Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Just plain fun"

Hitman: Blood Money is the fourth game in the series. You shouldn't have to play the past games to appreciate this game and that it can be treated as if were a stand alone. The first mission is a tutorial that lets you become familiar with the game controls and gives examples of how to accomplish your goals. The story line is good. Once again, you assume the role of Agent 47, a professional hitman who now discovers that he and his employer are sought after by a rival agency.

The game has many colorful and interesting mission locations ranging from the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, a Las Vegas casino, a riverboat on the Mississippi, a Los Angeles suburb, and many more. Each location offers many creative ways of using your tools-of-trade on hand, to using the surrounding environment to accomplish your objectives of making your designated hits. I really enjoyed the strategy of setting up "accidents" for the victims which could amount to crushing them with falling objects, incinerating them, poisoning, etc. which makes this game more than just the typical run and shoot type, but more stealth and cunning. But, of course, you can always use the old fashion way of strangulation and a nice clean bullet through the head.

This is the first game of the series that I've played on the Xbox 360 platform and I found the game achievement system to contradict the game level rewards. Figuring out cleaner kills gives you a higher ranking and more money during normal game play but I have read that some of the Xbox 360 achievements reward you for playing as a mass murder gone wild. As an example, making exactly 47 kills on a single mission and another of having a notoriety ranking of 100? That's bad, that means you randomly killed leaving lots of witnesses. I guess I'm old school Hitman, needless to say, I didn't earn these achievements. But, putting that aside, all in all, it was a good game.