I procured it last week.....I was thinking of writing a review because I loved it....initially!
Initially because I ran into some bugs. At the start everything worked fine and dandy. Then a few levels in, everytime I threw something on the floor, or placed a bomb, the game would crash back to the desktop.
Ahhhh there's a patch!! Great! So I installed the patch....and The menu system would load but thats all I saw. The screen was black, although I could hear things through the speakers.
Eidos claim it is running on a new engine, but to be honest, I cant find any differences comparing to the previous Hitman. There were some tweaks made here and there, but nothing significant.
The choice of weapons are great. You get loads of weapons to choose from, and you can "Upgrade" weapons, such as fitting silencers etc....The game's title is "Hitman", so maybe being silent is a good thing?
The objective of the game is to make money by completing contracts. The better you are at your job, the more you get to upgrade your weapons and such.
So running around pistols drawn isnt such a good idea if you want to get paid alot. You get rewards for making no noise, only killing the people needed, hiding bodies and such.
The story line is as usual GREAT. You get a multitude of ways of completing the objective. For example, In the picture above, You have to get a nacklace which contains some microfiche from the lady's neck.
You could run around pistols drawn and hope you kill everything, before everything kills you, goto a neighbours tree house and snipe her in some quiet secluded spot and hope to dear god no-one notices, sneak into her back garden and "tamper" with the barbeque which roasts her to a crisp or alternatively you could try my favourite, which is to entice her into bed.....the game is a jigsaw, will you use your brain to complete it or will you use your TV remote to hammer the jigsaw pieces if they dont fit?
When you complete a Level, you are given a title. I have been given titles ranging from professional, assasin, Hitman to terrorist and mass murderer.
Notoriety. Basically, if you keep leaving witnesses and getting caught on camera's (Photographers are always around!), your notoriety will increase, making you more vulnerable to security staff. You have to pay bribes and such to bring your notoriety level down. What you could do is to kill EVERYONE in the level and steal the video tapes, that way, there are no witnesses. Good idea, except in one level, you are at Mardi Gras, with literally hundreads of people, not the crowd background you see in rally games, but actual people walking around which you can kill. I got bored and deceided to kill EVERYONE, see how many bodies I could pile up, this isnt a very wise idea, as once all the policemen were dead and their weapons in my possesion, I quickly ran out of bullets, with only my fibre wire left to kill people. I slauughtered people for 4 hours straight, and finally killed EVERYONE, a feat in itself.
The reason why I played it for four hours straight, well, the saves you make mid-way through a level, everytime you restart the level, exit to the main menu, the Mid-way saves are automatically deleted, which is VERY frustrating!
One thing about the game I dont like is the way the characters stare at you all the time. You could argue that people would stare at a straight faced bald man with a barcode on the back of his head, wearing leather gloves and a business suit.
Note - The first mission is an Intro to the game. It teaches you the basics and the advanced moves. One of these moves, is to grab a person and use that person as a human shield. This feature worked great in the first one or two missions, but now It plain refuses to work.
After the throwing incident which causes the game to crash, I installed a patch which made things worse. I had to re-install the game.
After I reinstalled it, Everything was working fine, for a few hours. Then the sounds cut off, as if the computer pressed the mute button. All I could hear were my footsteps and my gun as I pulled the trigger and blew the brains out of an attractive Playboy bunny, at the playboy mansion.
So I knew what the game needed, a re-install. Its worked fine for around 1 hour and now, the black screen has arrived again, prompting a re-install.
Oh and incase you have'nt realised, Im playing it on a PC, not xbox 360, so these issues may not be relevant on a Xbox.
Whilst most of my system is inbetween the recommended and minimum specifications, I was consistently getting 30fps whilst sometimes dipping to 12fps, even when there wasnt anything much happening on the screen, very odd.
My system specs are: AMD XP 2200+, 512Mb Ram and a Geforce 6800GT overclocked to Ultra specs, oh and plenty of free hard drive space (Over 500Gb's!!)
I'll post some screenshots when I can be bothered
, as most of my time is taken up with uninstalling and re-installing the game!
BiG K
Hitman: Blood Money Out -
05-31-2006, 09:58 AM
Today
Sponsored Links
