Game Review: Hitman: Blood Money

I just finished playing "Hitman: Blood Money" on the rookie setting.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Hitman series of games, you play a man known as 47. He's one of a series of assassin clones that went rogue. You tried going straight in an earlier game but, as they say, they kept dragging you back in.
You work for something called Agency. They give you your missions. You're given a set number of goals and it's up to you to decide how best to solve them. You can come in with guns blazing and making sure that nobody walks out alive unless it's part of the mission. You can slip in with one of several disguises, kill only the targets, and leave undetected. You can shoot them, poison them, blow them up, run them down, push them from balconies, whatever. Any extra kills you need to get disguizes can be stuffed in a dumpster or deep freeze so they won't clue in security. The freedom the game provides is one of the best I've seen.

In this game there's another group killing Agency's agents. By the end there's only you and Diana, your contact, left alive and Diana is on the run. As the SWAT team is closing in on your location Diana comes and poisons you with a hypodermic needle to the neck as you've done to so many other people. It looks like she sold you out.

Gandolf bought it. She yelled "BITCH!" at the TV. Hey, she didn't learn the word from me. Wait, maybe she did. I guess I have been known to yell that at the TV when somebody does something sneaky to me that I don't like. Hmmm.

But at the funeral Diana comes up to your body, gives you a couple of guns and another injection. As the credits roll you start to wake up. Diana did the same thing to you that you did to a CIA agent you were trying to smuggle out of imprisonment in an alcohol rehab center and could only sneak out "dead". Wiggling the controls speeds up your recovery. You sit up and start shooting people. They're all heavily armed and all members of the group whose been killing people at Agency. All but a reporter and you have to kill him, too.

Great game, but the whole series is. Too bad there will probably never be a Thief 4. It's the only series I liked more than Hitman.