Hitman: Absolution HD (EP)

There are already several extensive guides for this achievement on the Hitman Absolution page. I’m doing this solution just so that if you happen to be on the HD version of the game, you don’t need to search further.

This achievement basically requires you to do kills with various weapons until you get a proficiency in them, and unlock a “play style” for it. Unfortunately, in the original game, sometimes kills don’t get registered. Also, some players have been doing these kills in the tutorial section that has no scoring available, thereby glitching the achievement. To be safe, therefore, I’d suggest that you avoid the tutorial mission altogether.

The majority of my solution will be done in the second mission, "The King of Chinatown". A lot of these would involve taking out the relatively isolated enemies in this level. For other styles not available in this mission, I’ll make sure to highlight them.

This being said, I’d therefore expect you to be relatively proficient with "The King of Chinatown" to know exactly where to locate the items and enemies to unlock your styles on.

Another point to note is that for some styles these kills can be done on random, non-interact civilians (i.e., anyone, when using instinct, that doesn’t appear in yellow or red), while others must be done solely on civilians that you can interact with (i.e., either targets, or NPCs that give a disguise). I’ve tested the kills out, so the solutions described below will work regardless of the type of NPCs that I’m asking you to do them on.

A final point is that you don’t need to complete the mission objectives to save the play styles. They’ll unlock when the requirements are met, after which you can reload the mission or checkpoint.

There are a total of 20 play styles to unlock. I’ll be doing all these on Normal difficulty. Note that for the requirements, I list most of them as “undetected” because at times, I raised an alarm when doing them, and the style didn’t unlock.

Dynamite Harry
Requirement: Five kills with remote explosives
This is easily done on "The King of Chinatown". Head to the king’s car, and pick up the remote explosive at the top of the stairs there (there’s a lone policeman here so either subdue or ignore him). Quickly run into a crowd, drop the explosive, and run away. Detonate the explosive, and you should unlock the play style effortlessly.

Sandman
Requirement: Three undetected subdues in a single mission
“The King of Chinatown” has three easy targets to subdue, and this is best done with Undertaker. Head straight to the alley beside the tattoo shop leading to the dealer’s house. Sabotage the wire board to lure the lone policeman away, and then sneak into the dealer’s room. Subdue him, and hide his body.

Grab a bottle, and wait for the policeman to return to his post. Toss the bottle close to the staircase to lure him in. Once he finishes examining the area, and turn his back, quickly run up to subdue, and hide him.

Head to the king’s car. Grab the bottle here, and toss it at the dumpster near the car to lure the policeman towards it. Subdue him, and hide his body there.

This completes the requirement to unlock Sandman.

Undertaker
Requirement: Dump five bodies (undetected) in a single mission
Following on Sandman, hit the car alarm. This will make the king walk into the area. Subdue him, and toss him into the dumpster as well. This would be your 4th hidden body.

Next head to the kitchen (where there’s a manhole on the left, near the mission exit). Go into the right side of the kitchen, and that’s your 5th easy target to subdue and hide.

Spook
Requirement: Three kills with handgun eliminations in a single mission
The first three enemies in “The King of Chinatown” (dealer, policeman at dealer’s house and policeman at king’s car) will give you this. Instead of subduing them, walk up behind them when equipping the Silverballers, and press to perform a handgun elimination.

This one should unlock even if you’re detected, but I did it undetected anyway.

Bank Robber
Requirement: Use three human shields in a single mission
The first three enemies in “The King of Chinatown” (dealer, policeman at dealer’s house and policeman at king’s car) will give you this. Instead of subduing or killing them, walk up behind them when equipping the Silverballers, and press to take them as a human shield. Make sure to press to knock them out. The style only seems to unlock after I knock my last target out.

Also, the style should unlock even if you’re detected. However, it’s definitely easier to do a human shield when you approach a target from the back, so just do it as quietly as possible.

