T w e n t y S i d e d

What should our Hitman game be about? Hitman against a billionaire industrialist? Hitman rescues a young girl who is also a science experiment? Hitman enters into a plot with Diana to betray the agency in order to restore it? Hitman is outsmarted by an intelligence agent pulling strings behind the scenes? Hitman plays cat & mouse with a detective? Why choose? Let’s just throw all those ideas into a blender and call it a story!

Birdie is amazing at gathering intelligence. Even when he’s stuck in a parking lot in South Dakota he apparently knows what the agency is doing, what the Hitman is doing, what Dexter is doing, and what a random cop in Chicago is doing. And also he can somehow get untraceable handwritten notes to all of them. Too bad he doesn’t seem to have a goal. Like, how does telling Cosmo about Blackwater Park advance his goals? If he’s an information broker, then why is he giving all his information away for free?

Also, for those of you following the “list of stuff the developers don’t understand” in the comments: I think the list will get a lot longer after this one.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

So on the outside we have a heavy-duty mining / industrial area. Then we go down a couple of elevators to reach an office-style research center with no offices or places for people to work. Then there’s a testing arena where they test landmines by blowing up pigs in an enclosed chamber. Then we have to descend a massive silo where people are doing biotech research. (How far underground are we by now?) Then we go down yet another elevator to the chamber where Victoria was being held. Then we go up a ladder to a wrestleman show.

Does this audience go through the research silo to get to the show? No? How did they get Victoria out of this lab without going past us? Did they drag her out through the arena? Isn’t this mine / office / lab in the middle of the desert? Is it next to a public place? How did the Patriot’s RV get into the area where he’s training?

The problem here is that it makes no damn sense to chain these environments together like this. In a world designed by a non-lunatic, each zone would be an isolated mission. However, then there would be no reason to visit the mine or the wrestleman show, since the only reason we visit those places is to get in and out of the lab.

A detail I didn’t notice until now: The Patriot RV is parked outside the hotel, meaning 47 must have crossed BACK through the arena to steal it?

Still, Mumbles is right. This part feels a little funny and self-aware. If they could have grasped that tone and ran with it they might have wound up with something that was fun and funny. It would probably still be offensive to long-time Hitman fans, but at least it would be able to stand on its own merits.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

We’ve been doing this for five years, and covered over sixteen videogames. In all that time, the same pattern holds true: We get more and more negative as a particular game drags on. If we start out loving a game, we’ll come to recognize its flaws. If we start out ambivilent about a game, we’ll grow to resent it. And if we start out disliking a game, we’ll loathe it by the end.

But Hitman: Absolution seems to break with that tradition. We started out really negative, but now I guess we’re more amused than outraged. The game really is awful, but it’s awful in such interesting and varied ways that after a while I run out of anger and just want to stop and watch the train wreck unfold.

The bit with jumping out of the birthday cake was a fun idea. But it was patronizingly easy to pull off, requiring no more planning than choking a single woman in an empty room. And since it’s not part of the core game, there’s no reason to do it. And it’s stuck in a silly postage-stamp level that serves no other purpose and is part of a sprawling installation that makes no damn sense.

I’d love a postmortem on this game. What on earth were they thinking?

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.