Natural Born Killer

First hands-on with assassin simulation Hitman: Absolution

Our target is The King. He’s important. He’s going to be well protected. We enter Chinatown (pictured). First task – find him. That part is easy. He’s holding court in the main square. Getting to him will be difficult. Killing him will be tougher still. Getting away with it seems almost impossible.

This is the set-up for our first play of the latest Hitman game. As soon as your target is identified, you have a wealth of options, including simply taking out a gun and starting to shoot. A quick tip: don’t do that, you won’t make it out alive. Both the Chicago police and The King’s men will return fire instantly. And, if you do somehow survive for a short time, a Swat team will be called.

We decide to wait, but despite the King leaving his sanctuary on occasion, the perfect opportunity doesn’t present itself. Until his dealer arrives, that is. The man is told to fetch certain “merchandise” (we’re talking about illegal drugs, if that wasn’t clear) and heads back to his apartment to retrieve it. We follow the dealer and, in the privacy of his living room shoot him with a silenced pistol. From this vantage point we have a view of the whole area. Handily, we also have a sniper rifle. Moments later, The King doesn’t have a head.

Job done? Not quite. Now it’s time to slip away unnoticed. We leave the apartment, but we haven’t hidden our gun. A lone cop sees it and tries to arrest us. It doesn’t go well for him. Now we have a disguise. But it doesn’t work. The cops see the uniform, recognise we’re not one of them and take us down. Game over. Well, sort of. There are a huge number of ways to take out the target, from poisoning his food to rigging scaffolding to fall on him. So back into Chinatown we go…

Hitman: Absolution is released on 20 November on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360