This week Planetside 2 and Hawken Beta 3 launch, but I do not have time for those, for a dear old friend 47 showed up all suited and red tied in my Steam account. Hitman is from a golden age of PC gaming and so are it`s developers IO, its design itself pays homage to all those old point and click favourites you wish they were remaking now and you didn't have to fund on Kickstarter...
When I play Hitman , when you play Hitman Absolution you can feel all the great classic PC games that IO have riffed off creating their own unique game genre. Blending parts of other genres adventure, stealth, point and click and cinema into its own unique game, since the original Hitman there has been no other game series quite like it. Let me show you some cheeky references :
lets have some Alone In The Dark ledge walking :
don`t look down....
and here`s a random Cinema influence ... Leon of course ....
Making it half way through the intro level you finally get to see the game open up , play your own way , either taking minutes to complete a level or hours attempting every possible solution.. and the magic ..when your gaming world is occupied by so many virtual thespians anything can happen within the confines of your present mission.
Hitman Absolution is one fine looking game on PC .. these shots are just at medium level at a low res of 1280 by 720 ( which I used to play the game on the smd ST1080 and Cinemizer OLED for comparison) powered by just an Intel HD3000 i7 Lenovo X220T ... This is a very well optimised game ..the tightest piece of coding I have seen all year... The game proper starts in Chinatown...just like the original Hitman all those years ago ..
Hitman Absolution easily holds its own with other AAA releases this year, in fact this is a sequel that exceeds expectations ..running blisteringly fast on even humble PC hardware , all these shots are in game none are renders and all at the games medium setting ! You walk amongst a real crowd, nay throng of people that you can use as a weapon, creating an atmosphere of immersion often promised by other games but rarely delivered. When you are strolling through those crowds, or driving them into a mad frenzy using the ensuing chaos as cover for your escape or assassination attempt and manage to pull it off, or almost .. and then go back and try something else .. that`s when Hitman Absolution shines. When you play this game you are actually solving dynamic real time puzzles , so it is not just a case of blowing up a barrel next to a bad guy .. that just gets you killed (as I proceed to demonstrate to great effect in the videos above) .. in Hitman that explosion has to mean something , inter link with something else you are doing that forms your own personal master plan for achieving your goals. For me the game plays slightly easier than the original in which you could not take disguises /clothes from people who you had wounded or shot. Maybe I should be playing on expert and not veteran...
This kind of game is the perfect antidote to all the other games that essentially just have you move along a corridor with night vision and darts ( Mr Sam Fisher) or move along a corridor with remote control toys and air strikes ( Call of Duty). Whilst most other games these days have a single player component that is around 3 hours for veteran gamers like myself (on the hardest settings at that), Hitman encourages you to come back replay and try all the solutions to its problems and your solution may be totally different to every one else. This gives the game and the series a longevity that other games cannot match ..even with their Hollywood authored scripts .. narrative is great but by it`s nature, just moves you along the linear corridor that you game in .. I am interested in all the chaos I can cause within the semi open levels of Hitman more than the actual story, some of the most elaborate plans require true skill and thought to pull off successfully or even unsuccessfully .. you have to be skilled just like 47..
Where other games claim to be open, they usually mean a large open procedurally generated map, in which a few meagre events occur over and over again and you interact with set events in a finite number of ways that you repeat over and over. Hitman may have a finite way of completing tasks successfully but it allows for an infinite ways of trying to achieve those tasks and this is why I go back to playing the series and spent hours in Chinatown even after I worked out how to finish the level in a couple of minutes..
Oh and the other reason I play Hitman is for Jesper Kyd`s soundtracks...but sadly he is not involved this time .. though the stand in does fine...
Get Hitman Absolution from Zavvi now in the UK or Steam everywhere . If you have an ageing console don`t leave it out of your 2012 gaming list
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