That Hitman: Absolution managed to step on almost every rake on its way to release is hardly surprising. When a game series often considered cerebral and refined re-emerges onto the scene with a trailer showing the hero brutally murdering a gang of kinky nuns and later trailers have our hero rescuing damsels in distress and toting shotguns it’s hard not to think that something stupid this way comes. Few games scream their failure to understand their audience from the rooftops in this manner.
As first impressions go Hitman really couldn’t have done worse if our hero had shambled drunkenly onto the scene with his fly open. But trailers can be misleading, as can memories of old games, and in the case of Hitman: Absolution we are not so much seeing an old series dragged up from the grave and defiled so much as we are seeing an old series being remade in a very modern way.
One thing that it is important to remember about the Hitman series is that this was always a series of brutally, often comically, violent games, often with plenty of combat. You could complete most of Blood Money, the best of the series, with a series of nasty accidents, but even then it ended with one of the most feeble and incongruous shootouts in gaming history. Just because you could rely on accidents and precision didn’t mean you had to and the early games featured shotguns, sniper rifles and remotely detonated mines aplenty. Hitman games have always allowed the player to smash into the missions like The Terminator into a police station if so desired. The titillation isn’t so much new for Hitman: Absolution, rather it is more obvious, the earlier games had it too though the more limited graphics made it harder to express. The story is poor in Absolution, but this is a recurring theme to a series which has always been more about the mission than the narrative.
In practice Hitman: Absolution is not so far removed from the series at heart, but what we see with the game is a thoroughly modern work and this is what has managed to so deftly antagonise some die-hard fans. Some elements of gaming have fallen by the wayside over the years and others have appeared. In the same way that we no longer approach a game with three lives and three continues Hitman: Absolution eschews elements of old games and brings in new established tropes.
Such tropes include health that regenerates once you’ve stopped getting shot. Also new is a cover system where you stick to walls and low obstacles in order to remain hidden. The ability to slow down time in order to more accurately shoot whole groups of people in the face as pioneered by Max Payne appears. Saving the game based on checkpoints and shorter, more linear level design are also par for the course. These features are game-changing but their inclusion is often almost arbitrary in modern games.
Modern remakes of classics can often risk upsetting fans. Syndicate was remade as a generic science fiction first person shooter, a capable one at that, but it wasn’t Syndicate, it was barely anything. XCOM: Enemy Unknown took a chainsaw to its namesake, dozens of features and layers of strategy were brutally stripped away, but this was seen as a more positive change because the game that was left at the heart of this ruthless reduction was a much more tense and engaging affair than the original. It’s rare to find somebody who played the original UFO: Enemy Unknown and didn’t love it, but the games had always been mired in busywork and a depth of micromanagement that wouldn’t be out of place if you were sending your team off to their first day at primary school. Building extra bases and taking a mechanised platoon to an alien crash site instead of four troops was great, but not so great was ensuring everybody was carrying ammo, everybody had the right trousers on and that you’d built enough storage space or living quarters. In new XCOM you can lose everything with a bad move, with UFO you could blithely administrate yourself into a terminal situation without ever really knowing how.
Something that Hitman: Absolution has demonstrated is that it is not always enough to be a good new game with a revered old name. The fans of these old games are older now too, grown up men and women with a suitably grown up disdain for the new and the trendy. If developers want to win back fans when they revisit established franchises maybe they should look to what made those games popular in the first place and by doing so maybe they’d avoid stepping on a rake or two.
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