Hitman Absolution: The Definitive Review
Dissolution, more like!?!?
In the very first ‘proper’ post for Affectionate Discourse, wherein I got unreasonably angry about the term ‘immersive sim’, I referenced the golden era of Square Enix in its post-Eidos acquisition phase, where the company managed to ruin three all-time great PC IPs within the space of three years. That piece focused anger on Deus Ex: Human Revolution for its simpering, maliciously static retread of the iconic original’s core design, only with more unskippable cutscenes, less believable environments and an even stupider ending. It’s not much of a surprise, then, that a year after Human Revolution’s release, Hitman Absolution would keep up those brand values with its own fair share of unskippable cutscenes, less believable environments and an even stupider ending. I never even gave 2014’s Thief a go, as following on from those two (and the equally static Mankind Divided sequel to Human Revolution), I figured it was a one-way ticket to disappointment city with a layover at the impotent rage travel tavern.1 In a recent pique of interest in my now-grubby Xbox 360, I thought I’d give Absolution a quick re-visit, just to see if my memories of a favourite child being poisoned into decrepitude and moral degradation were justified. I’ll leave the witty rejoinder to that up to you.2
The roots of Absolution may seem obvious, but there is need for a detour with 2003’s Freedom Fighters. This surprisingly weird, surprisingly good third-person shooter was a real departure from the bread-and-butter of the Hitman titles, coming the year after Hitman 2’s release. With a surprisingly prescient ‘Soviet takeover of the US’ plot, it threaded a sweet path between outright arcade blasting and the deeper demands of hardcore tactical shooters, not unlike the similarly under-appreciated Conflict: Desert Storm. After Hitman 2, Freedom Fighters felt incredibly different and despite huge dollops of ham and cheese in its plotting and characterisation, it seemed like IOI had stamped out a great template to run in parallel to its Hitman efforts. What we weren’t ready for was the absolutely bonkers swerve into Kane & Lynch for a 2007 sequel. With Blood Money arriving in 2006 and essentially perfecting the Hitman formula developed from Codename 47 through to Contracts, I certainly had plenty of expectation that Kane & Lynch would build on the nuggets of greatness at Freedom Fighters’ core. Sadly, it was shit. Or rather, painfully mediocre. I’m not sure I got past the second or third level - it was that much of a lame duck, it was that dull and uninspiring. In some ways it felt like a bad joke, a spectacular misfire. Given its predecessor and its earnest pretentions around the nobility of murder in the pursuit of political freedom,3 Kane & Lynch stunk of cool-chasing and moral degradation. A blanket rejection of Freedom Fighters’ ideals, instead chasing a half-borrowed, vaguely contrived grit from Hollywood crime cinema. The desire to be some aspirant Tarantino-tinged work of cinematic genius was so desperately ersatz that it deflated any urge to push on.4 These bleakly awful people were perhaps kinda cool on initial impressions as characters, but represent something corrupted and foul, yes, even something rotten in Denmark, to borrow a line Quentin thought was really very cool from fucking True Romance (apols to Shakespeare himself, naturally).
If you want to see how corrupting Kane & Lynch was, consider that IOI pressed ahead with a 2010 sequel, Dog Days, which was made with the specific intention of being genuinely unpleasant. I bought it at a vastly reduced price, in one of those glorious HMV three-for-thirty sales and I was actually pretty impressed at its visual style, being portrayed as seen through camcorders or CCTV lenses. It certainly had a glitchy, hallucinatory psychotic feel to its presentation, and its content is both genuinely horrific and stupidly hyperbolic.5 Apparently, the creative intent was to create a consciously postmodern comment on videogame violence, which it does by having huge amounts of violence and not an awfully large amount of commentary. I can’t speak for the honesty and earnestness of that stated goal, but to me Dog Days feels much more like a hipster zenith of ambition lacking the artistic weight to support it. It cements its hipster-media credentials with a flippant, casual refusal to care about how the game actually plays. The PR interviews mentioned the desire to make “almost an anti-game”, which seems so oppositional to the point of the market that maybe it was some tremendous act of creative defiance after all.6 I mean, it has plenty of the hallmarks of the cult classic, but perhaps a bit too purposefully so. It’s a performative kind of second-hand coolness, a borrowed charisma that masks a vapid, facile centre.7 If you really must flex obnoxiousness as a virtue, and seek to borrow the multi-format, found-media framings of the likes of Natural Born Killers,8 be sure to have something of real substance in there, lest you end up a Diary Of The Dead.9 For a cool-baiting underperformer to be considered a cult classic, it needs to have some virtue in play. It’s something of a shame that in that regard, Dog Days plays like an absolute piece of shit.
