Hitman: Blood Money [PS2]

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.

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