'Hitman: Blood Money' - 2006
Io Interactive's Seventh Generation Murder Sandbox
Hitman fans have strong opinions about which game in the long-running series (over 20 years at this point) is the best one. One diehard faction argues black-and-blue that it’s Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. Revisionists like me favour the soft-reboot trilogy, with its huge maps and tightly interwoven AI and gameplay systems. Sickos like Hitman: Absolution.
But ask most of the community and you’ll likely be told that the series highpoint is 2006’s Blood Money.
Tom Francis once described Blood Money as “the darker twin of Deus Ex”, and it’s a pretty good assessment. At its best Blood Money presents you with branching environments that reward exploration and creativity, much like the games of the immersive sim genre. The game’s levels are intricate machines of patrols, security and innocent witnesses, and you are a bald, barcoded, murderous spanner dropped into the works.
The game’s brilliance is rooted in its environments. With only a few exceptions these are recognisable places, with environmental rules that the player can intuitively understand. Taking as example ‘A House of Cards’, a level set in a Las Vegas casino hotel, we can see how this plays out. The map contains a mix of spaces, both front-of-house and behind the scenes, and it’s easy to grasp which disguises will work where. Wandering into maintenance areas as a guest is not going to be well received, and players don’t need it spelled out to them that dressing up in the uniform of the hotel staff will allow them free-reign in those areas. Most of the space is hotel rooms, and these work exactly as you might expect. To get into a room you need the room’s key, or to follow someone else who themselves has a key. The game barely explains any of this. Real hotels work this way, so the level works this way and it expects that you, a person who lives in the world, will bring, and apply, this knowledge with you.
Blood Money also does a great job in encouraging you to play skillfully. More recent Hitman games reward you for not engaging with the game’s core mechanic: disguises. Since Absolution the games have rewarded suit-only runs, creating a tacit implication that disguises are somehow a lesser way of playing, that the cleanest way to play is to sneak and use cover. Blood Money’s alternative approach to encouraging clean runs is a stroke of genius: tie everything to a financial mechanic. If you leave your suit or gear behind you’ll be charged a recovery fee. The messier you are, the less money you earn and the less you are able to buy upgrades to your bag of tricks. It subtly rewards a soft-touch; clean up after yourself, be the silent assassin, and you’ll reap bigger rewards. It’s great! It leaves your approach wide open for you to decide, but nudges you towards playing like the greatest paid killer in the world.
My favourite way to play is to try and get though levels without using guns. The fact that a game so laden with guns will let you do this is a hallmark of how smart its design is. It thrives when you start to figure out the less obvious ways of approaching the game’s problems. Shooting, exploding, and garroting your way though the various contracts gets results, but the more time you spend on each map, the more you start to reveal subtle, cunning approaches. It’s this investment in learning the ins and outs of the maps that defines the best Hitman games. Your first pass through a level is always messy, but each time you repeat it your knowledge grows and you figure out new, better approaches.
The game isn’t perfect, of course. Some of the maps are genuine duds. ‘Death on the Mississippi’, a level set on a tourist riverboat, is an astonishingly dull level, one of the worst not just in the game, but the whole series. ‘Amendment XXV’, the game’s grand finale set in the White House, sounds great on paper but is ultimately a slog to work through, and abandons so much of what makes the game great in order to set up climatic set pieces (this is a problem almost every Hitman game runs into).
But even when the game doesn’t quite work, its carried by its presentation. Like all Io Interactive games, its a masterclass in lighting, and protagonist Agent 47 is beautifully animated, full of character no matter what he’s doing. On top of this, the game is the first Hitman to perfectly land the tone: cynical and darkly funny, never taking itself too seriously like some of the earlier entries. It enjoys letting you craft blackly comic ends for its cavalcade of targets, all of whom the game makes very clear the world is better off without. It doesn’t quite manage the biting criticism of class and power that the reboot trilogy does (see Nic Reuben’s piece on that over at ‘Rock Paper Shotgun’), but it does make you feel comfortable with what you’re doing.
Whether or not Blood Money is the best Hitman game is a debate that is unlikely ever to be definitively resolved. However, what can be said of it is that it’s the entry that took the promise of Io’s early games’ best levels and built a game that carried that promise (almost) its whole way through. It’s the oldest game in the series that I feel comfortable recommending without caveats, and even now after so many playthroughs, knowing every level back to front, I still find myself going back to it from time to time. Because it is brilliant, and it’s definitely something you should play.