Agent 47, everyone’s favourite bald assassin, is back for Hitman: Blood Money. As before you are working for The Agency and that is where you receive your missions from, however you are now the centre of a CIA and FBI investigation to take you down. The storyline also revolves around the issue of cloning and how it could be used, for both good and evil purposes. Although, Hitman is and has never been to focused on storyline, preferring to focus on the task in hand of game play and fantastic level design.

The basic Game Play remains unchanged in Blood Money. You are dropped into an environment where you are tasked with eliminating a certain number of targets and perhaps retrieving and item or protecting a VIP. You could adopt a ‘gun everybody down’ strategy, however this wouldn’t get you a good result which links into the Blood Money system which will be talked about later. To achieve the best rating, aptly titled ‘Hitman’, you must employ stealth techniques to make sure you are undetected and everything is left as if you were never there. To what degree you keep your presence unknown also plays upon a new feature for Blood Money, the Notoriety system.

Notoriety basically translates to how infamous you are with the rest of the world. The more people you kill, the more evidence you leave behind and the more witnesses there are all increase your Notoriety. The only way to decrease this is to pay a hefty amount of money to members of the authorities to make everything simple disappear. If you have a high Notoriety then you could be recognised as soon as you enter a level, making your objectives extremely difficult, while a low Notoriety will result in your blending in with the crowd. Of course, it is the latter which you will more than likely want and it will be the only way to achieve the highest rating.

In previous games when achieving the rank of Silent Assassin you were awarded with a rare weapon, In Blood Money however you are reward with the exact thing that the name suggest, money. You receive a payment for completing your assignment, often between $250,000 and $400,000, and then a bonus on top of that determined by your rating. This money is then used to either decrease your Notoriety, buy information on targets or to upgrade your 5 upgradeable weapons and your miscellaneous items. Upgrading weapons should be your first priority, a silencer always comes in handy, but a little more information would always help you figure out the best ways to take out your target. The Blood Money and Notoriety systems work well together and definitely adds to the previous game play of Hitman making it more challenging, realistic and rewarding all at the same time.

The level design in Blood Money is excellent, exactly what you would expect from Io interactive. As usual the levels take a little time to explore and to figure out exactly which areas you can enter with certain disguises. However, after a few times through a level you will often find a perfect formula to completing it and to receive the highest accolade. This is perhaps one of the problems with Hitman, the actions of characters will simple loop round while you figure out what to do giving you an infinite amount of time. Also, once you find your path you can stick to it time and time again, offering very little replay value. However, Blood Money does offer 4 levels of difficulty with each one adding a certain factor to the game play, such as the addition of evidence effects and increased AI. However, this adds little to the challenge and you can often employ the same tactics for ever difficulty setting.

Completing Hitman once will not take too long on the easiest difficulty, but it is only on the difficulty up from that that Notoriety takes effect, adding to the challenge. From there however there isn’t any major changes to make the harder difficulties a lot more difficult, perhaps removing there purpose. You can probably go through to the end of the game in 6 to 8 hours, yet you wont have got the highest ratings. Overall, Blood Money could give you about 15-20 hours of ‘new’ experience, but after that you will have very little discoveries and may not get a whole lot out of the game.

The graphics haven’t changed much over the years and only a few, perhaps unnoticeable improvements are made for Blood Money. The high amount of characters you may have seen in the Mardi Gras level are merely mindless drones and will not change their movement or actions no matter what you do, this a let down for those who thought it would. Hitman has always been a game with a sense of style, yet Blood Money is missing a grand musical score and instead has some poor, understated music that sounds like it would be more at home in an action packed FPS game or something of the like. Just a little change here could have given Hitman: Blood Money a complete feel a made a noticeable difference to the overall appearance.

Hitman: Blood Money offers everything that a fan of the series may need, new levels and more Agent 47. Those new to the series will also be left with a very good impression of the game. However, while Blood Money is still a great game it does feel as if the series could very easily attain more and could use a full next-gen makeover. Perhaps when the next release comes around we may be treated to a fully fledged next-gen endeavour, but for now we have a temporary fix, and what a fix it is.