Reviewed by Eva Cekanska
The original Hitman: Codename 47 was an incredible experience. The game was flawed, buggy and too short, but the things that it did right provided simply spine tingling possibilities. The player took control of Agent 47, a bald-headed assassin with a variety of missions to kill a variety of bad guys for a variety of reasons.
The first time I snuck through a sewer and choked the life out of a Yakuza boss with my fibre-wire I knew this game would have a permanent place in the library. Its sequel, the aptly named Hitman 2 provided more branching paths, rag doll physics for the dead baddies and a golfclub. The third installment in the series, Hitman: Contracts was a bit of a setback, with lagging graphics, awkward controls and at times boring levels, for the first time Hitman had taken a step back. The newest release in the Hitman franchise, Blood Money, is another step forward for 47, but our titular character suffers a few stumbles along his way.
The most notable difference between Contracts and Blood Money in my opinion is the graphics. We have now ascended into the next generation of gaming, and Hitman makes use of a few neat tricks that make the game look a lot better. The shadows are far more realistic this time around, and the enemy as well as player characters have all received significant upgrades. The rag doll physics remain in place making for some eerily realistic-looking death animations.
In the sound department, Hitman also comes through with flying colours. Agent 47’s cold British accent is as chilling as ever whenever he delivers one of his sporadic lines of dialogue. The guns sound violent, and the sound of a hammer smashing through somebody’s skull is as wrong as one might expect. There is a fair bit of ‘colorful’ language in the game, to the point where I even found myself being shocked by some of the things that were said, but this isn’t a family game.
Hitman pushes its M rating by having plenty of blood, violence and gore. That violence and gore however are often entirely in the player’s hands. Allow me to present you with an example of this precise mechanic at work. In one of the earlier levels, Agent 47 enters a room. In it is a tied up man riding a small toy horse on a spring; in front of him, a gangster holding a canister of gas. The gangster is reciting some very cliche lines akin to something one might hear in a bad Tarantino movie (and no, that is not an oxymoron, merely something that could happen, though it hasn’t yet). The player has several choices. You can avoid the pair altogether, climb the banisters up to the second level and crouch past them. You can kill the gangster and leave the tied up man to his own devices, or you can kill the gangster and kill the tied up man. There is something terribly wrong with killing a blindfolded man by shooting him in the face, but truth be told, he really should have just stopped screaming for help after I killed the bad guy.
Hitman provides plenty of opportunities for acts of extreme violence, but it does not push them on the player.
Furthermore, the ways in which the targets are to be eliminated vary: from poison, through choking to the aforementioned sledgehammer to the back of the head (complete with having to press a button in order to dislodge it afterward). Much like Hitman 2, the player has several choices in executing the mission, but there is a slight difference and this ends up being the biggest problem the game has. While playing the other three games I often found myself confused as to where exactly I should go, or how exactly I should execute a mission. Finding all the different ways proved to be a very rewarding experience, and one of the main reasons to play through the game multiple times. Blood Money streamlines the game for a broader audience by providing ‘helpful’ tips. This wouldn’t be so bad if the helpful tips weren’t step by step instructions. It reaches to the point where the game literally tells you ‘go through the door’, ‘head upstairs’, ‘pick up syringe’, taking any and all exploration out of the game. It can feel like a glorified tutorial much of the time.
All this aside, Blood Money is an excellent stealth assassin simulation, and a great game. The missions are varied, the weapons and ways in which the player can kill his targets are plentiful, and the game looks and sounds really good. Minor control problems persist, but they don’t take away from the overall experience. Despite the fact Hitman has been somewhat dumbed down for a mainstream audience, the game remains extremely fun and worth playing by any fan of the past three titles.