Hitman: Absolution review for Nintendo Switch

You kind of have to feel sorry for Hitman: Absolution. It occupies an odd place in the Hitman series: even though it came out well over a decade ago, it’s not quite old enough to have the nostalgia factor that accompanies the original trilogy of games, and it’s definitely nowhere near as good as the World of Assassination trilogy. While the older and newer games have their fans, Absolution awkwardly sticks out like a sore thumb.

I’d like to say that the game’s out-of-nowhere re-release on the Switch offers a chance to re-evaluate the game, and properly give it its due…but it really doesn’t. It basically reaffirms what we all knew about the game, which is exactly what I said about it above: that it feels like a weird transitional game between what Hitman was initially and what people think of it today.

Absolution’s big issues now are exactly the same as they were when the game first came out: there’s an overreliance on stealth, and not nearly enough freedom. The whole game feels like it’s constantly funneling you towards where it wants you to go – and more often than not, that’s sneaking through the shadows towards a door.

Admittedly, a lot of the game’s flaws are much more obvious in hindsight, with the benefit of seeing where the game took some of these ideas just four years later in the rebooted Hitman series. The more recently trilogy definitely had stealth sections, but it made it so that you could approach them in any number of ways. In Absolution, by contrast, all you ever really do is crouch around a corner, wait for a person to pass, maybe knock them out and steal their clothes, and then move on.

It’s a lot less fun to kill people here, too. Whereas the World of Assassination gave you all kinds of ways to kill enemies and innocent passers-by – launching them into the air with a faulty plane cockpit, blowing up them up with dynamite in gopher holes, poisoning their food and drowning them in the toilet as they’re puking – Absolution never aspires to the same level of creativity in its murderousness. It’s just lots of guns, knives, and other traditional murder weapons.

Mind you, part of the problem is the game’s tone. Again, if you look at World of Assassination, you see how it embraced the series’ inherent dark humour; while a game about killing people is never going to be a laugh riot, WoA found a way to insert humour (albeit fairly black humour) into the most surprising places. Absolution, by contrast, takes itself incredibly seriously at all times, and tries to be gritty in a way that just feels dull.

That’s not to say that there aren’t fun moments, especially if you find ways to make them yourself. Occasionally I’d decide to see just how quickly I could clear out a floor of people, knocking them unconscious and then dumping their bodies in whatever boxes or chutes I could find. Similarly, I had fun in a few levels where I was able to hide in a room while enemy after enemy obligingly came running at me in a straight line, oblivious to the massive pile of bodies piled up behind me.

But it’s still clear that none of those moments hold a candle to what came before in the series, let alone what came after. Hitman: Absolution represents the series’ awkward, stumbling growth period. Play it you want to see where some of the ideas in the World of Assassination trilogy got their start, but don’t expect the game to reach anywhere near the same heights.

Feral Interactive provided us with a Hitman: Absolution Nintendo Switch code for review purposes.