Hitman: Absolution PC review
Having looked forward for the release of the latest add-on to the Hitman series, I couldn't help but like the game even before it came out. Surely the six years it took IO to bring Absolution to the world have been hard on me, so I was majorly excited, hence me liking it in advance. When I started up the game I almost didn't play it right away because of my 'nervousness', but breathing slowly helped me contain myself.
Starting up the campaign mode, all started well. Nice introduction mission, good tempo to the 'normal' difficulty, good pace to the game overall. A lot of that pace comes from not having a home base, something I miss, since a home-base in Hitman is like a chair next to a table. But even though I felt kind of lost in the beginning, I quickly adapted and enjoyed the rapid tempo by which new missions presented themselves. Some of the new tweaks like trowing an axe into a guys face, although gruesome, are the things I enjoyed the most. That and the instinct feature that I feel is often wrongly used and misunderstood. This walks hand in hand with the disguise issues, but doesn't exonerate the problems the disguise system has.
During the second part off the campaign I started feeling the need for a home-base again. Since the game is designed to give an on-the-road feeling, which it does very well, I was never pushed away from my PC to get a break. I know, you should just decide when to take a break yourself, but with the the story line being at least descent, I found myself wanting to play just to know the outcome.
After I almost finished, some flaws started to surface and then re-surface. The disguise system is just weird, if I put on a disguise that covers my face, say a SWAT suit, the other SWAT personnel can see it's not one of there colleagues. I can get they'd recognize co-workers, but with the face covered, that just seems irrational. Some other flaws can be found the system that triggers the buttons to activate. From time to time, I find myself behind a guard or even a nun, wanting to kill them with the fiber wire, but the button just doesn't activate. This causes the guard to turn around see me, a fistfight is triggered and screws up the whole game because I have been spotted even if I kill the guard after that. The game contains, I would not say a lot, but at the very least some of these errors throughout the whole campaign. I even got the impression that these conditions are more frequent in later levels. The last flaw, if you can call it that, is that I almost didn't see any checkpoints apart from the ones on a choke-point you have to pass to continue the game. I finished 80% off the missions without saving, forcing me to restart whole missions to often to my taste.
Overall the game is really good, I really enjoyed the gameplay, the storyline is not top notch but it's good. The casual gamer will probably not even notice the things that I find not well executed, but I feel the game doesn't live up to it's full potential. I hope a patch comes out to manage the disguise system, it would make the game a whole lot better even without tweaking the small things!
