Hitman: Blood Money – Retro Review

Christmas is finally over. With any luck you’ll have polished off the rest of the turkey sandwiches, dispatched the rest of the mince pies and signalled the end of the festive season with the resounding “thud” of a kilogram of fruit cake landing squarely in the bin. For me, the holidays ended on January 2^nd, the end of another epic Steam Sale.

Among the multitude of cheap games I bought this year was Hitman: Blood Money, a real gem of game and a title which had somehow managed to pass me by when it was first released. Indeed, one of the great things about the Steam sales is the incentive for gamers to purchase (for next to nothing) classic games that they might have missed for whatever reason and perhaps would never normally play. Personally, I’m in the habit of only playing the latest titles, more for review purposes than anything else.

Hitman: Blood Money was originally released for Playstation 2, XBOX360 and PC back in 2006. The latest game in an excellent series, Blood Money takes a slightly different angle on narrative, instead of following Agent 47’s progress directly, your missions are a series of flashbacks taken from the conversations between a reporter and Jack Cayne, a wheelchair-bound ex-director of the FBI. The two discuss the assassin’s exploits and you play through each mission as they come up in conversation.

If you’ve played the previous games, you’ll already know the formula. You are given targets in a brief before the mission, a little bit of background information on their whereabouts and habits, which may or may not help you, and then you are unleashed upon them and their unsuspecting henchmen. Although you can complete each level by going “gunman” and blasting your way through the levels, true artistry comes in dispatching your targets whilst remaining completely undetected by their guards and the general public.

There are innumerable ways in which a target can be neutralised. You may want to get close, disguised as a bodyguard, and strangle the unsuspecting victim while he’s watching TV. You might feel like picking up a hammer from the garage and making the kill a little messier or you could always try being creative. The true beauty of the game is that there is no single path to victory when completing the missions and if you take the time to explore you’ll be rewarded with some ingenious methods of execution. Want to kill an Italian mafia boss from a distance? Sure, you could use a sniper rifle… or you could attach an anti-personnel mine to his cello and detonate it from a safe distance when he starts playing. Want to kill a famous opera singer? You could sit amongst the crowd and shoot him when he comes on stage, or you could replace the prop pistol they use in the second act with a gun that fires live ammo, then sit in the front row and watch the co-star do the dirty work for you!

Blood Money has aged well considering it was built for release on the PS2. Visually, the PC version still stands up against many games released last year. The way the narration is handled and the score, which sounds like it’s been taken from Ridley Scott’s “Hannibal”, go a long way to setting the scene, making the game feel more cinematic than previous iterations.

There is more replay value here that you might expect, with the opportunity to replay any completed mission on any difficulty setting, allowing you to test your skills as a killer in a bid to get a perfect score, or spending money earned from past contracts on upgrades for one of your weapons and taking a target down Rambo-style.

If you have the patience for a game that makes you think and rewards deviousness and sneakery, Blood Money is the game for you. One of the benefits of Steam is that you don’t have to let classics pass you by, only to be re-discovered much later at the bottom of a bargain bin in CEX. So Don’t!

Happy hunting Number 47.