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men was such a damp squib that perhaps the only possible way out was downwards, into some over-indulgent corrupted madness, as if Kane’s brutality and Lynch’s poorly-medicated psychosis had infected IOI itself. Values distorted, judgement weakened, corporate overlords being assholes - a fine recipe for an instalment of Hitman that nearly killed the series. Lame & Cringe, perhaps? Well I don’t think it’s accidental at all that both Kane and Lynch have cameos in Hitman Absolution. Their presence shows how cursed this game is, how corrupted and misguided its attempts to ‘improve’ on the stellar success of Blood Money. They don’t feature in the game, they infect it. I’m not sure if it was the hotel ending cutscene or the bit about doing a jump to avoid a police helicopter that sealed its fate for me, but it was obvious from very early on that Absolution was far closer to an Aberration than it really should have been. But then, the pre-release media had already shown us the canary with a (deliberate?) furore-bating reveal of a coven of exploitation-movie murderous BDSM nuns. For those of us used to bumping off various members of a corrupt super-wealthy elite, being told we’d have to deal with a tawdry dress-up of Fox Force Five didn’t inspire confidence. The corruption, it turned out, wasn’t reserved for the targets. The stage that involves said nuns was actually one of Absolution’s highlights for me, being a serial-killer sim in a cornfield with plenty of LOLs to be had with piano wire kills and dragging victims into the crops. Here it deployed the mechanics of classical Hitman in a stage that felt anything but traditional. It worked in the way you could hide in the corn, but it wasn’t anything close to the top half of great stages in Blood Money. In fact, I don’t think any of the trad-Hitman parts of Absolution hold a candle to its predecessor. They are quite nice at times, notably the Chinatown and gun shop ones, but they feel so much thinner and less intricately complex than stages as far back as Contracts.
Hitman Absolution’s real issue is in its inspiration. It so desperately wanted the mood and aesthetic of the Tarantino-Rodriguez Grindhouse project that it soaks the screen in a veneer of grit and grime as 47 winds a torturously contrived path through a miserable, decaying, misanthropic scrapbook of Americana. Here, the story is more important than anything else and, in true Hitman tradition, the story doesn’t fucking matter one single jot to the enjoyment of the gameplay.10 However, it seems everybody in it is as awful as the design, which often sees 47 negotiating tiresome connecting tunnels between free-form arenas across a variety of locales. Some make hardly any sense - a sandbox taking place in a small town has you killing two awful people to gain access to a HQ for the boss of the awful people in a retread of the equally tiresome multipart stages of Hitman 2. Several stages are sequentialised in this fashion, and it’s entirely unwelcome. A mission set in a bar, where the objective is to talk to a barman,11 has a really obvious ‘secret tunnel’ that makes the entire thing utterly trivial. Oh, and this is where Kane is hanging out, by the way. Lynch is at the Gun Shop, and arguably you can have more fun killing Lynch with a variety of firearms than you can bumping off Kane, although the crowd system does work a minor wonder in allowing a fat old bar fight, for little more than showing off that it allows a big old bar fight. I can’t say it impressed me that much, as I’d already lost my bananas a long time ago at the crowds in the New Orleans stage in Blood Money. In my recent return, I did go through the King of Chinatown as well as the others mentioned, but I was so bored of Absolution that I gave up on trying the later stages such as the fancy Blackwater Park building, with its secret security army nonsense. Likewise, stages that should stick in the memory, such as Fight Night, simply don’t.12 They’re that dull and one-note. There was no way I wanted to re-do misery fests like Run For Your Life, which only served to completely waste your Hitman time. Like the hoops you have to jump through to access the underground lab in Death Factory, Run For Your Life is the least Hitman stage in Absolution. It’s annoying as fuck, to be honest. At least Run For Your Life has some interesting areas to pass through, like the cannabis garden or the abandoned library. However the entire objective of the exercise is what’s lacking. It’s an escape sequence that boils down to using stealth to avoid capture, which in actuality is an extremely tepid affair. In the context of stealth sims, it’s workable enough but in the Hitman context it’s a betrayal of trust. It’s absolutely a corruption of the Hitman systome, and a nicely upgraded one for Absolution, in the pursuit of dull, average, mediocre content. It’s understandable only as a corporate diktat, as some metrics-based guidance for broadening audience share in the third-person videogame space. Unless IOI came up with it all by itself ?!?! To think of it as some way of adding to, rather than subtracting from, the Hitman experience feels like madness. How the fuck does it add value to anything that’s gone before? It’s history repeating, just as Freedom Fighters’ taut combat and utile squad-commanding was repealed into generic third-person murdering with Kane & Lynch. If we refer back to Blood Money, the sheer waste that these kinds of sequences illustrate should be maddening, we should be outraged and indignant at that kind of thinking, which seems to almost deliberately miss the point of the entire Hitman proposition. That’s the taste that Absolution leaves in my mouth - a bitter and foul one, a rank mouthful of saliva to be spat out instead of swallowed.
