Hitman: Abomination

User Rating: 6.5 | Hitman: Absolution PC
I gotta say, Max Payne and Sam Fisher are dead and buried by the console crowd. Sadly, Agent 47 follows suit. (I even prophesied so at the end of my Max Payne 3 review).


Let's get the graphics out of the way. The game occupies 25 GB. The graphics are stunning. I can honestly say that Glacier 2 engine can compete with the Witcher's 2 RED engine. If I didn't know better, I would have a hard time telling the two apart. However, there are some blocky faces there and there. The attention to detail is impeccable. It seems like every little piece of equipment and miscellaneous items have been well taken care of. You can easily make out even the tiniest texts on various objects. The ambience, the atmosphere, the blinding DX11 lights, the water textures, the grass, the physics, it's all there. All in all, the game is well optimized for PC. The controls, the menu layouts, the key binding, the graphics.


As for the gameplay, well this game wants you to be finicky just like in the previous game. You want to take your time to learn your surroundings, listen to every piece of conversation and attempt to track your targets (if you are lucky enough to have a target to assassinate, but more on that later).


Needless to say, upon starting the game I quickly jumped into the Purist mode, the fifth hardest mode, and it kicked my ass hard. The mode disables hints, map, and most of your instinct abilities (that is covering your face when in disguise, seeing through walls and predicting enemy movement), leaving you only with the tag and kill skill. The mode also spawns twice as many enemies as in the easy mode, makes them blow your disguise in about 1.5 seconds instead of the usual 4-5 seconds. Just about the only reason I was able to even beat half the game is because I always had to have a miscellaneous item in my pocket to throw near a guard. The noise subsequently distracts him and I go on undetected. That is pretty much your only option on the Purist mode.


Another huge problem with the game is that you only get to do so few assassinations, something Gamespot and so many other websites have failed to mention.

One can argue that sneaking through most of the game and then doing the assassinating later on builds up the tension but I digress. 80% of levels are about completing this or that objective, staying in cover most of the time, getting spotted by every person wearing the same attire as you, finding this or that piece of evidence, evading the police (for about 2 whole chapters) and not actually assassinating anyone. Completing a level in Blood Money meant reading about your actions in the newspaper, upgrading your arsenal, listening to Diana's instructions, decreasing your notoriety level (which affected all future missions by the way) and following the cutscenes about Agent 47's exploits, in past tense. Those cutscenes all lead to the epic funeral finale. Every level was a self-containing experimental sandbox where you could backtrack and where you HAD to return to your original insertion point. They were all unique, self-contained and continuous adventures set around the world. Now all of that is gone. Now all you do is be on the run, follow your informant's instructions and protect the little girl (I don't even remember her name). At one point I kind of stopped feeling like a Hitman and started feeling like a rogue run-away agent. Splinter Cell Conviction anyone? Except Sam forgot how to hide the bodies and he never changed his disguise.


Now the fun factor is supposed to be mostly about completing challenges, collecting unlockables, finding new weapons that you cannot use in subsequent missions, not being seen and getting as high score as possible (which, if you really want to have, you'll need to play on the purist mode which is murder, I know, after 20 hours of playing, however it does add %150 bonus to your score). Hitman 4's story took a backseat role and was in its swing in the last couple of levels. Here, however, the story takes the front seat and it confines your actions in many ways. What the game basically does is take away your freedom to coerce you either into shooting your way out for fun or following a more or less specific path to progress to the next checkpoint….through opening a door, yeah I know. When I started the purist mode I expected to do my missions one by one by executing contracts without any saves. However, I then figured out that every chapter is broken into several parts connected by doors which serve as checkpoints, seriously?


The minuses and annoyances include:

1. There is no more simple headbutt with the click of the mouse. Now there is a mini game wherein you have to play with the Q, W, E, and SPACE keys. And it's impossible to win melee fights on Purist because the notifications appear for about half a second.;

2. The game no longer features Jasper Kyd's music. Also, the orchestral has been slashed also somewhat. You won't hear the instrumental orchestra as often, if ever. No more Ave Maria, no more Vegas soundtrack;

3. I also encountered a couple of bugs when you couldn't pick a lock or open a chest. You essentially had to walk away and then come back and try again. Another bug I've encountered a few times is when you alt-tab to desktop and then come back to the game the sound is gone. So the only way to play with the sound again is to restart the game.

