Hitman Blood Money Review (Xbox 360) By toothpasteluver

9 / 10
04 Dec 2006 at 04:23

Review by: toothpasteluver

The title Hitman: Blood Money will instantly attract any gamer. This new title helped the Hitman franchise bounce back from the dissappointing Hitman: Contracts. There are several new elements in it. One example is notoriety. Notoriety increases if you badly in a previous mission by leaving a lot of witnesses to report to the police. Then you will read an article on your stats and the worse you do on a mission the better a description will be released. This causes people to be more suspicious of you, or just start shooting you. But, luckily there is something that you can do to keep things like this from happening. At the end of every mission you will have the option to take part of your payment and bribe civilians, the sherrif, or even get a new identity. If you do good enough though you won't have to use your money to bribe people. When you save the money you collected on the hit, you can buy upgrades for your weapons. When you buy these upgrades you can perform a hit more efficiantly, which gives you a nice bonus for the better rating. Of course there are still the same mission ratings, Silent Assassin being the best of all of them. Another new add on is accident kills, which as you probably expected makes a murder look like an accident. You perform these by pushing someone off a balcony poisoning there food, or rigging a kitchen. These are a nice add-on because they don't count against your rating. But, you will still have a lot of trial and error because these don't make the game that much easier. Now to talk about the storyline. This is another element that has improved greatly since Contracts. It also makes the game more than cold-blooded killing, but there still is plenty of that. You will have to compete with a rival agency tha wants to shut your agency down. The end is also great and leaves you with a cliffhanger. Could this be the last Hitman? Who knows? Sadly though, the graphics havn't really been upgraded for the 360, but are still better than some other games. But, trust me you shouldn't be focused on the graphics while you should be figuring out a stradegy to getting a Silent Assassin on the hardest level. Newspaper articles that show up at the end of each mission are great fun to read because they describe how well you executed the hit. It also says if you're a talented shooter and what weapon you used for most of the kills, so you might want to mix it up a little in the next mission. The level design is nearly perfect for stealth and there is always some way to get a good rating on a mission, but on some levels it will be very difficult on account of accidentally talking to people which makes them witnesses. This will cause an awful lot of trial and error on levels that you want to get the best rating possible on. That brings me to a major flaw in Hitman's design. You can't permanently save in the middle of a mission. This will almost certainly be a problem for people who don't have hours to devote to gaming. I guess that proves that only gamers who are devoted to not speeding through a mission for a bad rating. But it sure does get annoying when you do well on a mission but have to turn off your system before completing a level. But otherwise this game is a must have. The only major flaws in its design are the saving system and the graphics not being as great as the 360 could have made them. It's still an excellent game though, even with those problems. That's why I rated Hitman: Blood Money as a 9/10.-toothpasteluver out. See ya. Bye bye.

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