Triforce of Liberty

You guys totally paved over Hitman L _L

You also have to activate instinct BEFORE they become suspicious. Otherwise, it will be as useful as a wet balloon.

Expert. You have to move patiently and sneak from cover to cover a lot, and pay attention to the enemy's LOS. You usually have two or three seconds to move away before they become suspicious , but sometimes it doesn't work and you have to lead them to a nice, quiet area to "chat."

I think Absolution is way better than anyone expected it to be. I'm still at an early stage of the game, but I definitely think I/O understood what made B$ work and improved upon that. The stealth mechanics are deeper and more challenging, and there's more object-interactivity and room for improvisation, and plenty of room for different playstyles. The Instinct mechanic that people were rightfully worried about can be largely curbed by playing on the higher difficulty levels. I'm playing on expert, and basically the one (fairly limited) use I have for it is to walk past people whose LOS is unavoidable, and who would otherwise see through my disguise and blow my cover. There's a lot more actual stealth than there was in B$, but the levels still feel open and explorable. You can walk freely in places where people won't see through your disguise, so there's a lot of internal mapping and reconnaisansse to see how freely you can move about, what the layout is like, and who you may have to stalk and subdue. And the levels are great. They feel like real, lived in places. The design and tone have a lot of carry-over from Kane and Lynch 2, so it's nice to have that feeling and atmosphere in an actually good game (I fucking hated K&L2). As for The Saints, it's fucking stupid and the game would be better without it. I didn't dig the sexualized violence in the previous Hitman games, either, and I wish he series would move away from that stuff.