4. You can't look through keyholes anymore;

5. You can't close doors anymore;

6. You can't turn off lights anymore;

7. No more picking of your own weapons and equipment at the beginning of a level;

8. No more sedative syringes, now you can subdue an infinite amount of people from behind thus simplifying the game;

9. No more first person view;

10. Extremely scripted events and NPC dialogues. All of those miscellaneous world events start taking place the instant you reach the appropriate near vicinity, unlike in the previous game where the world was moving by itself whether you were there to observe it or not;

11. The disguise system is broken, it seems like they couldn't find middle ground here. For instance, when you revisit Chinatown and you walk through crowds of people wearing a Chinese store clerk's disguise, another store clerk can spot you from afar, despite the fact that it's nighttime and there are fireworks gong off. And what does he have against you anyway? Basically, when you are playing you either have the choice to avoid one group of people or another group of people based on the disguises that they are wearing. This becomes IMPOSSIBLE in some levels such as the Orphanage escape (which is the only level that forced me to play through it on Easy after I died 50 times);

12. The couple of levels that feature the possibility of pulling off a sniper kill actually put the sniper rifle IN the sniping spot for you to find, how convenient! Meaning, you do not get to choose the sniper rifle briefcase at the beginning of the level for it to be retrieved at a particular spot for you to use at another spot;

13. The game wants you to use the tag and kill skill. First in the prologue, then upon killing the first villain ( not silently assassinating him, mind you, I mean chasing him down);

14. The shooting is for the most part solid. It sucks that they took away the small circle for the shotgun aiming and replaced it with a giant cross-hair though. Also, when you are aiming and shooting you cannot switch to a new weapon unless you exit out the zoom mode. The enemies still take a few hits to die.

15. As far as the recent Dev comment on the console limitation. Well, I did some digging and found out that the train station level was supposed to be much more claustrophobic and intense than it actually was and that console hardware did not allow them to make the way they wanted to. Who knows what else they had to cut out.

16. Crowds. Well, they had good crowds in the last game as well, however I would happily have less crowds just to have more NPC models. You have no idea how many identical NPCs are out there, standing next to each other even. It's a funny thing to discover that the same NPC lady plays the Hispanic hotel maid, a Chinese store clerk and a regular person hanging outside. In the bar level for instance, you fight a Burt Reynolds look alike, and then later on, 20 feet away, the same exact guy is fighting someone else and then giving you thumbs up for helping him out.

17. The cover system doesn't always work in your favor. Most of the time you can ex out of cover by pressing space. However, in some instances you can get out by standing up (by pressing control or whatever). I got discovered a few times simply because my ass was glued to cover and I kept getting confused as to how to get out of it.

18. The civilians don't have the balls anymore to pick up the gun and try to shoot you when in panic.

19. In general, the mechanics of prior games have been stripped down and tunneled into a cover based stealth game/shooter. Very few levels compete with Blood Money's sprawling environments. Think of Blood Money's Vegas or White House levels, yeah, you won't see anything like that here.


The Kane and Lynch cameos were pretty cool, I must say. The pothead stage was also pretty creative. There are enhancements to the game however. The AI is smart. They corner you, they flank you, they try to negotiate with you when you use one of their own as a human shield, they call for back up, etc. There ARE various ways to complete the small individual maps but the level of personal payoff and the feeling of self-satisfaction when you finish that Blood Money mission is gone. The game CAN still be enjoyable, especially if you are not hung up on the prior games.


As for the story, well, your main job is to basically protect this girl (won't spoil why) whilst avoiding the three main villains, well, really four villains, which all behave kind of like cartoon characters. One of them didn't know that there are only two of Founding Fathers whose faces are carved into Mount Rushmore.


The contracts mode is pretty much there to "fix" the story mode rather than supplement it. You won't get the same level of immersion with the contracts mode but at least you are allowed to pick your own disguises and upgradable weapons. On one hand it makes sense you can't pick your weapons in the story mode because you are on the run and all. So the reasoning for not being able to pick your own weapons /equipment is because the story happened to feature a run-away agent? That's circular reasoning. Maybe the run-away agent story doesn't fit the Hitman series then.


Basically they added a lot of things that were not needed and took away things that made Hitman great.