As you may remember from last time, the recent release of the new Hitman led to me starting to play Hitman: Blood Money (PS3 version from the HD collection), as that's the fan favorite of the series. And as you probably have guessed, I have finished Hitman: Blood Money, and am here to convey my thoughts on the game to you, through the "magic" of the written word. But that's not actually where this "tale" begins.

I guess I should also note that since this game is a decade old, there's going to be spoilers.

It begins a decade ago, back in 2006 when I first had my Xbox 360. Back then quite a few games received demos that you could just download whenever you wanted and play as much as you wanted. Unlike today where the Hitman demo was a "beta" that (unless you pre-ordered and got in the closed "beta") only ran for a weekend. As a teen with more time than money (unlike my current state of being in my twenties and having more time than money), I was quite fond of demos. Some demos sold me on games, and some unsold me on games. In the case of Blood Money, I was unsold on the game.

The demo for Blood Money was just the first level from the game, which was the tutorial mission. And while it's a decent tutorial for teaching the base mechanics of how to control the game, and how to interact with certain things in the environment, it's not really good at teaching you the skill you actually need to do well at and have fun with Blood Money. That's because the tutorial is a completely linear level and it tells you what to do every step of the way. It introduces you to concepts like disguising yourself, or hiding weapons in trays that guards won't search, but it doesn't really do a good job of conveying why that stuff is important, or how to go about doing it in regular levels. Not that I think that would be an easy tutorial mission to make, but the point is that as a demo, that tutorial stopped teen me from wanting to play Blood Money.

And that's a shame, because while I did enjoy Blood Money, I think I would have liked it a lot more back then. Most of the things that make this game good would have been much more impressive a decade ago, and many of the things that I didn't like about it wouldn't have been as bad then. Or, rather, I wouldn't have minded them as much, or found them to be issues.

That reminds me that 2006 was back when I still played most games on easy. Why? I'm not really sure. I think it was because back when I played games that had difficulty settings, I wanted to start on easy as a way of just starting out in the game. Like the first time I ever played a first person shooter, I didn't want to go in on normal because I had never played a game like that before. And then there was the odd game like Gears of War that didn't even have a "Normal" difficulty setting. It had Casual, Hardcore, and Insane, but none just called "Normal." I did eventually replay it on Hardcore, and beat it, and even got through the first act on Insane (in co-op), but...I've gotten off track.

The point was that I played Blood Money on Rookie, which is the easiest setting. Part of it was because I think younger me would have played on this setting, and part of it is because I just wanted to get through the game, and have fun with it. I didn't want to end up banging my head against the game because it was too hard. But really, the main reason I went for Rookie is because all of the other options limit the number of times you can save during a mission, with seven times being the highest (on Normal). And in a game that I knew was going to have a certain element of trial and error, I didn't want to feel hamstrung because of an artificial restriction on my ability to save. Not to say there is anything inherently wrong with the design decision to restrict that, but I'm glad there was an option that let me save as many times as I wanted. Especially since the game has no mid-level checkpoints or autosaves.

But one save related design decision in the game that I don't like at all is that, as the game warns you every time you save mid mission, in game saves can't be used after "exiting game play." Or in other words, if you exit to the main menu, or turn off the console, those saves are gone. You have to restart the level from the very beginning. While I understand the developers' desire to make sure missions are played in single sittings, this did negatively impact my time with the game. There was one mission in particular that I had to restart five or six times because something kept happening midway into it that caused me to have to turn off the PS3 and go do something else for a while, and there were several others that I had to restart once or twice for similar reasons.

The missions aren't terribly long if you know what to do, but if you don't they can take an hour or more of wandering around and trying to figure out what to do. Generally speaking a continuous hour of being able to play isn't difficult for me to achieve, but for whatever reason, I got pretty unlucky whenever I tried to play Blood Money, and I would have liked it a lot more if I didn't have to restart a level because life got in the way. Especially in a time when the modern consoles (or at least the PS4 and Xbox One) have the ability to go into rest mode and just load up exactly where I left a game (assuming it's not a Destiny like situation with a needed connection to a server), this sort of save restriction feels archaic and, not quite mean, but user unfriendly, I'd say.

Which brings me back to what I was saying about how I'd have liked this game more a decade ago. I find that time can make you forget about the bad things, and you only remember the good. Or forget the good, depending on the situation. But I could have been one of those people that talks about this game like it was a classic, instead of thinking of it as a mixed bag jumbled box. You know, it's got some good, and some bad. A jumbled box of-

A decade ago I was being wowed by things like Dead Rising's tunnels full of hundreds of on screen zombies, and I probably would have been wowed by Blood Money's (I keep wanting to abbreviate it to BM, but that's a different thing) crowds. And, honestly, they're still denser and more packed than a lot of crowds in modern games. The problem is that it only takes a second of actually looking at the crowd to realize that it's just a handful of different NPC models repeated a whole lot. By which I mean things like four identical people next to each other, all animating in unison, with the only difference being that one of them has a hat. And given that I don't remember thinking the game was a "looker" back when I played the demo, it certainly wasn't impressive visually today. Not that graphics not holding up is terrible, or worsens the game (at least so long as you can tell what's going on, which I could), it's just a good reminder of how much better graphics are today than they were ten years ago.

