The Hitman series is back after a long hiatus with Hitman: Absolution for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. The last Hitman game, Hitman: Blood Money, came out in 2006 and since then there's been a dearth of thoughtful sneaky killing games .

Emphasizes problem-solving and stealth over fighting.

Several missions feel limited and uninspired; Instinct mechanic hurts the series' feel.

Like the previous titles, the game consists of missions that require you to assassinate predetermined targets. To help you accomplish your objectives, you're given a range of weaponry, intel, and abilities, and it's up to you to put all three to good use.

Fantastic visuals; great stealth assassinations; user-created missions

Early climax; frustratingly steep learning curve

Hitman: Absolution is the story of an Agent 47 gone rogue. You are contracted to kill your former handler, Diana Burnwood, now thought to be a traitor, but upon finding her, Diana reveals that she was blacklisted for rescuing the tortured subject of the Agency's cruel experiments, a young girl...

Lots of choices to complete objectives; freedom in approaching those choices; beautiful graphics; lots of replayability in contracts mode

Escape missions are one-off; levels are smaller and segmented; keyboard controls can be cumbersome

IO Interactive sure is lucky that Richard ended up liking Absolution in spite of some of those major problems. If I'd spent a decade training a legion of hardcore assassination simulator fans, the absolute last thing I'd want to do is piss them off.

Still Hitman; gorgeous levels; very replayable

Glitchy AI; appalling story; bad stealth

Long time Hitman fans were justifiably nervous about the direction of this series after its infamous "Nun Commando" trailer.  For those of you who missed it, it featured a set of sexy nuns, stripping out of their habits to reveal hooker attire, and then attempting to blow up Agent 47's hotel room...

was released more than six years ago, but I feel that it aged better than many games of its time, and this only made fans of this assassination series by IO Interactive more antsy as the developers spent years away from the franchise that made them famous.

Hitman: Absolution came out earlier this year, and we've been using it since in our graphics card tests. Today we are presenting the scores of about 50 different GPUs and SLI/Crossfire combinations for this action game.

I expected to be disappointed by Hitman: Absolution, but I actually had a good time with it. Story mode alone is worth the price of entry, and is well worth playing multiple times if your first run wasn't on the hardest difficulty (trust me, the hardest difficulty is a joy to play).

Remember when Hollywood tried to make a Hitman movie? Remember how bad it sucked? Apparently so does Square Enix; as they're seemingly trying to make up for it by delivering Hitman: Absolution , the latest game in the long running stealth series that's easily the most cinematic and polished game in...

There are very few stealth franchises that handle the core mechanics of the genre better than the Hitman games, and Absolution continues the tradition brilliantly. While it stumbles in spots and some levels feel out of place, this is the best-playing Hitman yet, and contains some of the most...