>>1653067
Codename 47 was awful.
Silent Assassin was better, but not by much; running can blow your cover and the chloroform (non-lethal KO) takes forever to prep and use. Bullets are projectiles instead of hitscan. Plus the story was awful: 47 retires to a secluded church where his priest friend gets kidnapped by some vodka nigger who demands a shitton of ransom money, but doesn't even leave any details about where to contact him when it's time to collect. So essentially, 47 is going around doing an assassination fundraiser and in the end the bear-fucker breaks into the church where he first kidnapped the priest at the beginning of the game, and then lures 47 there to kill him without first demanding the ransom money which was the whole point of kidnapping the priest in the first place. It's really dumb.
Contracts is just Codename: 47 but with major improvements, due to the remastered missions from the first game. Bullets are hitscan (as they should be) and running doesn't fuck up your cover. Contracts also had the best atmosphere in the whole series, and the best OST. Jesper Kyd is amazing.
Blood Money is widely regarded as the best game in the series, due to the amazing gameplay and gun mods available. You also have the ability to disarm enemies, as well as CQC options such as shoving, fistfighting, and headbutting. You get remote-controlled bombs, and you can throw things, too. Makes for excellent gameplay with a large variety of ways to eliminate targets. The story was pretty good, too, just letting 47 be 47, just doing assassinations, which is what the whole series was supposed to be about in the first place. This time a rival agency enters the fray and 47 is forced to take them out.
Absolution, or Absoluteshit, as it's better known around /v/, is where the series drops off. Once again, good graphics do not a good game make. Throwables are lock-on, gunplay is generic, no gun mods, and the CQC system is QTE trash. On Purist (highest) difficulty, 2 punches can kill you. Seriously. Disguise system is replaced with the 'instinct' system, where you have a limited amount of 'instinct' that lets you basically have clairvoyant vision that tells you NPC patrol patterns and lets you see through walls, as well as slows down time. Casual shit supreme. The absolute worst part is that you need to use instinct to fool NPCs otherwise they'll see through your disguise, because apparently, for example, every cop in the NYPD knows every other single cop in the whole entire city, and the only way to fool them is to reach up to your police cap and tilt it down slightly to hide your face, and apparently this is something that requires 'stamina' to be able to do and won't last forever. Seriously, what the fuck were they thinking? Storywise...not good. 47's handler, Diana Burnwood, discovers that The Agency is breeding clones and intends to use them as future contract killers like 47. She saves one of them, a little girl named Victoria, and runs off, so then the director of The Agency, Travis I think his name is, tasks 47 with eliminating her and rescuing Victoria. Surprising nobody, 47 saves Victoria and evades The Agency, but then a rival arms developer, some hick named Dexter, kidnaps the girl and 47 has to save her. I don't like how they try to paint 47 of some kind of superhero when he was born and bred to be a killer, which is what the series is supposed to be about, he's not a babysitter. For the majority of the game he tries to pawn her off to other caretakers, such as nuns in a church. Half of your targets are perverted sex freaks and white trash. The stupidest thing in this whole ordeal is that Dexter, who's a multimillionaire, is trying to sell Victoria off for 'hundreds of thousands' of dollars...when he clearly already makes way more money than that in the first place due to his arms dealership business. I suppose I don't need to tell you how this ends but I'll do it anyway: Victoria gets saved, 47 kills Dexter, as well as Travis, and SUPRISE, Diana Burnwood was alive the whole time, 47 didn't really kill her (but he did shoot her). Roll credits.
I couldn't tell you about the other games because I stopped playing after the idiocy that was Absolution.