Hitman: Blood Money

Rating: A

Playing Time: approx. 30 hours

And so, I come to the last of the "classic" Hitman games, Blood Money (hereafter HBM). I'm out of stuff to say for prefaces on these (and I still have four more to go through for the "modern" Hitman games), so I'm just going to jump straight into it.

The tutorial stage, Death of a Showman, is the hottest of garbage as a tutorial. It actually has a decent narrative to it (some greedy carnival asshole cut corners on maintenance which resulted in a Ferris wheel accident that killed a bunch of people, and one of the victims' families hires 47 to kill the asshole after courts failed to hold him accountable), but this is the worst tutorial of any Hitman game, which is a high bar to clear considering the tutorial in HC47 was so bad that getting to kill the person who put 47 through it was the game's biggest saving grace. The previous three were just bad for not teaching the player much of use about the game they're playing, but HBM's tutorial actively teaches a bad approach to playing the game by practically forcing 47 to kill his way through the mission. It's possible to beat it "stealthily" (in ways that aren't actually stealthy and rely on exploiting certain broken game mechanics), but it's absolutely not worth going for a silent assassin rating on the tutorial since it doesn't even get a proper rating screen.

The other hot garbage on display in the tutorial was the revamped control scheme. While it did have some improvements (sneaking and crouching are finally combined into a single mode of movement, the UI is no longer difficult to read at higher resolutions, and holding the button to drop a item allows it to be thrown instead, which I will gush about more in a moment), it made a number of changes that are just baffling to me (there's now a whole separate button used for picking items up instead of that being part of a context-sensitive interaction menu, sneaking now has to be held instead of being a toggle, opening the inventory has a delay because the same button is used to draw/holster now, controlling 47 around ledges or boxes is more awkward now because pushing against them makes him to try to climb automatically instead of that being an interaction menu choice, and sniper rifles no longer swaps to scoped view automatically if you click to fire once while in third-person view). I got used to it over the course of the game, but coming straight off of playing H2SA and H3C, it felt like a bizarre downgrade overall.

That said, there were two changes to the controls that I liked a lot because of opening up more ways to play the game. First, as mentioned above, holding the button to drop an item now allows 47 to throw it instead. This brings a whole new dimension to the game's stealth by allowing for freeform distractions in ways other than distraction shots (which were generally terrible to do in H2SA and H3C due to how shots fired and alerts triggered made it harder to get a silent assassin rating). Not only do coins (which were introduced in HBM as an infinite resource) allow for making small distractions at some range, but 47 can also throw small anti-personnel explosives to plant them at range or throw weapons (both guns and syringes) to cause bigger distractions for guards (to date, HBM is still the only Hitman game that lets the player throw ranged weapons like this). I could write a whole post on just how much this new control alters how the game can be played, but for the purposes of this review, you'll just have to accept my word that it was a monumental shift.

The second control big change was being able to hide bodies in bins. There isn't as much to be said about this because the implications are more obvious, but giving a way to finally remove (some) bodies from the map was one of the few things HBM did that made 47 feel like a more competent hitman than he did in H3C.

And that praise said, I have to turn back to a gripe: HBM lost the alluring feel of being a cold, professional contract killer, replacing it instead with the half-serious/half-comedy approach that would come to be the series's identity going forward. Now, sure, in the overall scheme of things, the change in tone wasn't necessarily bad, just different, and as I thought more about how to rate this game, I did end up bumping it up from A- to A because I was probably being too negative about that. In a vacuum, HBM's tone is fine, and I actually really liked some of the lighter moments (like the newspaper article about the explosive cat in Paris that I used as the image at the start of this review); it felt off coming from having just played H3C before it, and it would end up becoming more of a problem in future games, but it was alright in this game by itself.

Unfortuantely, that is something of a running theme for how I feel about a lot of the stuff that bothers me in later Hitman games (that they took things which were fine in HBM and expanded on them to their own detriment), but I'll talk about those when I get to those games, and in any case, that shouldn't be held as a strike against HBM.

Anyway, tutorial and associated matters out of the way, we get to the real game, and the devs decided to be ambitious in their story presentation. Rather than focusing on 47, the main story playing about between missions is a meeting between a journalist (Rick Henderson) and a former FBI director (Leland Alexander), with the latter weaving a tale about cloning technology being an impending menace to society, as exemplified by 47. Henderson dismisses 47 as a myth initially, to which Alexander starts talking about deaths that were caused by 47, serving as the jumping-off point for each of HBM's missions. It's an intersting framing device, especially when Alexander's descriptions start to show clear deviation from the actual events of the missions themselves as a way of planting the seeds for the player to question everything else that Alexander is saying. This ends up becoming more explicit as the game goes on, ultimately culminating in Alexander being part of a conspiracy by a secret society (the Foundation) trying to gain exclusive control of cloning technology by influencing the US government to declare it illegal. And while I will absolutely complain about conspiracy stories in later Hitman games, I thought it worked quite well in this one because (a) it becomes clear in retrospect that 47 was constantly foiling the plans of the Foundation, adding to his competence instead of making him be an unwitting pawn, and (b) the conspiracy plot actually ends by the end of the game instead of serving as unending sequel fodder.

