Hitman: Absolution

I loved and hated Hitman: Absolution. It wraps its stealthy assassinations within a slim and challenging margin of comfort. Often, that's due to clunky mechanics that don't share the same kind of experimental freedom as other sandbox games, especially when unexpected glitches can ruin a half-hour of careful exploration. You can expect many hours of gameplay against a detailed backdrop of revenge, murder, and deliciously unsavory characters and comic book-styled villainy. It's not as beautiful a kill as it could have been, but the lengthy contract can still make a compelling argument for giving this wetwork collection a second look.

To be honest, Absolution is a bit of a weird game in general – if you take various components individually, there are a lot of fun and unique elements to the game. Start to look at it as a whole product though, and you can't help but feel as emotionally detached as the people you end up killing. It's way more narrative driven than any of the previous games, and that has a natural effect on where you go, and what you do when you get there.

A game with an identity crisis trying to be too many things to too many people. It's more successful than it should be but ultimately the entire package is brought down by being pulled in these two polarizing directions.

Hitman: Absolution provides a varied and sometimes stellar experience. The joy of creating brilliant accidents is hard to match, but the game can also be very frustrating. Using disguises can be a frustrating experience, and at times you feel very limited in the choices you can make.

Absolution is a slick, responsive and mechanically confident game - and on occasions it's one of the most satisfying stealth games in a year that already includes Dishonored - but a range of compromises to Hitman tradition mean it's still going to rub some people up the wrong way.

Contracts redeems Absolution, but it doesn't absolve it. The game has taken a unique formula and diluted it, allowing the fashionable trappings of other stealth titles to intrude upon a series that has always confidently eschewed convention.

Rather than encourage you to engage this striking world as a real place with coherent rules and consequences, you're asked to internalize its shortcomings and game them mercilessly. When it truly makes good on the open-world stealth thing, it certainly has its moments, and nowhere is this more evident than in the Contracts mode. But even in these cases, its flaws are merely papered-over. If you mean to accept this contract, bear in mind the numerous potential complications.

The best thing one can say about Absolution is that it's impossible to feel ambivalent about it; players will love and loathe aspects of this game in equal measure. In Absolution, terrible ideas rub up against great ones almost on a moment-to-moment basis, and the end result is a title which is impossible to consider with the same clinical detachment that it's protagonist is known for.

I can't really consider Absolution to be a must buy sort of title, but it's worth checking out as a curiosity rental at least. There are elements here that I like, and things that do harken back to the traditional Hitman experience, but this is about as far off the rails as the series has managed to get. Hopefully the next entry tries to reign in the foreign concepts a little more, because this hardly feels like the right direction to take the series in.