I do, however, think the core of what Hitman is holds up. The idea of having to infiltrate, take out a target (usually multiple and often also find some other item), and then escape without being seen appeals to me a lot. I'm a big fan of stealth games in general, and I really like the ability to disguise myself and just waltz past guards without them realizing who I actually am. To me, that's what Hitman is all about. Well, that and then using that to set up elaborate and often goofy death-traps for the targets.

But while I really enjoy that stuff in theory, a lot of the time in practice the clunkier aspects of Blood Money get in the way. The controls, while fairly "modern" in many respects, are also arbitrarily archaic. You pull the right trigger to shoot, but if you want to throw a coin, you have to click (and hold) the left stick to bring up a reticle, and then release it once you've aimed the throw. I do think that you can use that to throw any equipped item, so there is some semblance of logic behind that being separate from the right trigger, but it's also an awkward thing that stopped me from ever actually trying to use coins to distract guards or NPCs.

You don't use the left trigger to aim (it's used to crouch), instead if you want something more precise than the behind the back aiming, you go into first person by clicking the right stick. That's fine, but if you're dual-wielding Silver Ballers (Agent 47™'s trademark pistols), and have red dot sights or scopes equipped (which of course I did once I had the option), clicking again puts you into scoped mode, and clicking one final time puts you back in third person... But now with only one pistol equipped. Presumably because you'd only want to be using a single scoped pistol at a time in scoped mode, but the fact that it doesn't auto-re-equip the second pistol when you go back to third person is troublesome in certain situations. Like if you're shooting your way out of a level because you got tired of trying to find the one gimmick assassination and just shot the person, but in doing so alerted everyone in the level.

And for whatever reason, if you have the double Silver Ballers, you can't store them in boxes. Which, is a silly mechanic, but there's boxes around the levels that you can safely put a weapon into so you know an enemy won't take it. But I guess you can only put one, and the dual Silver Ballers count as two! If you're wondering why you might want to do that, my answer would be that sometimes guards will search you if you're entering an area, and they won't let you in with weapons (though the strangle wire and remote bombs don't set off the detectors). In those cases you're better off leaving the guns somewhere you can recover them than surrendering them to the guards. I almost feel like it had to have been a bug, because you can store the double Silver Ballers in anything else that you can store a "single" weapon in, like briefcases.

Dealing with the AI in general can be a lot more frustrating than it should be. Sometimes the AI will ask you to leave an area if they see you somewhere you shouldn't, and sometimes they just shoot on sight. The problem is that I often couldn't see any reasoning in the times when they just started opening fire. Sure, sometimes I was doing something obviously bad, like trying to strangle someone, but sometimes they just opened fire for no reason. I'm not saying the game needs to be completely realistic, and let me get away with anything, but it's too unclear about things like that. I can't improve my ability to sneak if I don't know why it is that I'm messing up.

That ended up being another issue. Sometimes there's obvious ways to get the disguises you need. Either a lone NPC that you can easily strangle, sometimes clothes left out while someone is showering (whilst wearing shorts because obviously in a game about assassinating for blood money you can't have any nudity). But sometimes there isn't, or at least so far as I could tell there wasn't. And because of that, you need to do some old fashioned sneaking. But the sneaking isn't very good, so it ended up being something that didn't do if I could avoid it. And of course there's always multiple ways to get things done in the game, but in cases like that the other way ended up just being to shoot the target.

There's other ways the AI reacts that is too unrealistic, but I'm not sure if that's a difficulty thing or not. Like in the last mission (not counting the epilogue) where one of the targets is the Vice President of the United States. If the VP was actually killed in real life, it would trigger a complete shutdown of everything not only in the White House, but in all of Washington DC, I'd assume. In Blood Money? A few Secret Service agents walked around his body, and then one put him in a body bag and dragged him off to another room. Just too much of a break from reality for me, really.

Back to the different ways to deal with targets, now. While there certainly are multiple different ways to hit the targets in each level, it also feels like there is precisely one "unique" assassination per target. That one assassination that allows you to achieve it completely undetected, looks like an accident, and is just silly enough to be kind of funny. In one level you can replace a prop gun with a real one, let an actor shoot another (the target) during a rehearsal of a play, and then drop the stage lights on the other target as he rushes to the stage to see what happened. That's my favorite of them, even if I didn't pull the whole thing off (I didn't find the key card to get to the room where I could drop the lights, so I just shot the guy). In another stage I dropped a piano on a lady, and in yet another I hid a bomb inside a birthday cake meant for the target.