Update for this play style: A few comments mentioned that this play style doesn't unlock accordingly. If that happens, please use the level "Burn", which is under the "Operation Sledgehammer" set of missions. It's the one in the burning warehouse with the SWAT-looking guys. After grabbing three of these heavy soldiers as human shields, the play style should unlock.

Piano Man
Requirement: Five undetected fibre wire kills in a single mission
We’re doing this in, you guess it, “The King of Chinatown”. You easily perform the garrotte kills on the first three enemies (dealer, policeman at dealer’s house and policeman at king’s car). For the third kill, make sure to hide the body.

Use the car alarm to lure the king into the alley, and do the 4th kill on him. Proceed to the kitchen area, and garrotte the last guy at the right side of the kitchen.

Sometimes, when hiding the third body, a food stall owner may randomly notice you. She’ll then run to the car for an easy kill as well, after which you didn’t even need to head to the kitchen.

Berserker
Requirement: Five axe kills in a single mission
Well, there’s an axe in “The King of Chinatown” – at the tattoo shop where you sabotage the electrical box, head all the way to the end of path, using the shops as a right wall.

Pick the axe up, and start swinging it at random NPCs. This one should unlock by killing anyone in the crowd. If it doesn’t, just spam the axe on food stall owners and policemen.

Obviously doesn’t need to be undetected.

Gunslinger
Requirement: Five revolver kills in a single mission
Most policemen have a revolver. Silently kill one to grab the gun, and maybe silently kill a couple more to gain ammo. After that, simply go crazy on the crowd. If you don’t aim well, it may take three to four shots to kill someone, so you’d need to start gunning policemen to find ammo.

Tank
Requirement: Take damage multiple times
Should be five times, so if you get shot by five bullets in a single confrontation with an enemy, this should unlock. I’m not entirely sure though because I got this even without trying when going for some of those reckless kills, like Beserker and Gunslinger.

Champion
Requirement: Five successful unarmed attacks in a single mission
Use the first three enemies (dealer, policeman at dealer’s house and policeman at king’s car) to do the fights, and then lure the king with the car alarm for your 4th. Head to the kitchen for the last one.

To do this, do not equip any weapon. Face the target from the front, and attack them with . Perform the QTE that follows (simple button presses) to successfully down them – I’m not sure if a successful attack actually kills them, but I doubt so.

Pitcher
Requirement: Five undetected thrown weapon kills in a single mission
I’d recommend using the knife for this one in (cough, cough) “The Kingdom of Chinatown”. There’s a knife at a food stall near the exit. Quickly grab, and holster it. Head to the dealer’s house, sabotage the electrical box, etc. The kills in the following sequence: dealer, policeman at dealer’s house, policeman at king’s car, king (use car alarm to lure), kitchen food stall helper.

To do the kill, press to aim until you see a red circle on the target’s head, and then press to throw the weapon for an instant kill.

You may want to stash the bodies after each kill, but make sure you pull the knife out of their heads – it may not be possible to retrieve the weapon once the bodies are hidden.

Brutus
Requirement: Five knife kills in a single mission
If you do what was described in Pitcher, you should get this as well. That was how I got both at the same time. If you don’t, just grab the weapon, and start knifing everyone you see.

Reaper Man
Requirement: Use point-shooting to execute eight people in a single mission
Okay, this one is definitely tough, glitchy, or both.

To do pointing-shooting, you’d need instinct (yellow bar at the bottom right of your screen). With instinct, hold to activate it, and then to initiate point-shooting. When doing so, the instinct meter will decrease. Before it fully depletes, you must use to aim for the heads of your targets, and then press to mark them. Press to begin the shooting.

My initial idea was to subdue the dealer to gain as much instinct as I could, and then unload eight shots (took me a long time to manage eight heads in one full instinct bar, to be honest). However, the play style didn’t unlock. I eventually did the kills one-by-one, and it popped.

