Hitman: Blood Money
Thursday, 27 December 2007 00:00
WOW... just... WOW!After playing Hitman: Blood Money (the fourth in the series) I’m almost speechless. Now, I loved Hitman 2, but like many was disappointed with Contracts; thankfully Blood Money is a return to form for the Baldy Killer.
The name of the game here is money, how you earn it and what you can do with it forms a fairly decent chunk of the extras this game has to offer (on top of the game play improvements that is) the amount of money you earn per 'job' differs depending on your approach and the general success with which you pull it off, for example the more times you are spotted the less cash will be paid to you.
Once you have earned this 'Blood Money' it is yours to spend in a number of different ways, you can upgrade your weapons, give those old favourites the Ballers silencers and laser sights (an upgrade that a fellow gamer is finding a lot of fun). You can buy Intel while in the field on a job, which can sometimes prove invaluable and you can even lower the frequency and accuracy with which you appear in the newspapers for the times you went a bit crazy and shot the whole damn place up.
This brings me onto the Newspaper stat system that has been introduced; all of the stats that were previously presented to you on a stat screen are now presented in Newspaper format. You’ll see all the usual things you would expect in a newspaper like how many people got killed, whether they know who the killer is (plus sometimes an actual fotofit of you which changes depending on your rating (the sneakier you were the worse the likeness) there are also things you don’t usually get in The Times like shot accuracy (if you fired a gun that is), it also serves to show you how Wanted you are and it's using this info can decide whether you need to bribe anyone.
As you may be able to tell, it pays to be a silent Hitman, (plus it gets damn hard if you start shooting people) that’s not to say that the guards will know what you have been up to unless they saw you, but guns are noisy. You see, they have sorted the psychic guard problem, no more do you have to stay away from all guards after being spotted once, being a naughty Hitman I was spotted headbutting a guard (which is unassailably cool by the way) by another guards prying eyes, I proceeded to chuck him over a fence into the water below after stealing his clothes and gun. I was then still free to walk around the level without any suspicion being drawn to me, this all goes towards helping the game flow a lot better. Different routes through a mission are limited by your imagination (and skill / patience) and even in the first couple of levels you will see many options available to you to despatch your target.
Along with the guns/weapons and your trusty fibre wire and other silent kill paraphernalia they have implemented the booby trap method. Rig a small explosive on a dodgy wooden lift. BEEP! BOOM, FALL, SPLAT!! Or maybe give the target a nudge over his balcony so he can take a closer look at the scenery below, anything that can leave the impression of an accident benefits you in the long term (and is also a lot of fun to come up with and implement). Once the victims have passed away, there are ways to hide them to decrease the chances of you being found out, chuck them in a crate shut the lid (or as mentioned before) chuck them over a nearby cliff or out a window, you really feel more like a Hitman than previous incarnations.
The music is as good as ever, as before it's mostly orchestral and fantastically moody, fitting in with the maps you're on perfectly. The maps... THE MAPS! They’ve really improved things here. Now, some of the maps from contracts were ok but these are in a different league, the layout of the levels has clearly received a lot of care during the creation process, and the backdrops they sit on are of equal quality. The look of the game (great though it is) isn’t the most beautiful thing you will have played, it serves it’s purpose and chucks you into the atmosphere, has the HDR lighting and all the other real time shadows you’d expect from any modern game, and as we all know it’s the game play which makes a game, and this has game play and replayability in abundance.
It runs pretty damn well too, but I do have a decent system of an AMD 3200+, 2GB PC3200 RAM and a 256MB nVidia 6800GS. I turned down the textures one notch from Max, other than that, it's all at default settings for GFX (High) getting between 35-45 fps most of the time with slight dips when I run through a room full of people bustling and chatting but nothing major (and full of people is correct as sometimes is seems as though there are hundreds of the buggers).
People have complained about the control system and no, it isn’t perfect, but I have to say I don’t find it annoying or distracting, it’s just.. well.. not perfect. The steep learning curve? Well yeah it may be a bit steep and, yeah the first level (after the tutorial) was a bit of a bitch to start with, but it does make you get into Hitman mode sooner rather than later which is not a bad thing in my opinion.
I haven’t mentioned particular parts of levels really, the reason being I hate spoilers in reviews of games I’ve been itching to play for ages. Nothing worse than having the lifespan of a game cut down because you read something about a particularly cool despatch method. So I leave it up to you to find these things.
8.3
