History YMMV / HitmanAbsolution

** The Five Difficulty settings are poorly implemented, the game is clearly designed for the wall hacking of Instinct but you lose those above Higher than Normal, 47's total Instinct (so disguise time) also gets made much smaller, making disguises less useful, on the other hand, if you do pick Normal, 47 is a tank and can absorb a ton of damage and there are less guards, meaning there's little reason not to just shoot everything beyond score.

* CompleteMonster: [[PsychoForHire Edward Wade]], a former cartel member and ruthless mercenary on the payroll of [[CorruptCorporateExecutive Blake Dexter]], turns a simple locate-and-kidnap mission into a horrifying massacre, killing every single nun and staff member at an orphanage his target is located at and cajoling his mentally-challenged associate Lenny Dexter into murdering the head nun. Even threatening to [[BadBoss kill his own men]] if they hesitate in the slaughter, Wade's gleeful response to Agent 47 is to announce that he'll kill him and [[ILoveTheDead have his way with the corpse]].

** Not being able to select collected weapons in the campaign. While it's a nod to realism in that 47 doesn't have access to a central armoury like in previous games, it means that unless you're playing Contracts mode, you won't be able to try out all of the CoolGuns in the game, especially the DLC guns. The later shutting down of the Contracts servers means that these weapons are now unusable, even in the remasters.

* CriticalDissonance: Critics were relatively favorable of the game, averaging 79 on Metacritic, and the game sold roughly 1.5 million more units than ''Blood Money''. On the contrary, others loathe the game for taking a linear grindhouse route and for ditching the sandbox aspect from ''Blood Money''.

** '''Instinct''', so very much. The mechanic is baked into the level design, it is crucial to gameplay, and it is broken beyond repair. It makes sense that if you're dressed up as a cop, the real cops would notice that you don't actually work for them, so to counter this you can get past them by using some of your "Instinct" resource, where the cops will just comment on you looking familiar, but will otherwise pay you no mind. However, with all those elements in place, the devs threw linear hallways at you and filled them nothing ''but'' cops. The bottom line is that there are places where you can't ''not'' use Instinct, and if the meter runs out, you're completely screwed, especially on the higher difficulty levels where Instinct is harder to come by, as [[FakeLongevity you'll need to subdue people to regenerate it]], going out of your way to risk getting caught ...because the point of Instinct was to ''[[ViolationOfCommonSense reduce suspicion??]]'' Really, it's an awkward system which doesn't make much sense and defeated the purpose of disguises for the most part as you're often ''more suspicious'' wearing a cop uniform than your two-piece suit. However it was RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap by the ''VideoGame/WorldOfAssassinationTrilogy'', by removing the meter and rebalancing it into an infinite-use informative tool to highlight specific things like tools, traps and important characters/targets, while separating it from the disguise system altogether. Said disguise system was also reworked so certain disguises won't fool specific "enforcers" who are considered "more perceptive than most", but otherwise fool everyone else, which is not only more consistent but ''far'' less irritating to play with.

* EvilIsSexy: While the saints are more of a FetishRetardant than anything, [[TheDragon Layla Stockton]] and [[OnlySaneMan Jade Nguyen]] are this.

* ToughActToFollow: 2012's ''Absolution''. The game itself isn't ''bad'', but suffered from a form of ''[[VideoGame/DukeNukemForever Duke Nukem]]'' syndrome. It had huge shoes to fill, and it didn't. By association with ''Blood Money'', it's an inferior game. Many comparisons have been drawn between this and how fellow stealth game ''VideoGame/SplinterCell: Conviction'' was similarly fun, but not in the silent ninja way that one imagines ''Splinter Cell'' to be.

* HilariousInHindsight: [[LetsPlay/{{Markiplier}} Shut up Wade!]], though Mark had been active for a few months when the game came out.

** [[HomelessPigeonPerson Birdie]], [[DarkChick Jade]], [[TheBaroness Layla]], [[PsychoForHire Wade]], Dexter (''"Yee-ha! Lemme tell ya, I don't ordinarily yee-ha. But that was a fuckin' yee-ha! Fuckin' Christmas!"'') and [[SympatheticInspectorAntagonist Faulkner]] are all instantly-recognizable template characters, which means there doesn't need to be a lot of exposition/development in order for us to relate to them.

* BizarroEpisode: The more the game ages, ''Absolution'' seems like more of an oddity, experimenting with new elements like increasingly linear gameplay with [[ActionizedSequel more action-y elements]] and a grittier, Hollywood-style tone, but in a franchise known for its sprawling sandbox stealth and much subtler ConspiracyThriller-type atmosphere. While [[ContestedSequel the merits of the game itself are up for debate]], the fact that IOI have veered away from this direction so hard, [[RevisitingTheRoots returning to their usual roots]] in the ''VideoGame/WorldOfAssassinationTrilogy'', and has cemented ''Absolution'' as an unusual entry in the series.

!![[center:'''YMMV Navigation:''' [[{{YMMV/Hitman}} Franchise]] | ''[[YMMV/HitmanCodename47 Codename 47]]'' | ''[[YMMV/Hitman2SilentAssassin Silent Assassin]]'' | ''[[YMMV/HitmanContracts Contracts]]'' | ''[[YMMV/HitmanBloodMoney Blood Money]]'' | ''Absolution'' | [[YMMV/Hitman2016 2016]] | ''[[YMMV/Hitman2 Hitman 2]]'' | ''[[YMMV/Hitman3 Hitman 3]]'' ]]

* AuthorsSavingThrow: Purist Mode, a harder difficulty, for fans who were annoyed at 47's newfound psychic abilities, the cumbersome HUD, and the Instinct mechanic.