However, walking through densely populated areas can cause some slowdown. Incidental conversation is plentiful and the general hubbub of large crowds is extremely well-observed. Some areas have upwards of 1,000 people wandering around and in that early section Chinatown is abuzz with activity. The engine’s ‘crowd technology’ handles large groups of NPCs superbly.
Despite the slightly misjudged lighting (overuse of bloom, lens flare, and so on - the usual nonsense), the graphics are wonderfully detailed and help bring locations to life. The improved Glacier 2 game engine impresses throughout. Discovering the more obscure possibilities represents an authentic Hitman experience. You can snipe him, poison him, or lure him away to a quiet alley for a spot of fiberwire fun. There are a multitude of ways to take him out. Your target is easily accessible, standing in the open on a bandstand. IO Interactive have gone to great lengths to emphasise their dedication to player choice in a ‘living, breathing world’ and the following hour or so of gameplay mostly supports their claim.Īn early level in Chinatown is particularly rewarding. The guided tutorial draws to a close when Agent 47 completes his mission at Diana’s house. The latter is a good idea in principle, but there’s little room for error and it's possible to fire by accident. For instance, using the fiberwire is less fiddly than in previous games, hand-to-hand combat requires a three-button quicktime event, and when shooting Agent 47’s aim can be steadied by half-pulling the right trigger. Unfortunately, the controls are needlessly fussy: the right bumper activates Instinct Mode, X enters Point Shooting, the left trigger zooms in, the right trigger marks enemies, then it's X again to take the shots. When enabled, time is near-paused, enabling multiple enemies to be tagged and dispatched. The final use for Instinct Mode is to activate Point Shooting, which is Absolution’s take on Splinter Cell: Conviction’s Mark and Execute or, perhaps more accurately, Red Dead's Dead Eye. If you stop and think about it for too long it seems ridiculous, but from a gameplay perspective it works rather well. But with Instinct Mode activated, Agent 47 raises a hand to his face, which is enough to throw NPCs off the scent. When Agent 47 is wearing a disguise he’s at risk of being spotted by people dressed the same way so if he’s dressed as a generic henchman, the other generic henchmen will wonder why they don’t recognise him and become suspicious. Instinct Mode performs a couple of other functions, too. Traditionalists will be relieved to hear its usefulness is greatly reduced at higher difficulty levels. Like Arkham Asylum’s Detective Mode and the myriad of other knock-offs, it allows the player to see enemies through walls, highlights their patrol paths, and identifies useful objects in the environment. The most striking change to the gameplay is the addition of Instinct Mode, at the cost of the previous games' real-time map. For those familiar with Blood Money, the section plays in a similar way to the theme park level, swiftly and intelligently introducing the key mechanics that will see the player through the rest of the game. The tutorial is a linear sequence that sees our barcoded anti-hero infiltrating the property of his former handler, Diana Burnwood, under orders to kill her. All the early signs suggest that despite six years passing since Agent 47 last flexed his fiberwire, Absolution remains true to Hitman’s roots. The campaign starts out promisingly enough. It’s no wonder the marketing department struggled to sell the product coherently. Floundering between evolution and revolution, Absolution attempts to please old fans and woo new ones, but doesn't fully succeed in doing either. The result is a game that feels riddled with compromises. Instead, they seem to have been motivated by technical limitations and a completely misplaced desire to tell a more a personal and affecting story about Agent 47. Many of the changes to the series’ core gameplay don’t appear to have been led by an overarching vision for the Hitman franchise. Now that the game is with us the confused publicity makes more sense. Hitman games have traditionally represented the high water mark of stealth sandboxes, but a muddled promotional campaign left many of us wondering exactly what type of experience IO Interactive were trying to create with Absolution.