I fiddled with the PS2/Xbox era ones and they were fun if a little primitive. Reading reviews for Hitman III, which are great, and wondering if it's the gaming press that I shouldn't trust or if they're actually good. Should I bother picking up I & II before picking up III? Should I pick up III?
Edit - thanks for all the honest replies. I trust you fuckers way more than I do the gaming shills in the press.
They're fun, but they're 'new' fun. Whereas the old Hitman games had smaller maps and was a test of patience and trial & error, the new Hitman games.. are not. You can see through walls and you can select which way you want to kill someone from a list and it will direct you to how to do that by having quest marker type things. You can turn this off though if you want to work it out on your own, and you're not locked into killing people in the ways listed in the menu.
The maps are far bigger than the old games, which is where the new guidance system doesn't feel too bad if you want to save yourself hours upon hours just running around doing jack shit. Having the smaller, tighter maps allowed for more progress to be made when you were dicking around, but now there's huge empty portions of the maps that don't appear to really be used at all.
In short they're still fun, but they're 'modern fun'. They're easier, the maps are bigger but kind of empty feeling, and you don't stumble onto something useful by just dicking around. 47 also talks more, a lot of people seem to have issue with this, they've tried to make him sarcastically funny with his one liners in some maps and sometimes it feels kind of forced.