These assassinations are definitely the highlights of the game for me, but I think the game goes too far in the direction of not giving information to the player, and is too unclear about what you can and can't interact with. A decent number of the assassinations are done through leaving a remote controlled bomb on something, and detonating when the target is near (or under that piano), but sometimes they're unique interactions. In one level you can mess with someone's cooking pot and then it'll explode the next time he comes to cook.

The problem is that the game doesn't do anything to let you know if you can interact with these things unless you're standing in exactly the right spot, at the right time, and sometimes if you have the right item to use on it (like lighter fluid in another level with a grill). In one level there was a motorcycle hanging from a ceiling that certainly looked like it could have been dropped onto a person to get a kill, but there wasn't any sort of prompt on it, so I have no idea if I could or not, since the route the target was going on didn't bring him into that room. And I didn't really want to try to fiddle with the AI to lure him in there just to see that there wasn't any way to do that. While I don't think the game should have held my hand the entire time and told me exactly what to do for each assassination, there were a lot of times when I just did some random thing, or just strangled/shot the target because I couldn't see any other way to do it.

And, to be fair, the game does have a hint system. You can spend in game money (which is also used to upgrade weapons and items) to get hints, but they're usually pretty vague. I probably should have used them more than I did, especially given that I had way more money than I actually needed given that I only upgraded the Silver Ballers and the gear (fast lock picking, higher defense, that sort of stuff). The only one of the weapons that would have been useful was the sniper rifle, but you have to carry that in a briefcase, and doing that means you can't carry another briefcase, which you have to in some missions (at least when you escape at the end).

But even when I did achieve those unique kills, it never felt like I had thought up some great way to kill the target, and then it worked. It felt like I had found the one "good" way to kill them, and managed to do the one or two steps needed before a guard saw me. I never felt like I was playing with the AI so much as just waiting for it to turn its back so I could do a scripted thing. And that's not inherently a bad thing, and maybe what I'm asking for is beyond the scope of what's feasible in a game, but in general a lot of that stuff felt more limited than what I had been led to believe over the years.

The game feels pretty fragmented, and doesn't really have a great flow from one level to the next. There is a story, but it's not great. It's more there just to tie together a bunch of missions in different locations. There are multiple times where there are two missions in a row in similar locations. There's two in the swampy south, and two in Las Vegas, for example. But like I said, it feels more like the developers had a bunch of discrete situations in which assassinations were to occur, and just wrote a pretty light narrative to tie them together in a halfway coherent manner. Maybe it would have been better if I had played the previous games, but I don't know. And I'm not really interested enough to go digging deeper into the Hitman Lore.

The last thing I want to briefly mention is that, in true video game fashion, this game features more than a few scantily clad women throughout a bunch of the levels. I was not a fan of that. My general thinking is that if it's a situation where I would feel embarrassed if someone (say, my dad given that I still haven't found a means to move out) walked in and saw, then it's probably not good. I don't care if it's supposed to be a nightclub, or whatever, I don't want to be playing a game where most of the women in a particular level are walking around in thongs (not the Australian kind). But on the plus side, at least the game never (so far as I know) lets 47 dress up as a woman, and go into, "Oh, this dude is dressed as a woman, isn't that funny" transmisogynist "humor" territory. I'm glad they showed some restraint there, at least.

And yet again, I've spent most of a blog writing about the negative parts of a game, when I did enjoy a lot of it. If anything, it just made me more interested in the new Hitman. From what I've heard, that's the game for me. It has the core of what makes Hitman, "Hitman," but with more modernized controls, mechanics, and just enough nudging you in the direction of the gimmicky kills that I wouldn't end up feeling like I had missed most of them.

Of course, this is also the point where I remember that if you buy the "Intro Pack" for $15, the upgrade to the full version is $50, meaning you pay $5 more than just buying it outright. Which, I'm not going to do that, and then have the rest of the game be lousy, and I certainly don't want to pay an extra $5. Just on principal alone. So, where does that leave me? I'll either buying the $15 thing and probably wait for a sale on the upgrade, or wait until the whole thing is out and probably for a sale on that.

Though, I'm not one to balk at paying $15 for a game of that scope. I paid double that for Ground Zeroes two years ago, even if that was almost entirely because of my MGS obsession. Otherwise, this is it for my Hitman related coverage. Unless you want me to just gush about how much I really like Hitman Go, which remains my favorite Hitman game.

Anything Else?

I did play some of the TrackMania Turbo "Beta" over the weekend. I enjoyed it, but not enough to spend $40 on the game. I did, however, decide to drive to the edge of the world in the Canyon variant, and edited together a little video of my journey. I hope you like it, and I hope you have a nice day. Thank you for reading!