Hitman BloodMoney

Oct 25, 2005

Hitman Blood Money takes a different tack than the bonus-pack natured Hitman: Contracts. It's expanding in a way that's both inviting and natural. In development with creator Io Interactive, Blood Money tells a good, full story and builds a globally reactive world around the necessary and sometimes evil actions of the infamous bald hitman with the barcode on the back of his neck.

The most interesting aspect of this new game is clearly not its slow and clunky interface, which is exactly like the previous games, and at this point in the series, should really be streamlined and sped up. No, while I grimaced a little as I stumbled through the Las Vegas level, what struck me as especially cool was the game's newly implemented notoriety system. Much like in previous games, Agent 47 is assigned to travel to exotic locals across the world to kill off especially seedy or evil men. Although there is no level quite like the techno-jamming industrial meat-packing ball room from Contracts, we once again traipsed through the gaudy streets of Las Vegas. Other levels of note include Paris and New Orleans.

In general, you'll find the fourth game in the original PC series is much more fleshed out, more thought out, deeper, and broader than before. You'll notice the effects of the notoriety system behind the scenes. In Las Vegas, you'll find yourself talking a little more. You'll actually hear the voice of Agent 47 more and you'll interact with more things to boot. You check in at a hotel, talk to the front desk woman, and discuss things regularly with almost any bartender at any bar in any level.

Information is also passed along in slightly different ways, using newspapers to report your actions. For instance, after each level, the notoriety system functions by reporting in the news that 10 people were killed in an unexplained killing spree in a Las Vegas hotel. In reality, you might have smoked 10 people, and your agency had to come in, clean up the mess you left, and provide a cover story for you. One such example: "Innocent Gambler Died: Reasons Unknown."

You'll actually see the newspaper format at the end of each level, each "article" being readable and providing good information on the last mission and an upcoming one, too. You can read the entire front page, which contains stories on both your transgressions and articles on the people you're after. Thus, the newspaper serves as a kind of secret de-briefer before you get the real mission objectives form the agency. They're not necessary to read, but they fill in fun and interesting little details. Since the IO guys are so underhanded, dark, and clever, you know the stories will be a kick.

A new currency system is tied to the notoriety system, and similar to any true stealth game like Tenchu, Metal Gear, or Thief, you're rewarded by being silent, unseen, and deadly. Your reward money for each level is affected by your blunders, sightings, and found bodies; so, the agency actually subtracts cash from your contract for each clean-up job it does. Luckily, there are more places to put dead bodies than in any Hitman game to date. You'll use money to bribe people to give you information and to pretend they didn't see you in action, and money also works to upgrade your weapons in between levels (upgrades include new scopes, silences, and more). There are 10-15 weapon upgrades.

The missions in Contracts were notably expansive. Blood Money is similar, featuring multiple targets with primary, secondary, and tertiary priorities, and all of them are viewable via a similar interactive map. Characters of importance are shown as colored circles. When a secondary target appears, an in-game window pops up to indicate who it is and where he or she is headed.

Agent 47 is now more athletic and his additional movements make for more devious fun. He can climb off balconies and jump from balcony to balcony to escape enemies or to put himself into a better position for a kill. He can also climb fences, ledges, ladders, and into the ceiling compartments of elevators. You can grapple and position humans as live shields, and when you're done with them, they can be thrown off balconies, dumped in cans, hurled into hampers, and more. This last feature isn't new, but the volume of places to put them has dramatically increased.

You'll be able to disarm enemies, use disguises to get into secret or undercover areas, and you can now distract people, by throwing objects, like your brief case, for instance. Of course, once again tying into the notoriety system, if you throw your own briefcase to distract somebody and an enemy agent picks it up -- and the briefcase contains special guns like your very own sniper rifle -- that's a dangerous clue that will count against you in the end. IO's system is great. It tracks and tallies everything you do, incorporating your actions into a global system that rewards and/or punishes you for your deeds or misdeeds.

We got our hands on Blood Money for about 15 minutes. Despite the excellent upgrades, it felt very much like other Hitman titles. It's a slow-paced stealth-adventure game designed with multiple options for completing a level, and it's brilliantly put together. Still, as I said before, the interface is still rather clunky, even if there are more contact sensitive areas with which to interact. The new moves, excellent new graphics, and the bigger, more captivating story are encouraging, and so we'll wait to see what happens this spring. In the meantime, I reckon we'll have to brush up on our stealth killing ways by sniping spit wads at our long-lost, short-lived editor, David Clayman, who now runs the Insider channel.