Hitman: Absolution Preview

Long before today's ADHD-addled kids indulged in a bit of shooting interspersed with pretty cutscenes, IO Interactive's Hitman series let determined gamers step into the shoes of a bald master assassin. Focusing on stealth, it followed the footsteps of the Thief and Metal Gear Solid franchises—they focussed on a slow, deliberate brand of gameplay that requires a great deal of patience as you transform into a ghost and take down foes unnoticed. Not one for those lacking discipline and discretion, the Hitman franchise has always embraced a style of gaming that rewards meticulous planning over twitch and gung-ho attitude. However, the real draw was the high of knowing that you're right at the top of the food chain—a silent assassin killing with surgical precision as he clears out a room full of baddies, one by one until there's nobody left.

Unlike your regular FPS fare though, games of Hitman's calibre aren't meant for everyone. They call for a greater degree of determination and commitment, and are a class apart from the simplified tripe that's being churned out to appease the larger casual audience. That's why I was rather apprehensive when I heard that Hitman: Absolution will be nerfed to accommodate everyone. The very idea of having countless tutorial prompts and obvious hints babying you around in a game as hardcore as Hitman is a travesty. And so, I fired up the preview copy with a heavy heart and braced myself for what I imagined would be Hitman on training wheels.

Someone's about to get a splitting headache

I didn't even have to hit the "Start Game" button to know that that wasn't to be the case. The Options menu shows difficulty settings cleaved into two columns—"Enhanced" for n00bs and "Professional" for those who seek the unadulterated Hitman experience. Each mode is further divided into various levels of difficulty that dictate enemy strength, numbers, hints provided, health and the number of save points. What's more, these settings can be tweaked individually—right in the middle of a game—to let you create your own customised level of difficulty by mixing and matching various parameters. IO has deftly managed to make Hitman accessible to everyone without diluting the experience for purists.

I fired up the preview in the Enhanced mode and a slick cutscene later I'm told that the mission involves killing your International Contract Agency handler Diana Burnwood. Wow, that escalated pretty quickly! Serving as a sort of prologue for the new storyline, this is one big tutorial level seamlessly integrated into a mission. You really need this large a tutorial because, like Blood Money, the scope of things Agent 47 can do will overwhelm most of us unless we learn it on the go. The level starts off at the gates of the Burnwood mansion, where you're taught the ropes of how to slink about and garrotte baddies unnoticed, hide their bodies and generally, how the stealth mechanics work.

How ironic

There are plenty of ways to kill, but the idea is to strangle your enemies with your trusty piano wire and hide their bodies in dumpsters, refrigerators, closets and many other places of interest. Even if you screw up, you can hide along with the bodies and peek around till the coast is clear. Dragging and stashing bodies away from sight may seem laborious, but it's an essential task because the enemy AI will detect any anomalies and raise an alarm. Once that happens, it is bye-bye silent killer, because the only means of dealing with a large area swarming with goons is to whip out your automatic weapons and engage in some good old-fashioned cover-based combat.

However, choking enemies with a wire isn't the only means to kill silently. Even if you are detected, you can feign surrender, and a quick time-based hand-to-hand combat sequence later, you'll have the baddie as a hostage; you can then knock him out or use him as a human shield to take out his colleagues. The idea here is to avoid guns and bloody ways to kill altogether, because patrolling guards will notice blood stains and call for backup.

A good hitman keeps himself organised