The pitch dark world of Agent 47 is one of the series’ hallmarks. The universe in which 47 resides is a floor drain lined with scum, a polluted pit of the worst humanity has to offer. 47 is the man with the bleach.

It’s hardly surprising a series exclusively focused on the sport of hunting and executing facsimiles of human beings would be so sinister. It always has been. It’s a game where the slaughterfication of someone else is your objective, not a side effect. Death is an end, not a means.

It’s interesting, however, that behind the stern jowls of its bald, besuited lead – and amongst all the brooding seriousness that surrounds him – there was always a certain blackly comic element to proceedings. Take Hitman: Blood Money, for instance. There’s something Looney Tunes-esque about dropping a piano on somebody from above, or gunning a target down in a chicken suit. Grim, sure, but too absurd not to rate a giggle. 47 may be a humourless shell in a grimy world but that’s not to say his actions can’t be funny, albeit in a macabre kind of way.

It’s the opening level of Hitman: Absolution; the same one Mr. Ryan Clements hilariously blundered through a few days back. Back to the wall, perched on a narrow ledge outside of a guarded window, 47 can hear a henchman speaking on his phone. The man is elated; his doctor has just cleared him of a cancer scare.

“This is the best day of my life,” he says, which is 47’s cue to yank him through the window and drop him to a death he’d thought he’d just sidestepped. You can leave him be, of course, and sneak around behind him once he moves away from the windowsill, but if you’re in a hurry you’re able to bring the joyous hired goon back down to Earth in more ways than one.

Io Interactive art director Roberto Marchesi chuckles along with me at this point. It’s a moment that stands out in a fairly po-faced first few minutes to reassure players that, even after its extended hiatus, Hitman hasn’t forgotten how to balance its confronting cruelness with cheeky schadenfreude. Later Marchesi suggests we hide the bodies of two men we’d just taken care of in an upright locker or cupboard; it’s no accident that the embarrassing way 47 positions one behind the other would make even the steeliest coroner smirk.

More importantly, however, perhaps the greatest compliment one could pay Absolution at this stage is just how comfortable a Hitman fan will feel behind the controls from the get go. Absolution feels fundamentally familiar to Hitman games of yore; you’ll instantly slip back into the groove. Patient observation. Disguises. Death traps just waiting to be sprung. Classic Hitman tropes abound. In a later level 47 strolls into a strip club dressed in a freshly-acquired police uniform. Marchesi and I spot our target working the bar. I thread 47 across the floor of the club, weaving through the patrons either bustling around the bar or transfixed by the strippers gyrating above them. Our target leaves the bar for a private lap dance, and stops off for a leak before returning. When do you hit him, and how? It’s Hitman as it always was.

However, while it may remind you of an old game it doesn’t feel like an old game. Gamers demand a lot more functionality of their third-person action games in 2012, and Absolution delivers it. A stable cover system. Far more user-friendly movement and shooting controls. Increased assists for less demanding players. Absolution – like Square Enix’s Sleeping Dogs before it – also finds ways of creating competition within its unashamedly single-player experience with Contracts Mode, which is explained here.

While the similarities between Absolution and Blood Money are clear, both of these games are very much products of their own times. Nowadays connectivity is a virtual must, and clunky controls are an instant turn off.

“Yeah, I mean, every game is a concession, to a certain degree,” says Marchesi. “This game here is probably the Hitman game that we have wanted to do all along, but now finally we have the tools and the technology to be able to do it.”

“When I think about the problems we have solved now and the challenges that we want to pose ourselves to the next project, we already know how we want to push it, this is the game we wanted to make all along. We couldn’t do it before.

“And it’s not an easy game. I'm really scared that people freak out when we say accessible, because accessible is really not a bad thing, it just appeals better to the player. For instance, the cover system. We spent so much time tweaking it and the animations Agent 47 takes to go into cover, round cover and come out of it. They feel very responsive. So when you control the guy, he’s doing what you’re telling him, when you’re telling him to do it. He’s not showing you a fancy animation or there’s some kind of lag before he does the controls. And this is also what makes a game accessible, just the fact that you are in control of the character you have on screen; it makes a huge difference to how you perceive the game.

“No game is perfect, no game is ever going to have that 100 out of 100, but this is the best Hitman game so far, by a longshot, and it’s very much true to the legacy. It has all the elements of the old games. There’s no mistaking it.”

With Dishonored out now I ask Marchesi the same question I asked Absolution director Tore Blystad some months back: why has it taken so long for someone else to make a sandbox-style assassin game reminiscent of Io’s most near-and-dear property?

“Well, because it’s tough. And I’m not trying to make us smarter than we are, because if we were we would’ve done it in less time!” Marchesi laughs. “But Absolution is a massive game, just in complexity. That’s also why we focused so much on making it easier to understand, because the game can do so much.”

“You can have so many controls. Just take precision shooting, which is nothing to do with point shooting. If you just lightly squeeze your trigger instead of just pulling it you will get a better shot; for a gamer maybe it’s not very awkward but it’s a tad over the usual mechanics.

“Most buttons on the controllers have two functions, at least; we have holds and taps, which basically already doubles the number of controls on your face buttons. Then you have modifiers on your face buttons. Then you have different squeeze sensitivities, so the amount of options that you have at your fingertips is huge. It’s a complex game; you have to be able to get to cover, you have to be able to escape from cover, you have to be able to pick up objects, get into disguises. So just figuring out where to put the different buttons has been a tremendous undertaking and has gone through so much playtesting and figuring out, ‘Okay, why don’t people understand this now? Why are you doing this? Why is this not natural to them?’

“As developers it’s super easy just to get snowblind at some point and feel like people just don’t get it, but the fact is they get it, we’re just not good enough at telling them.”

Hitman: Absolution is due out November 20.

 Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can chat to him about games, cars and Leon: The Professional on IGN here or find him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.

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