So, I’d recommend the following sequence:
1. Dealer – Activate point-shooting, aim for head, shoot. Hide the body to regain instinct.
2. Policeman near dealer – Ditto.
3. Policeman near king’s car – Ditto.
(Sometimes when hiding this body, a random food stall owner may see you to give you another kill, so you’d need to hide her if you choose to point-shoot her.)
4. King (lure to position with car alarm) – Ditto.
(If you kill the food stall owner, you won’t have enough room to hide the king’s body, and will be left with very little instinct.)
5. Food stall helper at right side of kitchen at the back of the map - Activate point-shooting, aim for head, shoot. Hide the body to regain instinct.
From now onwards, you won’t be able to hide any more bodies because there are no more “quiet” kills.
6. Go to the beginning of the level. There are two food stall owners to point-shoot for your 6th and 7th kill.
You’d now need to engage in gun fights with policemen. Get some headshots to refill your instinct, and once it’s about half filled, point-shoot the policemen. The play style should unlock on the 8th individual kill.

There may be an easier way to do this, but unfortunately when I tried doing more than one head shot during the point-shooting, it wasn’t counting. The style only unlocked after I did the head shot execution one target after another.

Maestro
Requirement: Expand a round of sniper ammo (five) with head shots, without missing a target in a single mission
The dealer’s room in “The King of Chinatown” has a sniper rifle, on the table to the right of the room when you enter. Grab it, and do the first kill on the dealer as he’s looking out of the window. I’d recommend doing a precision headshot (gently press to go into slow motion, and then press to shoot) because you’d need 47 precision headshot kills for The Russian Hare achievement.

After the kill, quickly hide in the container in the room. Wait until the policeman leaves the room. Head down, and from his back, perform the second precision head shot kill. Run back into the dealer’s room, and hide until the alarm status is “cautious”.

Now, go to the window where the dealer was at. Take aim at the pavilion where the king usually is. Perform a precision head shot kill on a policeman. Hide in the container, and wait until all the policeman who flood your location leaves, and the status returns to “cautious”.

Rinse and repeat until all five bullets are used on precision head shots. Remember, do not press to reload, or the play style won’t unlock.

This was actually the final style that I unlocked, and the achievement popped even before the play style notice appeared.

We’re done with “The King of Chinatown” now, finally! 14 styles, relatively easily completed in one mission!

Let’s head to “Welcome to Hope”.

Bartender
Requirement: Seven bottle kills in a single mission
There are many missions with bottles, but “Welcome to Hope” has a multitude of bottles all in proximity, making it easier to unlock the play style. Once mission begins, head right into the toilet, and tamper with the lights. This triggers the bar fight. Walk around grabbing bottles, and find targets that shows an option to “attack”. Attack them () to complete one bottle kill. Do it for a total of seven times to unlock the style.

Triggering the bar fight makes it easier to do things like hitting people on their heads with bottles.

Glass Cannon
Requirement: Three shotgun kills without taking damage in a single mission
After triggering the bar fight in “Welcome to Hope”, head to the vent (top left corner of toilet), and crawl into an office area. There’s a shotgun there. Leave through the door, take aim at the fight crowd, and spam the shots. You should unlock the play style instantaneously.

Viking
Requirement: Five baseball bat kills in a single mission
The same toilet in “Welcome to Hope” where you trigger the bar fight has a cubicle that says “private”. Go in to find a baseball bat. Go crazy on the crowd.

Needle Pumper
Requirement: Five syringe kills in a single mission
Unfortunately, you’d have to get this in the mission "Rosewood", which is truly one of the hardest in the game in my opinion due to the large number of enemies around.

In the second part of "Rosewood" (Orphanage Halls), you begin in an elevator shaft. Climb up the ledge, wait for the two enemies to walk away, and then subdue the nearest one. Take the disguise to make things a little easier.

Make your way to the area where two enemies are torturing a security guard, and another one looking on. Head to the first room on the right to find a syringe (there’s also a fuse here if you’re doing the mission objective). Go forward to the staircase, and wait for the left enemy to walk away. Kill the lone enemy with the syringe – either walk behind and use or do a thrown kill. The thrown kill is more epic. Trust me.

