Hitman: Absolution encourages you to play a level multiple times to experiment with different approaches.
The movements of characters in the game are predictable (until you disrupt them), which is part of the puzzle. You'll more often find yourself studying the routes of guards, determining that while one guard has turned away, you can silently take out the other guard and hide his body before the first guard has turned around. (In either case, reaching an exit serves as a persistent checkpoint.) How you complete your mission is up to you.Īlthough it’s your prerogative to shoot it out with anyone who stands in your way, that's not where the fun is in Hitman: Absolution. The levels in come in two basic flavors: assassination missions, where you must eliminate one or more targets, and entry/escape missions. Hitman: Absolution has twenty levels, made up of a variable number of individual segments, which should give you twenty hours of gameplay. There’s rarely been a game that rewards players for patience as much as Hitman: Absolution. It takes a level or two to slowly ease into this game, but it’s worth the time. While every level has multiple different ways to accomplish your task-including spree killing-the game does an excellent job of tempting you into examining the routes and routines of your targets for the optimal sequence of events, trying to find that one perfect assassination. But going in guns blazing will get you spanked after all, our protagonist, 47, is a hitman, not a spree killer. At times I felt I had become death, destroyer of worlds (or at least South Dakota).Īrmed with a weapon, my gamer instinct is to use it to the extent of its killing abilities.
Get it right, and you’re a master of assassination, a puppeteer pulling multiple strings at once. Like any puzzle, get one piece wrong, and your hard work falls into disarray. At its heart, Hitman: Absolution is a puzzle game, one that involves setting up multiple sequences of events with perfect timing. If you think Hitman: Absolution is a stealth-'em-up game, you’d be…not quite right.