Who are you, and what have you done with 47?
The story is that 47 assassinates Diana, but in her last moments she asks him to protect a teenage girl who is a genetic experiment by the Agency, and he agrees, even though such compassion is totally out of character for either of them. 47 brings the girl to a safe place, but she is soon kidnapped by a giant douchebag of a Texan crime lord, and you spend the rest of the game trying to get her back. Yes, the whole damn game is about saving a teenage girl, and it doesn't even take the trouble to develop her personality; I think you could count all the words she speaks throughout the game on your fingers. The Agency, which is one of the opposing forces in Absolution, is completely reinvented. From the previous games I got the impression that the Agency was a small group of elite assassins that, while maintaining ties to many law enforcement and intelligence services from around the world, did not count itself among them. Now it's suddenly some kind of Black Ops unit with naval ships and the authority to blow up entire towns. It is led by another douchebag who looks like a seedy strip club manager and has a robotic hand because…well, just because. It is never referred to and it doesn't add anything to the character, so I have no idea what purpose it serves. So yeah, most of the Hitman canon is ruined, but how does the gameplay fare?
The levels are now subdivided into several sublevels. Your actions in each sublevel are rated independently and have no bearing on what you will face in the next sublevel, one of the game's many strange conventions. This means that, for example, you can massacre everyone on a sublevel with a machine gun, raising every possible alarm, yet the people on the next sublevel (that is literally next door) will be none the wiser. The sublevels are a lot less varied and a lot more linear that a typical level from the previous games, but most of them do allow for multiple approaches. However, there are two things that discourage experimentation. The first one is the save system, or rather, the lack of it. You can save your progress only at checkpoints, which are very scarce and not marked on the map, and pretty much the only information a save stores is your location and the targets you have assassinated so far. Every enemy and civilian that you have killed or subdued will respawn when you load a checkpoint, so they are "saves" in the loosest possible sense. The second thing is the unforgiving detection system. Like in the other Hitman games, you can wear disguises, but the people wearing the same type of outfit will see through your disguise almost immediately; stray too close to a guard, linger a fraction of a second too long, and you are busted. To avoid this, you have to either exit their line of sight, or expend a resource called instinct, which doesn't last long and often doesn't work. This means that you will spend most of your time crouching behind some kind of cover. Not that it isn't fun, but it's not the kind of fun I would expect from a Hitman game. Pure stealth is common in video games, but social stealth is rare, it was one of the series' greatest strengths, and they've gone and reduced it to almost nothing. Why, I'll never understand.
While the enemies' suspiciousness may be lifelike enough (in some cases, at least – does it really make sense for convenience store employees to be as alert and suspicious as trained mercenaries?), the AI hasn't improved much. You can kill a guard who is in the middle of talking on his radio, or even to another guard standing right next to him, but it won't alert the other person at all. You can duck behind cover in front of an enemy, and his suspicion will immediately vanish, instead of rising. You can stand next to a pile of bodies and kill the guards that come to examine it one by one, instead of in force. You can start a firefight in a field, announcing your presence to everyone in a five-mile radius, and the enemies beyond your field of vision will still be completely oblivious. You can throw a bottle at a wall, and it will alert the guard in the next room, but the civilian in the same room won't bat an eyelid. And don't even get me started on the glitches. Completed challenges not showing up on your stats, points of interest not available for interaction, enemies that sink through the floor and see you through solid walls, crashes to desktop…the game feels very unpolished.
So what did I like about the game? Well, the graphics are quite impressive, and a couple of locations are close to breathtaking. The voice acting is good. The killings are fun, especially point shooting (an ability that allows you to execute multiple enemies in quick succession). The sneaking around is fun, too, and the levels do offer many possibilities that I left unexplored because I was in a hurry to complete the game. I did enjoy Absolution on the whole, and I will definitely revisit it at some point, but I didn't enoy it nearly as much, nor will I revisit it nearly as often as Blood Money.