I just beat my first playthrough of the game (expert difficulty). The game gets a lot of hate from veterans of former Hitman titles. I'm one myself, and personally I thought it was great. I started playing Hitman back in the days of Hitman 2 Silent Assassin, later going back to beat Codename 47, and I've been keeping up with the series at my own pace since then, though I haven't played any of the games after Absolution. Absolution is very different from previous titles in that you are forced to complete one section of the map at a time, and the sections are relatively linear. In previous titles you could really plan out how you would complete your missions step by step before starting, and you don't have the freedom to do that very much any more. Now the stealth and the strategy is more at a micro rather than macro level, and that's perfectly fine for me. All it does is make things harder - you don't have a whole map to run and hide through, you can't evade enemies in huge previously cleared sections of map anymore. I enjoyed the story and actually found the game to be pretty hard, which was surprising because stealth games never are for me. I consider difficulty a very good thing, within reason. To be fair though, a good bit of the challenge was probably just in learning the new game mechanics. I confess that I did turn down the difficulty on the section where the main antagonist is going to blow up a roof you're on (I kept dying in less than 20 seconds), and from that I learned that you can actually turn the difficulty up and down without having to start the whole game over, which is always cool. Basically, great game. Doesn't deserve the hate. Different doesn't equal bad.
