Hitman: Blood Money

Format Xbox

Developer Io Interactive

Publisher Eidos Interactive

Genre Action, Adventure

This time it's going to be a little harder for Agent 47. The bald sneaker has got himself caught up in a war between two rival spy agencies, pushing him underground, off the record, into the shadows and making Blood Money a much meaner game. This isn't just about infiltrating posh dinner parties any more. In Blood Money your main task is staying alive. It's all gone a bit gangsta.

The training mission will have you stuck if you're not familiar with the Hitman way, but it's one hell of a good sign of the new, more action-packed direction the series has taken. Within minutes of starting the first mission you're expected to throw coins to distract gangsta guards, spy through keyholes and stealth-kill blokes from behind by sneaking into position and sawing away at their necks with your fibre wire.

Then, right, you're dragging bodies and dumping them in chest freezers and hiding in a cupboard. For a stealth game, Hitman: Blood Money looks like a whole lot of fun. And it's also very easy to get around. Agent 47 is now an extremely user-friendly stealth operative. Lots of his moves are automatic - he can leap across gaps all on his own just by you pressing the stick in sort of the right direction, and he locks onto ledges and pipes, cutting out the pixel-perfect nonsense that makes so many of these games such tedious chores to play. You look after the planning, shooting and staying unnoticed. He does the holding on bits himself.

Clicking the right stick makes it all easier still, thanks to Blood Money letting you chose between first- and third-person perspectives, switching at will when the situation demands it. Shoot-outs are best played using Agent 47's eyes; stealth sections benefit from zooming out and getting a good look at your surroundings and cover options. As you'd expect from a game that's in its third sequel, it's all polished and very easy to use.

We also had a lot of fun with the sexy secretary. The real aim of the mission she stars in is to secretly poison her drink, so you can silently break into her boss's office without anyone hearing. However, impatient souls that we are, we went in all guns blazing and decided to shoot up her boyfriend right in front of her instead of going down the stealth route of pushing him out of the window.

So instead of going casually about her business she lets out a hideous scream and runs off. Everyone's alerted to your presence now, so you're left with no option but to keep on shooting. And that's pretty much what happens all the way through, with Blood Money letting you decide how to progress through the levels. And yes, you can just shoot the hell out of everyone.

Of course, there's new stuff in it for fans of the series. You might like to hear there's a shotgun in it nowadays, ideal for the nastier, grimier levels that dump you on the streets
of America. Weapons are customisable too, with faster fire rates, accuracy and zoom enhancements available to buy - and speaking of money, Agent 47 is now rewarded financially for taking people out in style. Do it properly, quietly and unseen to earn yourself the big bananas.

There's also a lot more to do in this new Hitman world as well. Agent 47's obviously spent the last year at home playing other stealth games and learning from them, with coin-tossing enemy distraction moves, body disposals and the ability to grab innocent bystanders to use their flabby bodies as human shields.

During one close-up fight we panicked, pressed something (dunno what) and elbowed our opponent in the face. We also stripped him of his gun in the same motion, and left him standing there, confused, with his gun in our hand and pointing at his head. So we shot him, and made a mental note to read the manual and work out what button it was we pressed so we can do that kind of cool thing more often.

And you shall be rewarded for doing the cool stuff. Each level finishes with a newspaper report on its events - get spotted by lots of people, make noise and rely on putting guns in faces instead of hands quietly around necks and your Notoriety goes up. The higher your Notoriety, the more aware enemies will be in the next mission, and the more holes there'll be in the bits of your arse you get handed back to you.

So you might want to seriously consider upgrading those weapons. Before each mission you can select your guns and that, and are also given the chance to make them substantially better at killing. Take the shotgun. Always a favourite. You'll like it even more now, especially once you've upgraded it to fire two more rounds before a reload, fitted it with a longer butt to make it more accurate and reduce recoil, or bought yourself some custom ammunition that boosts precision further still.

Everything can be modded in this way. Machine guns and pistols can be tweaked for accuracy and reduced noise, plus your sniper rifle has an enhancement that ups its rate of fire and similarly lessens recoil. Your regular equipment can also be tuned, lowered and totally customised, with Agent 47 able to waste his mission bonuses on more powerful spy binoculars, faster lockpicking skills or even just a few health boosts to miraculously patch up those bullet holes when his plans are rumbled.

But it's a good idea to hold off using all your super-enhanced maxed-out weapons until you know what's happening - and who to point them at. The Curtains Down mission has you back in familiar Hitman territory. You're at the opera, tracking down two targets - the American ambassador and the opera's main tenor - and although you're dressed like James Bond and blending in seamlessly, if one single thing goes wrong you're dead.

Like, even if you get caught picking a lock, you're dead. The ambassador's security guards are a bit aggressive here, hammering bullets into you even if you just open the wrong door when they're looking the right way - even on the Rookie difficulty setting. The makers of Blood Money may have given you more weapons and options to play with, but don't go thinking that means you're getting an easier experience.

Take that opera level. We blundered around it for ages at first, walking through doors and getting shot, then looking through keyholes and getting shot, and we daresay if the toilets let you wipe your arse we'd have got shot for that too.

Luckily we stumbled into a group of fat American tourists being shown around the beautiful building by a security guard. We were able to follow this group until the guard was called away, and used the diversion to follow another guard into a store room, knock him out, steal his uniform and emerge. The stupid Americans then started following Agent 47! The uniform and bunch of fat tourists gave us access to higher levels of the building, and we were then able to move onto the next section of game and find newer, more exciting ways of getting shot. Seriously, you will not be completing this game in a hurry.

During this part alone we also dressed as a decorator, hiding our gun in his toolbox to carry it past security, obstructed the view of a podgy audience member (punishment: sexy French verbal lashing), and used semi-naked men as human shields when everything went wrong and, as we often do in real life, we had to resort to hiding in the toilet until things had calmed down a bit and the bad men had gone away.

The missions are a cut above the usual. Another infiltration task has you storming a rehab clinic that keeps its 'guests' drunk extremely quietly. Again, you're able to move freely among the inmates and guards, with things only kicking off when you're caught doing something bad. The key to getting near your target here is to steal a robe, pretend to be a patient and wander aimlessly through security.

There's another mission in Las Vegas that involves murdering sheikhs and stealing diamonds, plus the more violent, seedier US settings and criminals give proceedings more of a Hollywood vibe than the arthouse European feel of previous Hitmans.

This isn't just a slightly better or a bit different Hitman - it's a massive redesign of the concept. It's easier to control, looks nicer, has slightly better-signposted missions so you don't get lost, and, well, it's just been polished up all round. It's a far more accessible and exciting game, one that seems to be taking popular elements from other stealth titles, adding a few gun-crazy missions and totally enhancing the look of it all. Meaner Hitman looks like fun.

Official Xbox Magazine staff