Hitman Blood Money Review (PC) By Pritchy

8 / 10
12 Jun 2006 at 17:03

Review by: Pritchy

The Hitman series plunges into the world of financed assainations. You play Agent 47 a clone developed for assassination by the American government. In this addition you find yourself in the middle of 2 rival contract companies and find contracts put out on your own head. Agent 47 has always been the hunter, not the hunted so it is your chance to take contracts but always be on the look out for other assassins after your blood. This is my type of Hitman game. The first one I bought of this series was "Hitman 2" which made me love the series. Sadly, like most games these days they tried to change the fundamental principles for the third game in the series. This turned out, for me at least to be a step in the wrong direction. Thankfully, in “Blood Money” they have gone back to their roots and really chose the options which the second one benefited from, which has made this game fantastic. Whether u like the splinter cell approach of figuring out ways of killing your objectives without anyone suspecting you, or going in guns blazing with your customized M16. Its up to you this is what made the game so enjoyable to me as i would stealth it as much as I cud but then when i got found you go out blazing. Of coarse how you conduct these missions have consequences on how much u get paid for example and how notorious you become. I have always been a fan of the small touches in game and one of those in this game is reading a newspaper article about your "Hit". At first these provide a laugh and a hint of realism to see how all the little things you did during the mission come together. However after a couple of missions these can become rather repetitive if you don’t mix it up abit. There is also flaws in some of these papers but the idea is good.
About game play i would say this game feels great to play no awkward camera angles, no dodgy animations. The shooting is fluid enough to pull off that all important head shot when u need it. The levels are planned out to accommodate both styles of game play. However there is quite a few flaws in this game which are only found if you "Nit pick" like if someone witness's you kill someone then you kill them without anyone seeing you this still keeps your tension up which can become a massive factor on the tightly packed inside missions. I will have to say as well the AI most the time is top notch and everything you expect from computer AI. They will follow blood trials, aimlessly wander around looking for you. However they can sometimes have the "Computer all seeing eye" which all gamers will find annoying like knowing exactly where you are, if u have changed disguise they can see through it and are often quick to shoot you if you are out of place which they wont to their homeboys. Even if there is no proof of your intentions or close enough to recognize you. But these are to b suspected. Overall game play wise it is excellent and can accommodate to any style of play as mentioned before. The game play can also be challenging as the game goes on like successfully navigating through levels without raising suspicions. Best game play i have seen in a while.
Graphics wise on PC i was more than pleased. I thought because it was on consoles the graphics would look flawed, but i was pleasantly surprised. I don’t believe graphics make games like ALOT of PC gamers. The graphics on top settings looked more than acceptable so far I haven’t found any messed up textures or animations. The environments are aestically appealing and draw you into the game and tension of the game even more and the lighting effects with high settings are top notch. However they are not up the Farcry type of graphics so if you like unrealistic shiny players then you may have some comments about them but to me they are more than acceptable. But technically i had a problem on the second level where the sound caused some problems which could be fixed easily but made the level unenjoyable. But this could of just been a couple of systems, so doesn’t affect my review of this game.
Its addictiveness is the next factor you can often lose a couple of hours on this game because of your trial and error ways of finding your ways around the lvl etc. U quickly reload it and think i will get this part and then save it, but then it comes to another part like this and you just keep going. But then again the game play can get tedious after a while of always failing the mission or the little things you forget come back and sting you in ur behind. Which frustrates a gamer like me so I give up for a while and then come back at a later time. But that’s what made this game so good is that it makes you come back to it. To start again and try to find new ways to do something in particular in the many different ways which this game enables you too. So it didn’t affect my gaming enjoyment of this game at all, if anything it makes you better to try things you usually wouldn’t.
So overall I give this game 9/10 as there is still a few tweaks which could be introduced here and there to make it more of a complete game. If this game is a sign of things to come, they are definitely moving in the right direction.

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