A message to anyone who has seen the PC Gamer review for Hitman: Absolution.
The reviewer for the game gave it a 62/100, citing that it is a mess with a terrible PC port, scripted assassinations, pointless objectives, a bad art style and over-use of bloom, small levels, no saving and bad AI.
Now, let us look at the actual facts;
1) The PC preview and review builds of the game work perfectly for reviewers using older computers, with no lag or graphical issues whatsoever.
2) The 'scripted assassinations' are not in the game. It is the same as Blood Money, where the AI reacts in certain ways to the assassination of targets.
3) The 'pointless objectives' noted by the reviewer refer to 'opening doors' - this is again a misconception as at the end of every Hitman level throughout the series, the player has to find an exit point to complete the mission. A big part of a 'hit' is to escape undetected.
4) Whilst the appraisal of the visuals is purely based upon conjecture, to say the game is ugly is laughable.
5) Small levels may appear in the game but, as an anonymous reviewer has pointed out, this matters little as there are over 50 stages in the game. The PC Gamer review also fails to mention that small levels were very much a part of Blood Money as well, and that Absolution has well over triple the amount of stages Blood Money did.
6) The 'no saves' issue is also a falsehood - save games are allowed on the lower difficulties and disabled on the higher difficulties, much like Blood Money. Given that the reviewer often directly compares the two games, this is a laughable point.
7) The game has been stated numerous times by numerous websites and journalists to have far superior AI to what has been offered in the series previously.
8) This is what proves the reviewer is lying. He claims that the game encourages you to kill guards and that stealth is not relevant. Well, this guy won't have any credibility left once the game is released. The gameplay footage that has been released and every preview shows that killing guards WORSENS your score and makes it harder to get higher rankings. Not only that, but, again, the gameplay trailers emphasize the stealth elements of the game.
Having read a few anonymous reviewers' responses to the PC Gamer review, it is obvious that the PC Gamer reviewer likely didn't even play the game fully and his review should not be heeded. That or he played it on Easy difficulty and just rushed through it, i.e. doing the opposite of what makes Hitman games so fun. Also, given that every single other review (a 9/10 from both the Official Xbox and Official Playstation Poland magazines, and an 88/100 from Play 3) has been mostly positive and has highlighted the points the PC Gamer reviewer hated as the good points of the game....yeah. Game Informer also gave it an 8.75/10.
Just a heads up for anyone that might have been worried after reading the PC Gamer review. Apparently the reviewer in question has been criticized justifiably in the past for similar reasons.
/:mrgreen::badgrin::sch:
