Absolution takes everything that made Codename 47, Silent Assassin, Contracts, and Blood Money great and tossed it out.
The level design is terrible. In all previous games a mission was not chopped up into different sections. You were thrown in a (sometimes) huge level and you were free to explore, experiment, and save your progress where ever you saw fit. Now you're running around like a bald-headed Splinter Cell agent with stupid checkpoints in the most inconvenient locations. To throw salt on that wound, guards you knock out or kill are not saved from checkpoints, only your location. What idiot thought of this?
Did you like the Hideout and weapon selection prior to missions from Blood Money? Yeah me too! It was great! Kiss that great idea good bye!!! You're forced to start off missions with the same items: Silver Ballers and Fiber Wire. What? Hitman lost his sedatives?
The story stinks. Nobody cares about Hitman being a hero. He's supposed to be an antihero. The music is terrible and puts you to sleep rather than engaging you during the missions. The sound effects did not impress me.
The developers over did it with this whole instinct mode. They practically design every mission in a way that the feature is forced down your throat and you have to learn to love it and use it. There is WAAY too much emphasis on sneaking around behind obstacles in almost every single mission. Whatever happened to his ability to blend in like a chameleon?!?
This does not feel like a Hitman game. It was very boring and I only played through it once. I've played all the old Hitman games and beaten all levels every way I could think of. I stay away from Absolution because it's a complete disappointment.
Too much time was spent into graphics and character development. And since when in the hell did Hitman have so much ****ing cussing in the game? Realistic or not, as much as I cuss, it was not classy at all. You can make a game dark and raunchy like the previous Hitman games without all that foul language.
They had YEARS to plan and develop this game correctly, and instead, they took all that time to destroy Hitman rather than taking him back to his roots.
Sad, but true: I would have been MUCH happier seeing the release of "Hitman: Contacts 2" if all they did was redesign and improve Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. That was by far the best Hitman game ever. Absolution is just about as bad as they get.