Quote:
Originally Posted by dibbs
Hitman Absolution
As a fan of the series since Silent Assassin, have been looking forward to this game for some time and am so glad it did not disappoint.
Absolution is the pinnacle of refinement for the series, the controls finally feel fluid, you feel in control and you feel that the game is working with you and you don't have to worry about the clunkiness of its mechanics thwarting you. Hand to hand combat is greatly improved and the shooting mechanics feel great/tight as well. It's a very good looking game, wonderful job on atmosphere and awesome attention to detail.
My main complaints would be the sometimes annoying gaps of logic in AI (ie one of 40 SWAT team guys can quickly make you in a smoking warehouse even though you're in a full swat suit), on harder difficulties, throwing objects to get guards to wander off so you can isolate them is a pretty exploitable common move that they never adapt to etc. This can be pretty frustrating at times but in general they hit a pretty good balance.
Replay value is decent, playing through again on the harder settings is rewarding as knowing the lay of the land lets you run through more intelligent enemies and experiment with different techniques without all the stumbles you probably made on the first playthrough. Contracts, a mode where you can play player created custom hits, is pretty much worthless, they plunk you in the games main levels and the contracts I played were all pretty horrible, ymmv.
Game feels and looks great, highly recommended if you've liked other games in the series or are into stealth kinda stuff.
9/10
+1
Game is phenomenal. All of the levels have great attention to detail. The npcs have some very funny small talk conversations and there's some good subtlety in certain spots. Graphics and environments are rich.
Most of the levels have at least a few different ways to approach the objectives and they created a challenges screen which has multiple ways to accomplish some of the objectives. For instance if your objective is to kill bad guy x, there might be 2-4 different ways to do it using environmental advantages such as rigging the gas oven to explode or sniping a guy over the edge to simultaneously kill and hide the body. The more challenges you do, the bigger bonus you get to your point score. It also shows some point score averages which are interesting. The game rewards you for trying to be as stealthy as possible, which caters to a slower and calculating play style.
The only negative I found is that at some points the stealth ai detection would be inconsistent and frustrating. For instance, getting spotted loses you points and severely caps your top end score for a level, yet there are certain times where I'd pop out to shoot a guy in the back of his head and the "spots" me a millisecond before he's dead, yet I still get penalized. Other times, it didn't seem to happen.
Super fun game overall IMO. Good storyline that continued from where blood money left off. Would recommend both games as I played/finished them back to back the last 2 wks.