Then you formulate a plan and try to pull it off. You sneak or roam in disguise through police stations, courthouses, dilapidated mob-run hotels, maize-covered farmland, factories and science labs, teasing out details about your target from overheard conversations and useful objects left on shelves or in poorly guarded rooms. Hitman: Absolution includes all of that stuff, and on the higher difficulty levels it leaves you to figure a lot of it out on your own. Perhaps you place explosives where you know they'll wander, or maybe you arrive just in time to nudge them over a railing into a deserted alleyway, and often you do all this dressed in borrowed clothes that conceal your identity from all but the most detailed investigation. It's not just about deciding whether to sneak past people or get into a gun-fight - it's about slowly tracking the movements of people through large environments and observing the ways you can manipulate them and their surroundings to bring about their downfall.

The genius of it is the way the designers let you do that. Hitman is a simple concept: someone gives you a target, or targets, and you take them out. Hitman: Absolution is a slick, responsive and mechanically confident game - and on occasions it's one of the most satisfying stealth games in a year that already includes Dishonored - but a range of compromises to Hitman tradition mean it's still going to rub some people up the wrong way. Agent 47 doesn't begin Hitman: Absolution with amnesia, but the six years that have passed since we last took control of him in Blood Money do seem to have dulled his creators' recollections of what made him so popular in the first place.

Hitman absolution review