Hitman: Absolution

[brkl]

I was forced to shoot random guards in the first damn mission. Doesn't bode well. The disguise system is really weird: ever seen a film where the protagonist or the villain disguises himself as a cop? In Hitman, this would make you easier to find by cops.

If you walk around Chinatown dressed as a chef, the actual chefs will call the cops on you. You can't do that shit.

[youmeyou]

I think you can sneak by every guard in the first mission of Absolution as well. But it does encourage you to shoot them, and it certainly is an easier game when played that way. (and damn if the shooting mechanics aren't cool)

The disguise system seems better thought out than in the OG hitman games. As opposed to having ultrapowered disguises where you could walk right up to a cop wearing his buddy's uniform, now you have to figure out who's in a given room before entering it. The chef thing does seem pretty stupid, and is where the system breaks. That mission in general felt pretty off. It was similar in setup to an OG hitman mission, but it amounted to interacting with a choice of one of several options and then immediately ending. There weren't any side bonus activities like most of the missions in Blood Money have.

[Nappi]

If someone sees me playing this on Steam, it's because my little brother bought it for me as a Christmas present. I did not pay for nun assassins, nor did I ask for the game to be gifted to me

And what is your excuse for all those latex nun assassin cosplay pictures on your Myspace page? Or your Myspace page for that matter?

This is, in effect, a previous gen game. It has a familiar sense of stiltedness about it. It's only six years old, but in those six years we got Assassin's Creed and it's amazing to see the progression in terms of animation and just expected functionality within a game. Blood Money has that annoying quality where it uses a different button for each weapon, like you're wrestling with three control schemes at once. I was able to activate weapons with X, but also the right shoulder button, and by clicking the right analogue stick. This really shouldn't happen.

And then the difficulty is punishing, but not because it's hard per se. It's just obfuscatory. Hard to read. The game expects you (at least in the tutorial mission - which I had to restart six times on normal mode) to do all these things that you don't know how to do or do at all until it's too late. I had to strangle a guy but I shoved him. I had to push a dude but I syringed him. I knocked down someone that was supposed to be my human shield. This feels like a game from a time before prompts and QTE's and parkours. Hard to get into. I don't know yet if I'll persist, though I'll at least take in the next few stages. I still hear Rab's glowing recommendation in my ears, so he'd be disappointed if I quit too soon.

I played a couple of hours of Blood Money some time ago and I came to the similar conclusion: the game would have seriously benefitted from the next-gen treatment. I think the last straw was continuously failing to stick a syringe on a guard simply because he was sitting.

I got Absolution for 17 euros, but I haven't played it yet. Sad to hear that the developers stumbled in so many placed.

How did the disguises work in Blood Money by the way?

[youmeyou]

The disguises in Blood Money and Absolution work the same except for one exception: in Absolution, NPCs wearing the same outfit as you will recognize you for a fraud if you get near them unless you use your (finite) "Instinct" to hide your face. Otherwise they work the same: an outfit will allow you to walk freely around a specific area. Some outfits are limited: a party guest can only walk around the party, a security guard outfit can walk freely anywhere, as an example.

[Roderick]

Blood Money is just not clicking with me. The first real mission, in Chile bumping off drug dealers, and I'm not having fun. People shoot at me, I'm trying to be stealthy but it's not working. Am I playing this game wrong? Probably, but I wonder if I have the patience to play it right.

[brkl]

If people shoot at you, you've probably already done something wrong.

[Roderick]

I've watched a few runthroughs of the level on Youtube:

- Wow, there are a lot of options to do the hit. You get free reign, which is good.

- But I get the feeling you need to do a lot of exploring to find all those options. The problem is, that will include lots of dying and trial & error. Figuring out what to do should be the fun part, but I get the feeling it's more of a chore here.

- I'm probably not going to play on.

[Erkki]

If I remember correctly about the Chile mission, it required some pretty insanely precise timing to do the way I wanted to do it. And that means lots of trial and error.

[youmeyou]

Chile was actually one of the easier ones. Most of the targets spend their time alone and thus are easy to take out.

Rodi, that's exactly my problem with Blood Money. And is why I compared to an adventure game (with guns!). You have to spend a lot of time exploring, observing the systems, figuring out the pieces of the puzzle before finally solving it. Does not offer very much instant satisfaction. Which is not a knock against it necessarily, just why had so much trouble with it. Though I did play almost 12 hours of it, so I definitely tried.