Each of HBM's twelve missions is notable in their own way, so I'm actually going to just talk a bit about all of them one by one.

A Vintage Year (the first real mission, not counting the tutorial) is a solid introduction to HBM, with 47 having to kill two targets in a villa/drug lab. There's nothing really remarkable about it by itself, but it was a fine opening marred by one notable bug (for me): HBM's physics engine is still tied to the frame rate like the previous Hitman games did, which results in a problem where the game's collision bugged out and wouldn't let me walk along a certain narrow path until I capped it at 60 fps. While this wasn't a huge problem in itself (nor were the bugs that I had to address with the previous Hitman games), it does raise concerns about some future time to come where the PC versions of these games may become entirely unplayable. I think it's sad that companies who keep old games in digital circulation don't take steps to make them actually work properly without extra effort. This is its own whole rant that I'm not going to go further into now, so I'll just leave it at saying that it was a little ironic for a mission in mid-2000s Chile to make me angry at capitalism.

Curtains Down is a mission that sounds a lot more interesting than it was to actually play, but it deserves special mention for being the mission that immediately preceded the events of H3C. The actual gut shot isn't shown, with the ending cinematic cutting off on an ominous pistol slide racking and then 47's next appearance having Diana talk about him recovering from his injury, but having just played H3C, I picked up on the connection and thought it was a very cool way to tie the two games together.

Flatline was awful to play because the way it implements a delay timer until it can be completed feels very forced (having over a minute of unskippable dialogue that has to be triggered in order to start the countdown for being allowed to finish the mission certainly doesn't help). It wasn't the worst mission for me in HBM (there's another one that's even ), but it was clearly the second-worst.

A New Life is simply wonderful. Despite being a rare case of a post-H2SA mission with only a single target (albeit with an additional non-target objective), it's a contender for the best single mission in any Hitman game, and while I'd personally put Beldingford Manor (from H3C) and Apex Predator (from a future game) ahead of it, I can completely understand why other people might consider it the best. During my actual playthrough of HBM, I would've ranked it in the top two missions for this game (alongside Til Death Do Us Part), but on reflection after playing, it was the stronger of the two. This video shows it off far better than I can describe.

Murder of Crows was yet another one of those "HBM does something cool that future games will make into a problem" moments. Taking place during a Madri Gras parade, the map is absolutely filled with civilians who have very limited behavior scripting, allowing the game to handle having a huge crowd without melting on itself. It's also the first Hitman mission where 47 can pick up an enemy operative's earpiece to listen in on their conversations, which is a gimmick that plays wonderfully both here and far in the future with Apex Predator. In terms of tone/feels, this is probably the mission that strikes my favorite balance between being serious and being comedic, which is amazing considering the ridiculous-in-any-other-context bird outfits that function as disguises; it's still distinctly more lighthearted than pretty much anything in H3C or even H2SA, but it does enough to stand out well here. Add in that none of the three targets start marked on the map and one spawns in one of three possible locations at random, and it's also the mission that forces the most engagement from the player even after they're familiar enough with it to go for a high rating. There are others that I think are better missions overall, but this one did well to have gimmicks that don't get tedious once they're figured out.

You Better Watch Out stood out to me for two reasons. First, it was almost like a mash-up of Basement Killing and Jacuzzi Job from H2SA, showing how far the devs have come in both technical capability and game design expertise since then. Second, assuming the player didn't discover this in A New Life, it's the first mission likely to show that HBM's coding allows dogs to be witnesses but doesn't count a dead dog as a non-target kill. A lot of players seem to find that distasteful and try going out of their way to avoid having any dog witnesses, which I think is just a lovely bit of psychology considering they're playing a game about being a contract killer.

Death on the Mississippi is the first non-forced-shoot-out mission with so many targets that I felt like there was almost always something to do other than waiting on NPC behavior cycles to get to the timing I wanted. This is a rarity (I'd say the next wouldn't be until almost a decade later), but I tend to like these a lot as a way of having a fast feel in what's still overall a slow-paced game. I expect I'd tire of it if it was done frequently, but as a single mission, it's cool.

Til Death Do Us Part was my favorite mission on immediate opinions after playing HBM, though as stated above, A New Life has since overtaken it in my personal rankings. There's just something about "kill targets in their own house/mansion/etc." that tends to work very well for me (Anathema in H2SA or Beldingford Manor in H3C also fit that pattern), possibly because residences tend to naturally have a lot of different paths and line-of-sight obstructions that combine to present interesting opportunities for a quiet kill in what seems to be a very secure location. Also, I liked the implication in the briefings and post-mission newspapers that the bride was the actual client for both this and the previous mission. That was a nice subtle subplot touch.

