My personal favourite is Far Cry 3.
Hitman Absolution is no match for previous Hitman games, particularly Blood Money, and leaves me feeling hollow. The maps are smaller, the new disguise system is a mess, they seem to have taken hints on stealth from Alpha Protocol and Splinter Cell: Conviction, and the story is so obnoxiously childish(Yet another fucking child to illicit sympathy?), that I can't find myself liking it much. It also enjoys taking control away from the player and fucking up their mission after they did things right, and also has lots of instantly locking doors that seal you into another area, and littering the environment with collectibles, which you can't get if the door locks on you. So if you want the highest score, you're going to have to explore the whole thing. While avoiding detection. Also, the game punishes the player for killing rather than knocking out, even when those people are mass murderers who are killing the nuns at the abbey that took 47 in. Break. Character. More.
xCom is good, just not really my thing.
Dishonored has the stupidest morality system, and is a try-hard stealth game. It really wants to be Hitman Blood Money, wants to be Theif, but it doesn't really work. It's poser stealth. Heck, some of the bodies just disappear (Not rats, really, the game stopped rendering them. I was laying out a pattern of bodies, came back, two had vanished. No rats in sight). The enemies are too weak for stealth to matter, except as a matter of personal pride (There are perks which make killed bodies disintegrate. Stealth is so optional here as to be irrelevant), and the story hamstrings the gameplay, and yet another sympathy-child plagues the story, which is cliche and boring. The setting is amazing, the levels are kind of awesome, and the lore is really interesting, and the gameplay can be fun if you're interested in being a brutal assassin, killing and hiding bodies. But the game will then spend the entire time calling you a monster for killing the other brutal killers in the city. And it doesn't even seem to realise the real moral implications of it's actions (Poisoning a plague medicine? Neutral. Giving a woman to a man who wants to kidnap her and make her his presumed sex-prisoner type thing? It's better than killing her! The game has terrible morals).
Far Cry 3 combines the tropical island setting from Far Cry, with the open world mechanics of Far Cry 2, but with some welcome changes: You've now got AI allies, there's a fast travel (Which I could do without, but oh well). There is now a whole ecosystem of animals (And hunting them is a key gameplay mechanic). The enemies are difficult, so difficult, that, at the start of the game (Only on midrange difficulty), one or two were enough to take me down. It actually encourage me to use stealth (And the limited stealth mechanics, melee takedowns and silenced weapons), actually work fairly well. Far Cry 3's probably my favourite game this year.
