Besides, the RPS review is very well written and puts the game into the series' context.
Exactly. And which every review should do.
I mean if it wouldn't matter, then don't fucking call it Hitman: Absolution.
Just like "Splinter Cell: Conviction" should have been called "Jason Bourne: The game"
or "SOCOM Confrontation" should have been called "Buggy crappy mess of a game"
or "SOCOM 4" should have been called "this is not like the PS2-SOCOM games"
or "Syndicate" should have been called "Generic futuristic boring first person shooter"
I mean they are calling it that way, so that fans of the Hitman series assume that it's at least on par with those games and buy it because of that.
Blood Money had it right gameplay wise. You had a really easy setting for the "meh, that's too difficult crowd". But the difficulty was fine anywhere else. Sandbox levels were gigantic and full of all sorts of ways of getting to your target. But this time, they had to also deliver to the "oh shiny" crowd. So they used an engine, that wasn't able to do a proper job, so they had to do chunk-levels. I would have been perfectly happy with Blood Money on 360 type graphics, if there was the same type of gameplay and the gigantic sandbox levels. They knew it from the start, so if all those other groups are way larger than the hitman fan group - fine. But then be honest and say "this is not like the original hitman games". Instead they tacked on difficulty settings, which were not thought through and called them "those are for the hitman series fans lol".
I never understood why they never released Blood Money 2 one or two years later using the same engine but new levels. Would have been totally fine with me.