh baby, was that ever a mission. See, when the supersoldier isn't being Dexter's personal bodyguard, he competes in underground to-the-death MMA fights. In the mission to kill him, 47 can either do things in a quiet and Hitman-like fashion (such as tossing a brick on C4 into the cage and blowing his target the fuck up, because HAbs doesn't understand what the term "silent assassin" suggests), or 47 can replace the luchador opponent and kill the supersoldier hand-to-hand. In theory, this sounds cool, since the luchador mask would hide 47's identity, except it's a scripted cinematic that includes 47 taking off his mask to show the supersoldier (and presumably the whole audience, including those watching on the local town's private TV network) who he is. All I'll say further about this is that I hate it when sequels decide to be "shocking" and "edgy" by shitting all over their legacy characters.

Anyway, 47 eventually kills everyone of note involved with Dexter's gang, takes out ICA's elite wetworks team of latex nuns, and finally saves the girl after killing Dexter himself. Then there's an epilogue to reveal that Diana's death had been faked all along and the whole "make another 47"-project was just one loser's fascination, so 47 kills him to earn a happily-ever-after ending. Now, if I consider just the most zoomed-out perspective of the story and don't worry about the way that there's no sensible flow in the details between the major points, I actually don't mind it. It's a little cute that, in a reversal from HBM, 47 fake-killed Diana's death this time. I would've preferred if he'd been a secret rogue within ICA afterwards instead of leading a one-person war against the agency, but in the greater scheme of things, that's hardly the worst part of HAbs.

I also liked that the game had a mix of seedy shithole locations along with grand James Bond-esque underground laboratories or fortress penthouses. Despite the whole game taking place in either Chicago or the fake small town of Hope, South Dakota (aside from the epilogue in an unidentified graveyard that was presumably somewhere in the UK), the mission locations all felt quite varied and individually unique. The maps themselves did tend to be restrictive and linear, unfortunately, but that wasn't the main complaint I had about them.

My main complaint about HAbs is that the mission design largely sucks. After H3C and HBM had a total line-up of missions with objectives that invited creative solutions, the sheer number of missions (let alone mission segments) in HAbs that were just "get across the map" was an atrocious step backwards. Also, seemingly in order to pad things out for twenty total missions (to match H2SA), there were two that were each a single unscored segment which could've just been a cinematic. I hate it when developers actively disrespect the player's time like that.

Ultimately, out of the twenty missions, there were only four or five that were actually fun for me (King of Chinatown, Run For Your Life, Attack of the Saints, Operation Sledgehammer, and maybe Absolution, though I keep flip-flopping about that one because it's only enjoyable if I ignore everything about the context of what's happening during it). Those missions were quite good, doing just enough to make this game feel like it was worth playing overall, which is kind of heartbreaking.

Despite all the jank and bizarre design choices, there are pieces of a good game in HAbs. The parts of it that I liked, I liked a lot. And in terms of just the gameplay, the parts of it that I disliked weren't even bad for the most part, just bland and generic without enough support from other parts of the game (such as the story or map design) to avoid feeling like filler. This was quite different from how I felt about HC47, where it was mostly a mess of jank where half of the fun was how ridiculous it was. The story was ass, but it was ass grown around a concept that had genuine potential, and it's not hard for me to imagine how it could've actually been good (though I'm not going to give the game credit for hypothetical-good-decisions that the designers didn't make).

It felt like a game that was originally a different IP before being forced into a preexisting franchise, but all evidence that I'm aware of suggests that it was planned as a Hitman game all along, which just makes the final product even more bizarre.

In the end, I don't regret playing HAbs. I don't think it was a bad game, but it also don't think it was a good game. Much like HC47, it's a game that I'm fine with having played once, but it's not something that I'd recommend to anyone unless they're interested in exploring it without necessarily enjoying it.

Rating: C-

Playing Time: approx. 65 hours