[Roderick]

Yeah, pretty much. I feel ambivalent about giving up, fortunately. I've got lots of games to play that will suit me better. Funny enough, my short experience with Blood Money has made me more interested in Absolution, to see if I would like it more now that the flow is more streamlined. If there's a demo, I'll get it.

[Nappi]

At least they haven't streamlined the PC controls. I appreciate the fact that I can select between 4+ contextual actions at a time without having to rotate the view, but Jesus that's a lot of keys.

Hitman Absolution: The Typing of the Dead with nuns.

[youmeyou]

Having just finished Absolution, I'd like to review it in light of Blood Money, which is the only other HItman game I've played.

My assumption that Absolution would be a more stripped down and streamlined experience than Blood Money has mostly born out. Miniaturized levels, no choice of weapon loadouts, and the introduction of linear stealth-focused level design all evidence this. Excepting the last one, which I'll get to, I'd argue that these changes are actually an improvement on the Hitman formula.

Why? Well, if the goal of HItman is to make you feel like a cold-calculating killer, Absolution is far more successful at this than its predecessors. A partial reason is 'next-gen' graphics and up-to-date production values which allow for much better immersion in the game's virtual spaces. You're not wrestling with controls or being distracted by badly modeled characters barking poorly recorded lines. The developers have clearly taken a lot of time to add life to the backdrops of the game. Guards are constantly engaging in conversations that are some of the most natural sounding of any game I've ever played. Most of the writing is silly at best and offensive at worst but despite this, it adds depth to the game to simply have NPCs talking about their personal lives and bitching at each other as you crawl around in the darkness trying to figure out ways to dispatch them. Think Dishonored's guard dialogue but far more varied and fleshed out.

The main reason I find Absolution to be an improvement, though, is in the actual design of the mechanics. Blood Money had a very particular and grating play style: explore a huge area from top to bottom - dying and restarting constantly - in order to find the solution to the puzzle of the level (how best to assassinate the target). Each level was a bore to play up until that actual assassination itself. Absolution improves on this in a number of ways. For one, there's instinct vision. It basically allows you to see everyone around you in addition to objects of interest. I love instinct vision, it totally makes Hitman into a game where you play as a bad-ass genetically engineered super-killer and not a random dude wandering through the wrong door and getting gunned down in slow mo as my previous Hitman experiences had been. It replicates that element that makes Mark of the Ninja so great: taking the guesswork out of stealth, immediately illustrating the problem and allowing you to focus your time on fun solutions to it instead. And there are plenty of solutions in the assassination levels. All very classically Hitman-esque: poison food or drink, drop something heavy, blow them up, push them out a window, it's all there. Not having a loadout also encourages you to use your environment and find natural "accidental" ways to kill an enemy, which is the very best way to play Hitman.

Now despite all this glowing praise, Absolution ends up being a fairly disappointing experience. If they had taken the general game structure of Blood Money to heart and had nothing but a series of assassination missions I wouldn't be saying this. The assassination missions are awesome in Absolution. The forced-stealth Metal Gear Solid style linear segments are not. And they, for some insane reason, make up the majority of the game. Since the story of Absolution basically has 47 on the run, you get to spend a lot of time... running. And hiding. And it's so very, very dull to play a Hitman game this way. Especially when you can break most of these missions by grabbing a guard, stealing his clothes and just walking straight to the exit (while keeping an eye on the instinct meter). Gone is the IO Interactive who merely wanted Hitman to be a violent playground. Whoever is leading this project fancies themselves a film director (the game even has directing credits fading up during its intro) and mediocre B-move quality story is shoved down your throat at every opportunity. And it's not a good story. The same tone from earlier Hitman games is there and feels even more out of place in 2012. Men are perverts and women are whores, it's a slurry of cribbed action movie tropes and straight to DVD acting. And the misogyny is slathered on every available surface. The nuns being only the most limelit example of this. They are only present in one mission, and exist for no other reason than to receive brutal deaths at your hands. It's pointless and infuriating, and I would have trouble believing that even one woman had a voice in this project.

What makes it all the more disappointing is that this stuff settles like a heavy dirty blanket and obscures the parts of the game that are actually excellent and well executed. And now that IO won't be leading the next game in the franchise, they don't even chance to learn from their mistakes.

[brkl]

So it's a bit like if you took the repeated dying out of Hotline Miami and made it possible to just murder everybody on the first go?

