It’s been over six years since Agent 47 showed his face and
any fan of Hitman will have being anticipating it for a long time. So what’s he
up to in this new game? Well it turns out that his old friend Dianna from the agency
has exposed the agency to the world and brought it to its knees. Now the agency
has rebuilt itself and they have put a contract on her head and guess what, the
contract is yours.
Pretty much straight away you find out why Dianna did what
she did and you find yourself continuing with her work by trying to protect a
teenage girl whilst going rogue from the agency. The rest of the game is
focused around the wellbeing of this girl and avoiding being killed by the
agency that you’ve just betrayed.
To be quite blunt the storyline for Hitman: Absolution is
average at best. They’ve finally given the agency a face and to be honest it’s
quite a rubbish one. The main characters in the agency seem to be lacking the intelligence
of a premiership footballer. As well as this Agent 47 seems to be seeking information
from some unlikely characters, which leads you to ask why can a mad man in a
bus surrounded by pigeons get Intel before the agency? Also, some of the
assassins that come after agent 47, well let’s just say that their appearance sometimes
seems less than subtle for people that want to go unnoticed.
However, the characters have great AI. For instance 47 has a
huge range of fake identities that he can take on during a mission. But if
someone in the same clothes sees you they will start to become suspicious of
you as you are not someone that they recognise. This works really well in an environment
such a garage where 47 is dressed as a mechanic. But when he’s dressed as a
police officer in a city with 300 other officers on duty, it seems a little farfetched
to think that they all know each other’s faces. But it’s a small issue with
something that overall works very well.
There is also a large range of difficulty options to choose
from that you can switch between during the campaign, meaning that if you’re
finding it too hard or too easy at any point then you can just adjust it to
suit your abilities. And don’t think that just because you’ve learnt a map on
easy that you’ll smash it on expert because you won’t. The chances are they’ll
be more enemies in your path and their reactions will definitely be sharper. This
gives the game a great deal of replay-ability. The good news about the increase
in NPCs is that if you are seen you still have time to take out the people who
have seen you before they raise the alarm, unlike previous Hitman games where
the alarm is instantly raised as soon as you’re seen.
The controls for Hitman: Absolution are also very smooth.
They allow you to take and change cover very easily. There’s a large range of
weapons to choose from and 47’s use of them can be very realistic. Especially
when it comes to the sniper rifle where you can gently squeeze the trigger to
steady your aim before taking a shot, instead of just clicking a button to hold
47’s breath.
However, many hardcore fans of the Hitman games will be disappointed
to find that you can no longer select your equipment before going on a mission
and that your behaviour in one mission won’t affect how people react towards
you in future ones. In a sense this is a major regression for the Hitman series.
The Graphics for
Hitman: Absolution are extremely good and have obviously pushed the game’s
engine to its limits. Unfortunately there is the odd occasion where you may
find yourself in a huge shootout with two dozen enemies. When this happens and
you survive for a little while, you’ll probably find that the NPCs sometimes
jump from one end of a room to another and could result in 47 being cheated out
of life.
THE VERDICT
Hitman: Absolution Has its good points and its bad. The
story is pretty poor and the choices you have before entering a mission have
pretty much vanished. However, you now have loads more weapons to choose from
in game and disguises have greatly improved. The graphics are epic and the AI
is pretty good as well. Long term fans of the series will most likely be a
little unhappy with how the game has turned out though. But overall it is a really
fun game to play if you have never played a Hitman game before. And even if you
are familiar with the series, you will probably just be happy to be re-equated with
your old friend Agent 47.
LHSRAting for Hitman: Absolution – 8/10 (Xbox 360)
Spec Ops: The Line is set within the
destroyed city of Dubai. The city was hit by huge sandstorms leaving Dubai half
buried under a desert. Although most people made it out of the city before the
storms hit, this is Dubai and there were always going to be people who were
too impoverished and incapable of finding their way out of the city. U.S. Army
Colonel Konrad and his infantry battalion The 33rd were tasked with
the evacuation of Dubai and when ordered to leave the city before it was too
late, Colonel Konrad and his men disobeyed and chose to stay in an
attempt to help those civilians left behind.
Six months later and the world now assumes
that Dubai is nothing more than a ghost city with its inhabitance fled or dead.
That is until a distress signal is received, sent from Colonel Konrad requesting an
evacuation. This is where you come into it. You play Captain Walker of the U.S.
Army Delta Force and it is your squad’s mission to enter Dubai and simply
search for any survivors and particularly Colonel Konrad.
When you first start playing the game
it just appears to be a bog standard third person shooter, all be it with a
pretty original back story. After a chapter or two you start to realise that
Dubai is far from uninhabited and you find yourself killing people all over the
place to rock music. And the music isn’t just random, because Dubai has its own
radio DJ. This comes across as quite strange at first and the story doesn’t
seem to be going anywhere for a few chapters.
Then all of a sudden about half way
through the game you are given choices to make To start with this just
feels like an afterthought from a developer that has just finished playing Mass
Effect. But by the end you see that it really isn’t an afterthought and that the
person who wrote this game is a bit of a psychological genius. The difference
is that with other games the choices you make are clear cut and will result in
good and bad things happening. In Spec Ops you don’t have that luxury; you just
have to do what you have to do to survive and hope that that is enough whilst
you search for the truth and maintaining your sanity.
You also have two NPC team mates with
you and again at first Spec Ops seems to be trying to get you to feel for these
guys but you just can’t because they are the generic soldier characters that
you get in most action games. But very slowly as the game progresses you start
to build some sort of respect for them and you almost feel like you need them
as their own character profiles develop.
There are also collectables in Spec
Ops which for a change actually fit into a game really well. The collectables
come in the form of ‘evidence’ and each piece gives you a bit more information about
what is going on and slightly more insight into some of the characters.
The game itself has lots of different
locations, from desert wastelands to the hotels that were once only for the
very wealthy. Usually when a game tries to do this the levels seem very forced
together, making cut sense appear to be just a tool used to move locations. But
in Spec Ops this isn’t the case and pretty much all of the cut scenes seem to
be telling an important part of the story whilst also moulding the chapters
together.
The environment is also used very
well. With most of it destructible you can shoot windows out to make sand fall
in on people and you can take out things that people where stood on to make them
fall to their deaths. You can even blind your enemies with sand that has been
thrown up from an exploding grenade. You also have to make every shot count because
ammo is few and far between, meaning that you will almost definitely have to
pick up new weapons in each chapter.
The A.I is quite intelligent in this
game as well, for both the enemy and your team mates. You can even tell your
squad to target someone and they will actually do it, and from behind cover as
well. The game controls are a bit scratchy at times though and you’ll quite
often find that you’ll melee a wall instead of jumping over it, and then you’ll
run up to cover but not actually hide behind it.
THE VERDICT
Spec Ops: The Line seems very generic
to start with and things happen throughout the campaign that make you question
why the developers thought it was a good idea to put these things in at all.
But half way through things start to get interesting. If you play the game all
the way through all will be explained, and you will not be disappointed when
you find out the truth about Dubai and the secrets that it holds.
LHSRAting for Spec Ops: The Line – 7.6/10 (Xbox 360)
