The Assassination of the Everyday Superhero

A cairn at Discovery Park,
photo by Simiao.

I was really excited to play Hitman: Absolution as a birthday present to myself, and had pre-ordered it on Steam just as soon as it was available because I loved the previous Hitman games.

In fact, I loved Hitman, Thief, and Deus Ex because the protagonists all had the elements of being an everyday superhero:  a person with some talents that was able to make ethical statements through his actions.  Certainly, a hitman in the traditional sense is a generally poor choice for a protagonist.  It is decidedly unethical to kill for profit.  Agent 47 used to be different.  He killed human traffickers, high-ranking drug kingpins, pedophiles, mafia dons, and violent gangsters while (in my playthroughs, at least) leaving the innocent party guests, security guards, and maintenance personnel just doing a job to make a buck untouched, or at worst sedated and left somewhere out of the way to wake up the next morning.  To say that I find killing of innocents distasteful is an understatement:  I refuse to do it even in an imaginary video game.  My character, in my mind, is taking out the garbage that slipped through the fingers of law enforcement and will inflict only a career change on the underlings who neither profit nor even know about the actions of their superiors.  One of the most satisfying parts of Hitman:  Blood Money was the next day's newspaper describing a suspicious accident, poison or a sniper's bullet that took out the high-profile criminal target while nobody else surrounding him claims to have so much as seen the assassin.

If, like me, this is what you loved about the Hitman franchise, then Hitman: Absolution is the Hitman game for those that preferred to play Halo or perhaps Max Payne.  I've played up to Dexter Industries so far, and from what I have seen it replaces the lush, non-linear environments and pre-mission checklist of open-ended objectives of the earlier Hitman games with linear scenarios and concrete objectives like "obtain the keycard", "pacify Lenny" and "talk to the bartender."  The entire effect smacks of the degeneration of video game environments.  Many areas of the game are obviously designed to encourage the user to select a specific tool from the abilities available in Absolution such as point shooting and instinct.  The trouble is that on Purist difficulty, and as a player that wants to make an ethical statement through my actions, I do not want a bloodbath and I do want to out-wit my enemy, not cheat to blind them for a moment.  It seems like IO software tried to make Hitman into a Halo-like FPS game where between checkpoints the player is to select the appropriate tool:  sneaking, bloodbath, disguise, hostage-taking or exploration.  I'll admit that there are moments where this actually works.  In the "Rosewood" level, I am open to using violence against a mob of assassins who are in the process of or already have brutally murdered an orphanage full of innocents.  I also generally like the level where the player must save Birdie from imminent death by eliminating the three assassins in a crowded Chinatown, as well as the level where the player must kidnap Lenny.  These have the common features of feeling quite non-linear, as well as offering a huge array of opportunities for different styles of play.  

Unfortunately, to get to these gems that I actually enjoyed, I had to trudge through some really painful chores.  The game made a lousy first impression on me by suggesting that I demonstrate defenestration with an innocent guard who just learned that he was free of prostate cancer, and by forcing me to massacre four security personnel guarding a teenage girl in cold blood.   There was another scene where the goal was clearly to get me to outgun a dozen police officers inexplicably searching for me in an abandoned building behind a nightclub, and one where the police were prepared to open fire on me on a crowded train platform, though apparently playing a strategically placed skill crane game was sufficient to convince these eagle-eyed officers who were able to spot me in a crowd across the platform that I was not in fact the man they were looking for.  Other levels stood out as simply bizarre:  one where the entire goal was to walk into a redneck bar and talk to the bartender which is apparently a huge challenge, and another where the game tried to be America's Army by suggesting that I partake in some OCD target practice instead of the first-person sneaker game I wanted.

AI behavior also takes me out of the game.  Aside from skill cranes serving as magical invisibility cloaks and cops opening fire on a crowded train platform, apparently every street vendor in Chinatown knows every other vendor and will call the cops if they see any newcomer.  Apparently cleaners in an act of mass murder can distinguish gunshots from one of their people from gunshots fired by somebody else.  Apparently there exist redneck bars with a reverse dress code such that entering while wearing a suit and tie will get you shot by bouncers.  Since when did redneck bars have bouncers anyway?  Was there no Wal-Mart in this town that would sell me a change of clothes?

Overall, I can appreciate some of the changes:  I actually like the classic James Bond feel of occasionally having to simply run past security.  I actually liked the time that I had to take a human shield and back onto a train just before it departed, revealing my bluff when I pushed him off the train car at the last second.  However, I can't help but feel resentful at the times when the game suggests or enforces that I kill innocents.  I can't help but wonder if the first syllable of "Hitman" was confusing to IO software when they inserted ridiculous missions on rails without even an actual target.  Finally, I can't help but mourn for an everyday superhero who IO software thinks would pull an innocent maintenance worker who "hadn't planned on being a father at his age" through a window to his death.  Not on my watch.

This AAA title is a failure in my book.  For those that liked early James Bond who never killed anybody, or those who got the Pacifist achievement in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, or those who felt that killing people was the mark of an amateur in Thief, or those who can empathize with Dexter Morgan, this is the planned assassination of the everyday superhero that was Agent 47 in favor of a thinly veiled shooter on rails.  Hitman: Absolution is a bland, generic title that will resonate with those who would have preferred to play Halo, Call of Duty or America's Army featuring a protagonist that absolutely nobody will identify with.

In closing, I would like to plug an independent game that is excellent.  Instead of spending $50 on Hitman: Absolution, spend $10 on Faster Than Light.  It is a real-time strategy space combat simulation game where the player must make the right choices to survive and save the Federation from a very well-armed rebellion.  It's a game design that's a far cry from the one-size-fits-all rehash of working concepts that constitutes a modern AAA title, but that will resonate strongly with players who appreciate a novel design and an adrenaline-pumping challenge.

If you like NetHack but wish it was a little bit shorter, and you liked Star Trek, you will love FTL.