You give away all of your trademark kit at the start of the game, and start most missions with one bad, loud pistol. The other thing that really hurts Absolution's few actual assassinations is the new equipment system.
The other quarter do give you a target to kill, and a choice of how to do so, but that segmentation means you're operating in a space that isn't as rich or complex as a typical Hitman: Blood Money mission. Three-quarters of these levels are purely about traversal: you're just trying to get from A to B to move the story forwards, and if you're given anyone to kill at all, it happens in a cutscene or scripted slow-mo event. When the objective of some levels is to escape captivity or attackers, being locked in until your opponents stop looking for you starts to feel a little perverse. And you can't open these doors if any guards on the level are alert. Each mission is split into a series of short levels, connected by a single door that you can't go back through. It's a shame, because beneath that some of the locations are beautiful. When it catches the light, your bald head glints so dazzlingly that beams of pink lens flare erupt from it in four directions.
It also appears to have been rendered through a Vaseline lens, causing anything as bright as a flesh tone to burn with the bloom of a thousand suns. Those have been corrected in a patch, but aiming is still a needlessly clumsy emulation of a console controller's analogue input: you have to hold two different aim buttons to be accurate. When I first started playing, three different tutorial tips advised me to press the left mouse button 'gently' to aim more accurately, or chided me for 'squeezing' it too hard. Particularly when the stealthy approach involves waiting for achingly long conversations to finish before guards go their separate ways. And when your ghost-like performance is blown at the last minute by the unpredictable rules of the guard's detection logic, it's hard to muster the will to repeat the whole level in the hope that it won't happen again. It's still a game with a lot of items and systems to play around with, but doing so is madness when 15 minutes of perfectly stealthy progress are at stake.
The reason this hurts the game so deeply is that two of Hitman's core appeals are experimentation and perfectionism.
It's suspiciously as if the developers just never figured out how to store all the relevant information. Disguises and items you've left disappear. Very rarely there are mid-mission checkpoints, but even if you can find them, they don't save vital aspects of your progress. Its biggest problem is that it doesn't have a save function, so every screw-up or glitch of game logic costs you a galling amount of pointless repetition.
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