Remove the syringe from the enemy, and quickly hide the body in the cabinet. Head down the stairs, and activate the checkpoint. Make a right turn, and quickly hug the left wall. Wait for the enemy boss guy to gather his troops, and quickly head to the right alcove (where another fuse is), and get into the room opposite where the colourful balls is.

(While waiting for the enemies to go away, you should receive an alert about blood pool noticed for the first enemy you kill. Ignore it.)

Now, you need to be extremely careful for the next two kills. Make sure nobody is looking, kill the enemy nearest to the pool of balls. If you can, hide him into the pool of balls.

Now, go to the enemy opposite the balls, and kill him. I left him there to save time.

(Note that when doing these two kills, an enemy who patrols outside may see you if he’s near the window, so be very sure that he isn’t looking when you do your thing.)

Sneakily backtrack to the stairs, and head up, while being careful that the enemy up here isn’t looking at you (he was the one who noticed the blood pool of his dead colleague earlier). Kill him with the syringe.

Now, head back to where you found the syringe earlier to find three enemies. Quickly kill one of them with a quick syringe throw to get your 5th kill for the play style.

Not going to lie. This one is tough as nuts.

Finally, let’s load up last section (Chinese New Year) of the mission "Hunter and Hunted".

Jinx
Requirement: Two simultaneous accident kills
Go to the tattoo shop – from the beginning, just hug the last wall, and keep going straight. You’ll reach a staircase going down on the left to where a corrupt cop meets one of the targets. Ignore the stairs, head right, and go further forward to find the tattoo shop on the left. You’ll see a food stall owner (Chinese dude with white uniform) here.

Wait until one of the targets come over, and start saying “Hey, you!” This triggers the event that sees the target bringing the white-shirt guy to an alley to ask for roast duck (actually, no). Before that happens, enter the fenced area nearby, and walk up the catwalk. You should notice a loading crane to the left. Wait for the target and the white-shirt guy to walk underneath it, and quickly shoot the chain to kill both of them. This requires precise timing, obviously.

Dynasty Warrior
Requirement: Eight kills with the katana
After jinxing the two earlier, walk back to the tattoo shop. You’ll find an array of melee weapons at the front of it (what do they actually do inside this shop?). Grab the katana here, and start slicing people apart. Any random person in the crowd will add to the count. Accumulate eight kills to unlock your last play style.

Achievement unlocked!

NOTE: This is a guide on how to unlock the achievement if it glitches. If you want to know how to unlock the play styles, then check out neeker75's excellent guide.

If this solution does work, then please let me know and I can add assurances and/or additional guidance to this solution.

Based on feedback so far...
It worked! = 1
Didn't work! = 1


Sorry that this is a very long solution, but there are risks involved and I want to explain in as much details as possible what those risks are and what you can expect to happen if you proceed.

It seems that one thing that hasn't changed with the 2019 remastered version are glitchy achievements and if you're like me, then Jack of All Trades did not pop for you. The most likely cause of the problem is completing a play style on the prologue mission. For some bizarre reason, play styles unlocked in that mission do not count towards the achievement, yet once you've unlocked that play style you can't do it again to make it count. The bottom line is that, unless IOI release a patch, you are going to have to unlock all the play styles again.

Firstly, selecting a New Game will not fix the problem. All that will do is reset your position in the campaign. You will still have all your unlocks: challenges, weapons, disguises, and... you guessed it, play styles.

The simplest solution is to delete your game save and start with a blank profile, only this time ensuring you don't unlock any play styles on the prologue mission. But I'd already completed every challenge on all maps, except those annoying shooting range ones on Birdie's Gift, and I certainly didn't want to lose all my hard work.

Fortunately, I found a way to keep all of my unlocks and unlock this achievement. Frustratingly, you are going to have to re-do all the play styles again.

However...

A. I will take no responsibility for you permanently losing your game save.
B. What I'm about to share, did work for me, but I cannot guarantee it will work for you.
C. Read all of the instructions carefully before doing this.
D. Finally, proceed entirely at your own risk.

