$20 Game of The Week: Hitman – Blood Money (Xbox, PS2, PC)

Eidos/IO Interactive’s Hitman series has always been the thinking man’s stealth action game. You don’t into heavily fortified military bases to take out genocidal terrorists (most of the time), you are sneaking into public locations to eliminate a designated series of targets. Simply not being seen isn’t enough, you have to cover up evidence of your presence and eliminate any cause for suspicion. You don’t just hide in ventilation shafts and cardboard boxes. Often times you’ll have to disguise yourself and figure out how to sneak your weaponry onto the mission site. Your job isn’t just to kill your target and move on, you’ll also have to avoid (or reduce the possibility of) innocents being killed. After 2 successful games and a weaker third title, Hitman returns to top form, just in time for the next generation of gaming.

Once again you’ll play as Agent 47. You’ll travel throughout a number of places in South America, Europe, and the United States as you eliminate your marks. Many of your targets are real jerks, and the information you’re given does a good job of making you want to kill them. For instance, “Swing King’s” (your target in the game’s tutorial) faulty engineering led to the deaths of dozens of people when an amusement park ride collapsed, and an opera singer in a later mission was involved with a child prostitution ring. This entry makes extensive use of environmental features to help you come up with creative ways to kill the targets. You can plant bombs to feign accidents, poison drinks, and even set lethal traps by sabotaging everyday objects. After each mission, you’ll be rewarded for your kill depending on how much noise was made and how much evidence was left behind. The less suspicion you raise, the more money you’ll be paid and the less you’ll have to pay out in order to cover up your crime. If you don’t reduce your notoriety level, future missions will be that much harder. You can spend the extra cash left over to purchase weapon upgrades and find out intel about a target. Be warned though, the difficulty is much harder this time around, and you’ll have to make each move carefully as one wrong move can send an entire area’s worth of guards and policemen after you, costing thousands of dollars worth of ‘cleaning up’. This game’s major problem is the save system, which only grants you a limited amount of saves per level depending on the difficulty. Even worse, these saves are deleted should you exit the game, forcing you to either finish the level in one sitting or start it over from the beginning each time you play. Things like this can easily scare away casual players and new fans of the series.

Even so, Blood money offers the perfect glimpse into the life of a professional hitman. Longtime fans of the series and stealth game fans alike will enjoy the level of challenge this entry offers. By the way, this game is also available on Xbox 360, but it may not be $20 at all locations. Besides the prerequsite achievements and graphical upgrades, there is little difference between this and the other versions of the game.