Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick. Or Gun.

So, you wait six years for a game and when you know it's finally coming, your expectation goes through the roof. Can it meet expectation? Obviously not.

Actually, that may be a little unfair on Hitman: Absolution. It was fun to play through, just not the kind of fun I wanted from it. Over the first decade of this millennium, the Hitman franchise had established itself on the Playstation 2-era as offering superb gaming, engaging us to examine situations as best we could to pull off the perfect hit. I can remember spending hours outside of gaming musing on an area, wondering how to get in and out unseen with the target eliminated.

With that in mind, my heart raced at the possibilities the next generation of console gaming would offer the makers. I envisioned puzzles so complex my head would explode at the thought of doing Agent 47 justice. Instead, we got a fairly good stealth thriller.

The story: Agent 47 is a genetically-warped freak who has made a nice living from being the world's top contract killer. At the start of the game, he's sent by the International Contract Agency (his constant employers) to knock off his former handler, Diane, as she's gone rogue. But in a series of somewhat tired plot clichés, he's subsequently entrusted with the task of protecting a teenage girl (ehhh...) in a stupid school uniform (oh, please) who is wanted by a psychotic redneck businessman and the pissed-off big cheese back at ICA. Thus, you can gather the rest.

The story actually bugs several times, as we get 47 making schoolboy mistakes you wouldn't expect of him that allow him to get out-thought by characters best described as fucking inbred idiots. Plus we have the worrying spectre of the characters known as "The Saints" - young women dressed in S&M nun outfits. It comes across as little but wank fantasy and offers the best part of fuck all to proceedings.

Let's be kind about the good things: this game looks amazing. The locations, the cut scenes - it matches the level set by games like Max Payne 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution in presentation levels. Plus the voice acting is a good level - Powers Booth and Keith Carradine are suitably hatstand as the bad guys and we can thank the Gaming Gods that they got David Bateson back in to voice 47, after initially deciding otherwise. The dude simply is the character, and his cold, emotionless tones hide the deeper anger the character feels but cannot express.

When the game gives us what we want, it excels. There are a handful of times we are given a wide area with a target and told to kill them. Naturally, we can wade in guns akimbo, but the challenge is to execute the perfect hit, which is how the game should be. But it feels a rare treat, as mostly we are given a room/area and essentially told to go from one side to the other, preferably with the most stealth as possible.

I've read reviews since I finished the game, and agree with the feeling that this strays far too much from what we expect of these games and into Splinter Cell land. It may look great, and even play well (there is a certain satisfaction from timing your runs to perfection to avoid a guard's movement) but it's not what we signed up for when we bought the game.

Despite all that, I hope they make another Hitman game and perhaps go back to the roots that made the series so compelling in the first place. We want the chance to use our imagination to knock off some poor piece of shite scum, then walk out as calm as you like. Not a quasi-stealth game with a Hollywood b-movie plot stuck to it.

Bald of Awesome, shame about the game