Hitman Absolution is the 5th Entry in Io-Interactive's series, and this game is sure a doozy. Following the release of the stellar entry, Hitman Blood Money, it almost felt like IO wanted to branch out and try new games which resulted in stuff like Kane and Lynch, and Mini Ninjas neither of which seemed to stick in the popular conciousness. and around the release of Kane and Lynch 2, Eidos, Former publisher for the Hitman Franchise was gobbled up by the japanese gaming conglomerate, Square Enix. These factors could have brought some stress upon the team around Absolution's development to result in such a tonally inconsistent, jumbled amalgamation of random ideas and concepts that is this game. Whatever the reason was Hitman Absolution really dropped the ball in terms of series momentum. The story follows Agent 47 as he is tasked to eliminate his former retainer, and only real friend, Diana. He soon comes to find out that the reason he was sent to eliminate her was so the Agency could get their hands on an experimental super soldier child that they had been developing who was stolen by Diana. He is left to care for the child but quickly gets out smarted by the main antagonist of this game who is just Jack Nicholson from the shining but slightly more nutty. The story tries to take it's self so seriously that it comes off incredibly edgy, and to top it all off it throws in all sorts of nonsense jokes and line delivery that throws the whole tone out the window. But most people don't play Hitman for the story, they mostly play it for the fun sand box levels and mechanics that they can play around with, so does this game deliver on that front? No. This game instead opts for an extremely linear level design philosophy which is so counter intuitive to the mechanics of the Hitman series, and this game in general. All the staple mechanics from Hitman return here such as sneaking, wearing disguises, and dragging bodies, but the way these levels are structured makes it so that all these core mechanics are pretty useless and instead the most optimal route to completion most of the time is to just instead go in guns blazing. It certainly doesn't help that this game also has really cheap enemy placement which makes it hard to not get spotted when joined together with the terrible instinct system. The basic premise of the instinct system isn't terrible, it essentially allows you to see enemies through walls and pin point targets which could be helpful for strategizing if it weren't for the fact that there is no map to reference along to like previous games. There is also the problem with disguises basically being more useless than they were in Hitman 2 Silent Assassin which says a lot. Basically any guard can see through any disguise unless you use your instinct ability to hide your features from oncoming guards. The big problem with this is that the instinct ability is based off a meter which lasts too little to really have an impact on sneaking past guards. Overall Hitman Absolution is an over bloated, mess of a game that if I had played on launch I would have assumed that this game would mark the end of the Hitman franchise as we know it. But at the time of writing this review there has been 3 additional Hitman games to have come out who bring the series back to it's roots and then some in some very impressive ways. There is only really one positive thing I can say about the game and that is that it runs as it should and isn't very buggy which nowadays is something that is far too rare. I wouldn't really recommend this entry to anyone, not even fans of the series, but if you are a completionist who has to play all the entries in the series, I just recommend playing this game more like a cover shooter, and less like a stealth game and you will have a much better time.