47’s limited use sedatives, for instance, are no longer necessary because of his close-quarters combat skills. It’s all a lot more organic and a lot less stiff.įurthermore Absolution adds a host of additional abilities for 47. 47 feels far more connected to the environment rather than skating about on it, and successfully sneaking up on a target from behind with your signature fibre wire is no longer quite as fickle an exercise. The way Absolution itself plays is very much a refined version of what Io attempted with its previous effort, but gone are most of the quirks Hitman diehards were happy to overlook in Blood Money. This is not Medal of Duty: Modern Warfighter Ops. This is a slow-paced, measured experience. A couple of the game’s kills are more tightly choreographed for dramatic effect, complete with a brief cutscene of your deserved victim sucking in their last breaths, but most of the game’s kills – two dozen of them at least – are traditional Hitman fare. Some of them are more subtle than others but, like Blood Money, they’re all there, waiting to be discovered. Returning Hitman fans won’t settle for a simple bullet to the back of the head they’ll immediately be on the lookout for the tell-tale signs of a classic Hitman kill opportunity.

Like Blood Money before it, your targets here can be executed in a host of ever-so-slightly sickeningly different ways. It wants you to spend time inside it, methodically picking your way around and discovering morbid new ways to snuff out your unfortunate marks. It refuses to be rushed through, rewarding brains over brawn. Six-and-a-half years on the team at Io Interactive must ship a successor to it worthy of the wait.Ībove everything, Absolution is a game that wants you to experiment with it.

Blood Money may be a dinosaur in some respects but it remains a cult favourite adored by its faithful fans. In actual fact the besuited Agent 47 and his barcoded dome have spent the vast bulk of this generation on the sideline. Hitman: Absolution has been a long time coming, a fact fans are acutely aware of. In video game terms that’s somewhere in the Cretaceous Period. For those of you counting at home it’s been 2368 days since Hitman: Blood Money was released, give or take.

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