House of Cards, on the other hand, was the worst mission in the game. Not only is it on a delay timer like Flatland, but the timer is so horribly long that, even when playing it blind, I still ended up with minutes of waiting around for the privilege of being allowed to continue with the game. The third target is also handled in a way that feels very unfulfilling; after taking an age and a half to even enter the map, he's surrounded by guards until he gets to a private booth in a restaurant, at which point his retinue bizarrely decides to ignore him completely, so your options for a silent assassin rating require either exploiting NPC scripts to separate him from his guards during that walk or waiting for him to reach the point where the developers seemingly gave up on doing anything interesting with him. It feels awful to play and is the single reason why I'd be hesitant to replay this whole game.

Dance with the Devil is also a mission that loves disrespecting the player's time, though in this case the forced waiting is because of excessively-long elevator rides instead of mandatory waiting for objectives to become possible. Adding two more targets in the middle of the mission was a neat twist, I guess, but it's so pathetically easy to kill all of them if you just don't care about taking around half an hour to do the whole mission that the whole thing felt like it was missing about two more editing revisions. HBM may have less obvious jank than the previous three, but both of the Las Vegas missions are jank in disguise. At least this one has some genuinely funny moments (for instance, through dialogue, you can figure out that one of the assassins hunting 47 got into position by replacing someone with an "accident" kill) and lets you actually play the game continuously when you aren't riding in elevators, unlike House of Cards.

Amendment XXV is an awesome idea (infiltrate the White House to stop a coup attempt by the Foundation), and while the execution doesn't quite live up to the fantasy because HBM is too easy of a game for that (which I'll get into more shortly), it was still one of the better missions in HBM overall. The map layout is too constrained compared to my two honeys to get up to that top tier, but it was a blast to play.

Requiem, sadly, shows that the developers didn't learn anything about making a good final mission from H3C, as it is once again a forced shoot-out with zero room in stealth. Even H2SA at least had that be an option. The narrative idea is brilliant, but the actual gameplay sucks so much that it actually doesn't work properly at higher framerates for people who rely on the last stand mechanic to speedrun it. It is ratingless, at least, so it's entirely skippable for a silent assassin replay.

With all that said, I have to talk about what was (for me) the biggest elephant in the room when it came to my thoughts on HBM: it's easy. On its own, the requirements for a silent assassin rating to being "no non-targets killed, no witnesses, no bodies found, no covers blown, no camera evidence, and no load-out items (including 47's suit) left behind" are all reasonable and intuitive, and dropping the restrictions about alerts raised allows for actually using loud weapons or explosives much more freely. In practice, however, there's the caveat that "accident" kills don't count as non-target kills for rating purposes, so taken together with 47 being able to knock people out for free with the new human shield mechanic (which was sadly dropped entirely from the series after this game instead of being refined in the "modern" titles), you have full freedom to kill anyone as long as it's from stuff like pushing them off of a balcony or over a handrail (even if the other side of the handrail is the same elevation). Even without exploiting that, trespassing in your suit doesn't cause witnesses, even if guards start shooting at 47 (as long as he doesn't shoot back), which means that disguises actively become a liability as often as they are an asset. It just feels wrong, and while I wouldn't advocate for the jank-induced difficulty of HC47 or H2SA, I felt like H3C had already hit a sweet spot in balancing difficulty, disguise usefulness/degradation, and freedom of approach. HBM is unquestionably better as a silly murder sandbox engine, but the lack of resistance put up by the game dimished how much I felt good about getting those silent assassin ratings, compared to H2SA or H3C.

This was Jesper Kyd's last time composing for a Hitman game, and it was a beauty. Returning to the clean orchestral sounds of H2SA, Kyd pulled off yet another masterwork soundtrack. It's no accident that Ave Maria would go on to basically become the leitmotif of the series as a whole, even cheapened as it is with being played at every funeral in the future games, and all of the original compositions are good. While I do prefer the H3C soundtrack overall, that's more about my preferences for the darker tone of that game than a commentary on the music quality.

Something that I've mentioned in passing and shown with screenshots is that each mission ends with a newspaper that has a summary of your performance as the main article and several other fixed articles/advertisements around it. It's cute, and it allows for some clever ways of weaving in more worldbuilding, like tracking the US political intrigue in the background that, in hindsight, ties in heavily with the Foundation's machinations. It's sad that HBM is the only game that was done for.

Altogether, HBM belongs right alongside H2SA, H3C, and the World of Assassination compilation as arguably the best Hitman game. It all comes down to the player's personal preferences, and for me, the lack of difficulty and the tonal shift towards much more intentional comedy were just too much to put it at the top. That said, though, despite my criticisms, it is still clearly a fantastic game that I had a great time with, so while I'd put it just a bit behind H3C, I can completely understand people who have it in first place. Once again, highly recommended for almost anyone, with the caveat this time being that players who value difficulty highly will probably be disappointed unless they put their own challenges on themselves.

Rating: A

Playing Time: approx. 30 hours