Hitman Absolution PC Review

The story for Hitman Absolution took my by surprise, in the sense that it didn’t completely suck. Sure it was littered with cliches and the typical macho flair you tend to find in most action games, but what really made it is how well it was executed (no pun intended).

You have the contract to take out a rogue agent, a task that leaves you in charge of a young girl who of course needs your protection and leaves agent 47 himself also going rogue. Now with the Agency and a few of your general enemies out to get the girl, its down to you to stop them, kill them, don’t die and save the girl from the various groups who would like to turn her in for a profit.

Of course there are many more fine points to the story than this, but this games story is very easily spoiled (something I hate to do) but its also easy to predict, as I said it really does follow a lot of common cliches. If you like being a secret agent who is hell bent on saving a young girl, overthrowing a government agency and killing more than a few gang members, your going to love this game.

Gameplay is rock solid throughout Absolution, while the game does support keyboard and mouse, I much prefer to kick back and put my feet up from time to time and use the Xbox 360 controller on my PC. Controls are straight forward enough yet have enough delicacy to leave some room to master their more subtle points.

There are many ways you can play this game and its sure to go down well with many fans of the series. There is a straightforward, no mucking about “easy” mode, which I prefer to call tourist mode. For example, when faced with a group of 5 armed guards firing a wall of bullets at me, I was able to walk up and “disable” them with an iron to the face. Put the game on normal mode however and you can still take a fair few shots, but not too many that your counted as half superman. You’ll find a reasonable challenge too in terms of mixing stealth and action.

But normal mode is for wimps, there are three more difficulties harder than that set to punish you for the foreseeable future. The final of which features zero HUD, hints, but only a cross hair, think LASO difficulty from Halo and you’re along the right lines of how bad your going to get your head kicked in, unless of course you already have a near psychic knowledge of the entire game.

The whole game is scored too, something I really enjoyed working on. Kill someone who isn’t a target and you’ll lose points, but remember to hide his body in a box, over a cliff, or locker and you’ll win points back. While your at it you can steal the persons clothes and use it as a disguise (to a certain degree), maybe any guns they had and maybe even a key card.

You can run, gun and essentially Max Payne your way through Hitman Absolution, but you won’t want to. Tracking your target, sneaking through windows and clubbing them with a sledgehammer is way more subtle and entertaining. Either way, the game designers have hit on a solid mix of stealth and action that I haven’t seen since the Metal Gear Solid series and this is of course a very, very good thing.