underdawg's Full Review: Hitman: Blood Money for PlayStation 2
The Hitman series is probably the second most popular stealth game series right below Splinter Cell. While Splinter Cell seems to focus on technology to aid you (I haven't actually played any of them), Hitman focuses more on disguise. Mostly you'll be doing stuff like this...knock out a guard, take his uniform and hide the body. Now you can walk around in the open freely, as long as you act like the guard you've disposed of, and not go where you're not supposed to. Your goal in each level is to kill only your target, without any witnesses, and perhaps make the death look like an accident by pushing the body over a ledge, for example. Okay, so how does the game play?
The Skinny
Hitman: Blood Money has some pretty open ended gameplay, but it is a stealth game, and you can't really play the game as a shooter bloodbath. But if you like to play stealthy and you like to think, you'll most likely dig the game. If you've played Hitman 2, it's mostly the same with a few enhancements, a lamer story, and more interesting level designes. Be careful though, because it's pretty hard.
Suspension of disbelief
Your character, Agent 47, is an ugly bald dude with a barcode tattoo on the back of his skull. The point of this is that he's a clone, and the game tries very clumsily to talk about the dangers of cloning throughout. The downside of this is that he's not someone that easily blends into surroundings. Many disguises don't include hats and thus would never work in real life. Many of them wouldn't work anyway. For example, if you take a bodyguard's clothes, the other bodyguards would definitely notice that some stranger is wearing their colleague's suit, even if the guy wasn't bald. Now given that 47 IS bald and has a freakin' BARCODE on the back of his dead, you wonder how much suspension of disbelief this game requires. Now it might've been a little lame to have 47 also be a master of makeup and wigs, but you gotta wonder if the people at Eidos regret bringing the whole clone dimension into the game because it doesn't bring much to the table, and makes it a whole lot less realistic.
The game is more realistic in other ways than Hitman 2. In the latter, you wouldn't know when you were walking into a restricted area, and when you did, bullets would rain on you. In Blood Money, guards will tell you whether you can or cannot pass into a restricted area, saying something like "Go right ahead" or "Sorry, VIP's only". And if you wander in there by accident, you can sometimes run right out and the guards won't kill you. You also have to pay, literally, if you play the game like a total n00b and gun down everyone in the area (which is very tough to do in this game, actually). You'll gain notoriety for doing so, and have to pay money to bribe witnesses to suddenly become forgetful, bribe the area's police chief, or even bribe people to acquire a whole new identity. It'd have been cooler to unlock a mission where you have to kill the remaining witnesses or the police chief though...
Begun, the Clone Wars Have
The great thing about Hitman 2 were the sometimes inspired level designs. But many of them involved infiltrating compounds and those were kind of boring, Blood Money has some cool ones too, but some elicit some deja vu. But there are some cool completely new settings too, like a rehab facility, a Mardi Gras parade (no boobs though...), an abandoned amusement park, and a vineyard. The abandoned amusement park is the first introductory level, and while it's simple and linear, it's also the best in one way. You're supposed to kill a former amusement park manager whose negligence led to several children's deaths and his descent into a small time drug dealear. You get the contract from a despondent father, who requests that a picture of his son (who died on the errant Ferris Wheel) be the last thing that he sees. The whole story was shown with style too, but for the other missions, the Agency briefs you on what's going on but without any movies or anything like that, which in turn makes you care less about your hit.
Instead, the rest of the game focuses on a politician telling a journalist the story of the clone-assassin Agent 47, with your missions being the meat of the story. The story fails to handle a serious topic with any depth however. Shades of Yoda too.
I can't win
The gameplay is quite open-ended with usually one clear-cut "best" way to your objective but plenty of other "good" ways. For example, in one level, you have to kill an opera star and his VIP friend. It's an open rehearsal, and one scene includes the star being shot by a firing squad. The best way to do it is to sedate a crew member in the bathroom, take his clothes and sneak into the room of the actor that plays the executioner in the play and hide in the closet. Wait for the actor to come back and start playing with his replica WWI gun. He'll leave to take a leak, at which point, you swap out the replica for a real WWI gun that the Agency provided for you. Head to the top floor and look down on the opera and watch the executioner shoot the opera star with the actual gun. Chaos will ensue and the VIP friend will rush to the stage to look at the body of his friend. At that point, you can set a bomb on a light fixture directly overhead and it will land on the VIP. Leave.
But there's other ways to do your dirty deed. You can join the tour led by a cop, and when he goes to take a leak eventually, you can sedate/kill him, take his uniform, and take over as tour guide, at which point the tourists will talk about how bad of a guide you are. You now have a cop uniform which lets you get just about anywhere. You can just go on stage at the right time and shoot the actor and the VIP and run out of there. You can hide in the actors room and kill him when he comes in. In various missions, you can do things like poison a sausage to feed to a guard dog, poison a cake for a gang member with a sweet tooth, dress as the pool boy to have a target hit on you and ask you to her room, deliver poisoned donuts to an FBI surviellance team, booby trap a stove, stage a weightlifting "accident" and more. Often a mission just becomes acquiring a disguise that gives you access everywhere and making kills with a silenced pistol when no one is watching and just moving quickly. Even still, the game can be absurdly hard. I remember Hitman 2 being challenging, but Blood Money can make you want to rip your hair out. And when you're having trouble and just want to get to the next mission, you can't just gun through a level like you used to be able to.
In fact, the difficulty level is the reason why I chose to return the game without finishing. It's just too damn hard.
Graphics, etc
The graphics are superb for a PS2 game. While it doesn't have that 720p look of a 360 game, the cutscenes are superb with great art, and the gameplay graphics are solid. All the settings look realistic and while character models are reused way too often, people look realistic too. The Mardi Gras level was disappointing though, and not just because it didn't have any boobs in it. While there are hundreds of people on the street, there are about 12 different character models there. And they seem kinda faded and not real. This was confirmed when I started firing on the crowd and not everyone ran...so they must be half-characters with limited AI so that they can fit so many people on the screen. Bummer.
The soundtrack for the game is some intense orchestral music that can be inadvertently funny because it's TOO intense. It's still pretty good though. Voice acting is neither bad or spectacular.
Fin
If your idea of fun is playing as a silent assassin, and you're better at this game than me, get this game. Or if you're not better than me but you're not stubborn enough to refuse to play on Easy mode, get this game. While it isn't completely different from Hitman 2, it continues the solid core gameplay with better visuals and less boring levels. Yay.
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