It was with a huge sigh of relief that I tackled the very first beta download of Hitman(™).13 The opening mission on the faux boat, followed by the faux airbase, was not only relieving but also triumphant in a visceral way. The course of the series felt immediately corrected, and when the Paris level finally arrived, it unfurled its wondrous depths with such aplomb that I was locked in that Antonio Banderas gif pose, clenched fist held to my mouth, adrift in the kind of bliss that comes from knowing justice has been served. That which had been sullied and corrupted was clean and pure again, and rightfully articulated - the tenets of complexify and multiply (that any decent sequel should adhere to) were there in force, with no Kane or Lynch cameos in sight. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when IOI uncoupled itself from Square Enix, it left the Kane & Lynch IP behind and in doing so, likely lifted the Absolution curse. I said it should be called Hitman: Aberration, for that’s precisely what it is. And on replaying it in a post-World Of Assassination era, abhorrent was exactly how I found it. Perhaps it was Absolution’s failure and corporate tyranny that drove selective pressure on IOI’s creative minds to reformulate a truly modern Hitman, so hard as it might be for me to accept, maybe I should be thankful that it came. One thing’s for sure, though. I’m far more thankful that it fucking went.
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Funnily enough, because I thought Thief would be much like Thief 3, only with more unskippable cutscenes, less believable environments and an even stupider ending
Of course it fucking was.
Isn't this a nice counterpoint to Hitman's murder for profit?
It's probably important to mention that Kane & Lynch was the game that saw Jeff Gerstmann leave Gamespot because of Eidos pressure over Jeff's 6/10 review. It was revealed, after NDAs lapsing, that Eidos had threatened financial harm to Gamespot in terms of pulling advertising unless the review was changed. When I talk about Kane & Lynch as a corruption, I fucking mean it.
Take this example from the Wikipedia article's synopsis: "Kane, Lynch, and Xiu are brutally tortured by Hsing. Believed dead, Lynch is dumped in an alleyway. When he regains consciousness, he kills Hsing and saves Kane, but is too late to save Xiu, who has been raped and skinned alive. Naked and badly lacerated with box cutters, Kane and Lynch manage to escape into the city, fighting their way through another SWAT team in the process." I mean, fucking hell.
Also in 2010, Stuart Black, creator of the actual cult FPS named after his surname, gave an interview about its spiritual sequel, Bodycount. He stunned the games media by announcing that it was going to be inspired by none other than Lady Gaga, having seen her at Glastonbury. Suffice to say, this sadly did not materialise in the released product, which scored a fat round of 5/10s. It's fun to imagine that Dog Days and Bodycount are products of the same mentality, of creatives far too assured of their own greatness when what they actually possess is confidence instead of ability.
I can't help but note a correlation here with my feelings about the faux-surrealist core of Control, setting up the mad idea that there's something about Nordic studios getting all this kind of thing really wrong. But then, that's their fucking fault for not making a decent game of the Pusher trilogy.
I re-watched Natural Born Killers a couple of a years ago and it blew my mind. It felt so oddly native to a post-YouTube, post-InstaTok culture that all the period decrying of Stone's drug-addled attempts to ally the movie with MTV youth aesthetics now feels decidedly hollow. It remains just as vicious, and perhaps just as faux-dangerous in its capacity to deliberately outrage. However where Scott's True Romance feels cringey and hollow as a sleazy Tarantino self-insert vehicle, Stone's Natural Born Killers feels like a slurring, poisoned slide through his malign unconscious. And yes, I mean that for either Stone or Tarantino. Or both, if I’m really honest.
For the record, I didn't mind Diary Of The Dead. It was fine as a generic zombie apocalypse story, but its vaunted mixed-media approach was so inconsistent and unimportant that it's easy to forget it's trying to be mixed-media. I think I actually preferred the far more camp and outright fun Land Of The Dead, which on repeated watches reveals itself to be an absolute masterpiece. A real tribute to the shlock 80s, Romero off the leash, making the gloriously celebratory trash he could have made if he'd sold out to Don Simpson in 1986.
Well that’s not strictly true, but give me six hours and I’ll show you countless examples where Absolution’s miserably grim story makes the gameplay worse.
Yep, TALK TO A BARMAN. That’s how badly the story dominates the gameplay here. Can you imagine a Hitman stage devoted to BUYING SOME MILK or LOOK FOR BUT FAIL TO FIND THE TIRESOME MACGUFFIN?
Fight Night suffers from being too enamoured with its own grandiosity. The signposted methods to complete it are a bit too canned, too ostentatious to warrant replaying and just by their presence alone, the options for glorious Hitman improv are diminished to the point of irrelevancy. Thankfully, modern Hitman stages may include myriad methods of the canned variety for hoop-jumpers to indulge, but always left scope for the madmen who wanted to do the job with a thrown kitchen knife, et al.
Yes, you fuckers, I am that ardent a Hitman fan. Honestly, I was so thrilled with Beta. It was a key gaming highlight in my life.