Hitman: Absolution — Not An S&M Battle Nun In Sight!

Callum Petch

On September the 29th of 2012, a wannabe games journalist named Callum Petch made a three-hour trip down to London, England to attend the Eurogamer Expo — the UK’s premier videogame… err… expo. His mission? To preview as many games as humanly possible in one day. These are his stories…

Time for me to eat some mildly humble pie, folks.  You see, I have been ripping Hitman: Absolution to utter shreds ever since it was announced because it had the temerity to be advertised as a Splinter Cell/Arkham Asylum rip-off.  That it didn’t look like a true Hitmangame.  That, in the case of “The Battle of The Sexy, Stupid, Kung-Fu, S&M Nun Assassins” trailer, it was simultaneously horrendously stupid and horribly sexist.  My expectations were rock bottom and I pretty much assumed that it would be awful.

So, maybe it’s the rock bottom expectations.  Maybe it’s the high of being at a games convention (I’m rather unprofessional like that).  Maybe it really was that good.  But, for whatever reason, I really liked my hands-on time with Hitman: Absolution.  So much so, that I’m now genuinely looking forward to it.  And how does the demo do it?  How does the demo reverse such toxic initial impressions and leave me a lot more reassured that developers IO Interactive somehow haven’t forgotten to make a good game this generation?

Simple: I got to play a Hitman game.

The demo level, initially, did not fill me with much hope.  The load screen played a video that both clearly highlighted the target and showed most every possible way that I could get to murdering said target.  Part of the fun of the original Hitman games was trying to find all of the possible ways you could get around security and off the target; triply so in Blood Money thanks to the introduction of “accidents.”  Just being told straight off the bat that you can, say, poison the guy’s fish or shoot them from afar with a drug dealer’s conveniently located sniper rifle, smacked of dumbing down the series’ most fun feature for the sake of extra sales.

Fortunately, once gameplay proper started up, things got better quickly.  The level that I played, The King of Chinatown, is a very small map; barely larger than Nuketown from Call of Duty: Black Ops.  But, do not fret, fellow Hitman fans, because this smaller level size works!  Yes, it streamlines the process of getting in and finding the target, but the game makes up for this by shoving about 300 civilians into that tiny space; each one a possible witness to your misdeeds.  It’s pretty much like the Mardi Gras level from Blood Money, but with even less room for error – tense stuff.

There are multiple ways to complete the level.  This is one of them.

If tits should go awkwardly up during your assassination attempt, then immediately quitting and reloading is no longer a necessary action.  There are alternatives.  For example, I snuck my way up to the drug dealer’s room a little earlier than I needed to and, thusly, he was still there which made things awkward when he caught me going for his sniper rifle.  However, instead of immediately getting to plugging my brains out, he instead held his gun at me, daring me to make a move.  This gave me the option to “Fake Surrender”, a new feature in which you… err… fake surrendering until the person holding you hostage gets close enough for you to turn the tables.  As a feature, it’s pretty much a godsend as it managed to save my second attempt through the level.

However, not all of these new features are good.  For one, the hint button is ridiculously overzealous, popping up almost everywhere for any reason.  “You need the fish in order to poison the fish.”  “Press the action button to sabotage the fuse box.”  “Press the hint button to identify the target.”  No, really, that is an actual instruction that the game flashed up.  Even if I was a Hitman newbie, I’d feel slightly insulted by how stupid the hint system thinks I am.

Plus, our old friend regenerating health makes a show-stopping appearance and, whilst I will readily admit that he helped out a tonne during the big finale of the level, it feels really out of place in the Hitman world.  If I screw things up in the world, I should not be able to take cover (oh yeah, there’s an actual cover system now, like you didn’t see that coming), suck my thumb for five to ten seconds and then be able to return to shooting people in the face like nothing happened.  It feels like a forced concession to modern game design, rather than a natural decision.

Then, directly in the middle of my opinion scale, is what occurred at the end of my playthrough.  I tried the mission out three times, restarting the second time for screwing up my “no kills before the finale” rule, and each time went for sniping the target from across the street (as that was the quickest way for me to be able to complete the level and I was on a timer from the staff).  This lead to the FBI being called up as soon as the shot was fired, evacuating all of the civilians, and making the finale consist of escaping an area crawling with FBI goons.

I’ll leave you to make your own captions here, folks.

Now, at the time, I liked this twist.  The story for Absolution involves 47 being completely on the run this time, from the ICA, not just the authorities, and by having the FBI swarm the area as if they’ve been tailing him the whole time works for the story and makes escaping a genuinely thrilling and nerve-wracking prospect.  There’s actual risk here instead of merely walking out the front door again.

But, the more I think about it, the less I dig it.  It’s cool when it happens once, but if this is always going to happen every single time I get my guns out during a hit, I see it getting real old, real fast.  Also, the game just plain doesn’t work as a standard stealth-em-up in the vein of Splinter Cell.  Guards are too trigger happy and their line of sight is too wide to make up for the clunky “stealth” movement option and the very temperamental cover system.  It’s not particularly fair, basically, and all of my playthroughs ended with me having to mow down every agent in sight in order to successfully leave the level.

Plus, the level I played had been retrofitted for the game’s new Challenge Mode where you play the level as normal but you’re actually scored and graded as you go along (whereas before you were merely graded at the end of the mission).  Now, I liked the level (I already said as much), but it left me worried about the rest of the game.  I’m still curious as to how the “story” missions will work, seeing as the demo gave no indication there.  The developers previously touted with pride the story for this game, but Hitman has never been about the story, despite Silent Assassin’s desperate attempts to the contrary.  I’m just worried that it’ll be too intrusive and take away from the fun of methodically plotting a target’s gruesome demise.

Re-reading this preview, I’ve made myself a bit depressed.  I sound a lot more down on Absolution than I actually am.  Again, I loved the first half of the demo, when I felt like I was playing a true Hitman sequel.  Silently knocking out guards and taking their disguises, hiding bodies in convenient dumpsters and, in my absolute favourite moment, nervously staring down the sniper scope trying to keep the aim steady and trying to confirm that the target and only the target is in my sights before that wondrous release of firing the shot, only murdering the target and then the blind panic of the beginning of the escape.

David Bateson has supposedly returned as the voice of 47, but the demo had the world’s most Generic American Tough Guy as 47 instead.  Funnily enough, he wasn’t as good as Bateson.

That is the game that I want to play!  That is the game that I have been waiting six years for!  That is the game that I have suffered through the Kane & Lynchseries for!  But my thoughts keep coming back to that second half, the moment where it tries to become Splinter Cell: Conviction, and I worry.  The mechanics are absolutely not up to it and, whilst the shooting controls have now been tightened up so much that they’re a viable option at last, I don’t want to have to complete my up-to-that-point stealthy run-through of a level with a total massacre.

But let’s return to the positive.  I now have at least some hope that Hitman: Absolution will be good.  I actually have a fair bit of hope that the game will be good, as long as it continues being a Hitman game.  And considering the fact that I went to the Expo with only negative expectations and feelings towards the game, that’s a damn big accomplishment.  Well played, IO…