Before I provide the solution, I need to explain how profiles are synced with the Xbox live cloud. However, it's quite possible that some of this might change in future, so make sure you're up-to-date.

When you start a game, if it cannot detect a game save on your Xbox, then it will check with the cloud, and if one exists it will download that. Otherwise it will create a new empty game save on your Xbox.
When you exit a game, the local game save is copied to the cloud. This is done in the background. Basically if you're not in Absolution and the game save on your Xbox is different to the cloud, then the cloud will be overwritten with your local save. Your local game save is king!

1. You need to begin by quitting Absolution and then making sure that you go offline: Settings->General->Network->Go Offline. To be really sure, I got my Xbox to forget its wireless network setting for my router too. If you're using a wired connection, then make sure that the cable is unplugged and remains so. You must not reconnect until step 5.
2. Move to Absolution on your home screen or in your games, press Start and select Manage Games. You need to delete the game save for your Xbox profile. You don't need to deleted the Reserved Space file. This is just a file that contains the latests patches and updates and has nothing to do with your game save. If you do accidentally delete it, don't panic! It will automatically re-download next time you're back online and start the game.
3. Start Absolution. When you select your profile, you should get a message to say that a game save could not be found so it will create a new one. Proceed and start a new game. You've already done the hard work, so play on Easy! Get through the prologue without doing anything extraordinary that might unlock a play style. For example, don't get shot to death as that might unlock Tank. If you see any play styles unlock, then quit, and go back to step 2.
4. Now you're going to have to get at least as far as Rosewood (for the Needle Pumper play style). Possibly some play styles will unlock as you work through the missions. That is perfectly fine! Then use neeker75's guide to unlock all of the play styles. ALL PLAY STYLES CAN BE UNLOCKED ON EASY. Most can be done in The King of Chinatown.
NOTE When you unlock the last play style the achievement will NOT pop. You cannot unlock achievements offline, but it will store the unlock in a queue. When you go back online the process of unlocking will begin. This does not always happen immediately and it can take time, but I'll explain more about this in a moment...
5. Once you have unlocked all twenty play styles it is important to exit Absolution, go to Manage game, and delete the temporary game save for your profile. Do not start Absolution again just yet!
6. Go back online in Settings->General->Network. You may need to re-enter your network password if you got your Xbox to forget it like I did. If you're using a wired connection, then plug the cable back in.
7. Restart your Xbox; you'll find this option on the last tab when you press the Home button.
8. Once your Xbox has restarted, load Absolution. When you select your profile you should see a screen saying that it is syncing with the cloud. Your original game save is now being downloaded to your Xbox. Once you get to the menu screen you should have all your previous unlocks back. Phew!

For me, I restarted my Xbox again. When I did this, the achievement visibly and audibly popped when it got back to the Xbox home screen - what a delightful sound!

POTENTIAL ISSUES:
i. When you load Absolution at step 8 and select your profile it says that it could not find a game save so it will create a new one. Do not accept this! Immediately quit Absolution: press the Home button, press the Start button on Absolution, and select Quit. This happened for one of two reasons: 1) Your Xbox is not properly online, or 2) You did not delete the temporary game save you used to unlock the play styles again.
ii. The achievement refuses to pop or you go to your achievements and it still says it's not unlocked. For me, when I did my second restart, the achievement popped, but when I went to my achievements it said 37/38 and Jack of All Trades was still listed as unlocked; I'd already unlocked all the other achievements. However, when I went to Recent Achievements I could see it there unlocked. So be patient. I believe it can take up to 72 hours for everything to sync properly. Mine properly synced in about one hour.
iii. I struggled horribly to unlock the Maestro play style (snipe five head shots on one round). I tried several times to do it in "The King of Chinatown", but it just never happened for me. In the end I got it on the Streets of Hope part of the Shaving Lenny mission. I went down to the end of the street, near the railroad crossing that comes down when you approach it, and took my shots from there.

I hope this helps. Please let me know in the comments if something is not clear. Also let me know if it works or doesn't work for you.