[youmeyou]

Not exactly. While Hotline Miami did come to mind while playing (especially since you can pick up certain items such as screwdrivers and murder people gruesomely with them) you are penalized for killing anyone besides the designated targets. So if you want to get that fabled Hitman high score the best way to play it is to not interact with anyone besides the target, though I found it much easier to get through by subduing people and hiding their bodies. So it's much more like Dishonored if you want to make 2012 game comparisons.

Except it has some hilarious loopholes in that respect: if you silently kill an incidental NPC and hide the body your negative score is erased. And, best loophole by far: if you choke an NPC to unconsciousness you get less points docked than outright killing them. However you can then dispose of their body in any way you like including dropping them off the balcony of a hi-rise and still get the same "hide body" bonus point. So the game doesn't care if you kill them later, just not as a method of knocking them out.

[Nappi]

Any word on the developers fixing the checkpoint bugs? Or do they consider it a feature? The fact that enemies respawn and item positions are reset after you load a checkpoint makes the system almost completely useless in the non-linear levels.

Apart from the annoying save system and the idiotic story, I'm actually enjoying this game so far. While, the linear levels are a bit dull, I find the playground sections really fun. I remember being completely devastated by the sheer size of the levels in Hitman: Blood Money. In fact, I quit playing when I reached the hospital level and realized that "studying" it would take me ages. Smaller playgrounds in Hitman Absolution mean that I may actually be able to complete the mission in a satisfying way in a reasonable time without having to consult a walkthrough.

[youmeyou]

I haven't heard about the checkpoint bug, that sounds awful!

And everything you said in the last paragraph I agree with 100%

[brkl]

I think you are weird.

[brkl]

Man... The scene and the missions where you have to go on the run suddenly are just... Really difficult to start playing again, and I haven't even gotten to the nun assassins.

[Nappi]

Which mission are you talking about?

[brkl]

The ones that end when get on the train.

The sequence where you mess up and get caught is one of the worst examples of a game taking agency away from you I know. Suddenly 47 turns into a stupid amateur and tries to kill someone who isn't even the target in an obvious manner, without preparing at all? I all the Hitman games I've only used the razor wire a few times because it's preferable to make the deaths seem accidental somehow. And then then the bad guy's ploy was so stupid I couldn't figure out why the cops were after 47 and not him.

Imagine this asshole going to the police: "Some bald guy just broke into my room, slit the maid's throat and drank all my vodka and lit himself on fire! Now the hotel is on fire! Then I knocked him out cold for you to pick up." Random policeman at the desk: "That's terrible! We'll send 200 cops and a helicopter straight away to check out how that maelstrom of death looks from the inside!"

Of game plots, Hitman always had the worst. It's just as bad now, but done with a whole lot more money.

[youmeyou]

Yeah, the high production value highlights it all the more.

And there are much worse forced stealth sections later in the game, unfortunately.

[Nappi]

Ah yeah, that. At least you can still take your time with the escape.

I finished the game yesterday. Quite liked it actually. I was glad that it let me pretend to be a silent assassin all the way to the end. With a better story, more focus on the playground missions, and less idiotic save system, this could have been a great game. Mechanically the game worked well. Even the disguise system made sense to me. Most of the time at least.

[youmeyou]

I've been looking forward to this guy doing a Let's Play:

If you haven't seen his Blood Money Let's Plays, check them out. I kind of had a better experience watching them than playing the game.

[CaptainFish]

Just started playing this the other day after getting it on sale. I'm a big fan of the Hitman series, so I assumed I'd like it. However, after the decent tutorial and super fun Chinatown mission, I've found myself in an unfun mushy stealth game, in which you play a man who isn't a hitman any more... Hitman is at it's best when there are free areas and restricted areas, they connect in a large non-linear fashion, and you can explore them to find the fun ways to complete your target. The Chinatown mission accomplished that, but now I'm going to a club and hiding from cops!? Why aren't they leveraging the advantages of the formula, allowing me to go to really distinct looking locations to do fun murders before walking out with my suit and silverballers?

 

I was all psyched to play a new Hitman. I even started on expert, but all that seems to mean is that there are more guards in these terrible sections. I like the improvements to the system, with various soft failstates rather than going from undetected to being murdered by everyone on the map, but so far they haven't been used to do anything that I'd want to do in a Hitman game.

Probably gonna lower the game to normal and just playthrough on that, outside of the assassinations, which I imagine are coming up at some point...

[Nappi]

There are a couple of fun non-linear playground missions still. And a lot of linear ones, unfortunately.