izigame.me

I personally dislike the direction Hitman games took in later installments, and I think this is where it all started. In an attempt to modernise and attract wider audience Hitman games started to incorporate this movie like type of presentation. Absolution feels more like a weird Hitman action movie than a Hitman game installment.
The game is stealth oriented theme park ride. Many events are scripted, many solutions to the stealth puzzles are linear and sometimes simply forced on you. This theme park ride is sometimes sprinkled with a specific assassination level which is what you probably came for. The assassinations themselves aren't bad.
Skip to the final paragraph if you're only interested in opinion on Absolution.
The precedent behind why newer Hitman titles don't seem fun to me was set here. The focus has been taken away from thoughtful exploration and put into more railroaded/scripted action-movie sequences. Older games had much more freedom of exploration, rewarding a player for taking time and actually looking at the environment. Absolution misses the point giving you visually cluttered environment mixed with bad design. What I mean by this is that the game isn't in it's design focused at guiding the player towards the solution(s), it knows there's too much going on in the environment and therefore solves the lack of focus by giving players Eagle Vision from Assassins Creed. With it, you instantly spot the pieces mindlessly, and level designers can design puzzles and challenges without worrying to much about players actively thinking and failing at finding the pieces and the solutions. This does open up the option of designing extremely complex, multi dimensional levels without overwhelming the player. The complex level design was already done well in older titles.
Another detriment to the player's credibility are challenges. The levels gets basically spoiled by the challenges. The game almost tells (sometimes outright) the player all of the possibilities he has taking on a level. Here, you get an advertisement of "Look at what is possible and try it out! Make the pieces fit!", as if the player isn't capable of finding and fitting the pieces. This takes out the struggle and excitement of discovery.
And that is the directions the games took after Absolution, cinematic railroaded experiences that don't trust the player and instill the fear of missing out by shouting the possibilities and challenges at players. They also give you, and announce predefined quest marks if you overhear important conversations or find clues. Following that, you don't even have to pay attention to the discussions or information, you just follow the quest marks, follow the hand that walks you.
But more importantly, the Absolution itself is much more focused on broken stealth and action sequences with "insta kill" instinct feature (freeze time and kill everyone). Here, 47 is more like John Wick or Jason Bourne. The game design of disguises is broken yet they still exist in the game. Final score is balanced around not killing a single person, and if you want to knock someone out, you need to put them in conventional hiding place in order to not be penalised. The story is non existent and makes 47 look emasculated, incapable and utterly stupid. The villains are cartoonishly evil and unrealistic. Too much attention was given to graphics and the game's atmosphere is built on postprocessing. The animations and features of the world are objectively worse than what Blood Money had. In the end, if you don't mind as much and are looking for streamlined experience you might enjoy this. I still recommend Hitman: Blood Money the most.