I guess there’s something good to be said about any game that truly offers multiple paths to its objectives. These days, plenty of games boast about the ability to pick and choose your style of completion, and plenty of them are bullshit claims. Hitman: Blood Money is pretty cool, I guess. You could argue that there are only two ways to complete a level; quiet or loud, but the ranking system displayed at the end of each hit is full of varying degrees of professional killer titles. You might think you’re finishing an assassination in a ‘loud’ manner, but only earn the “mass murderer” rank rather than “terrorist.” The game is aware of almost every action you can perform and takes it into account when grading your execution. You can choose between either spraying down a neighborhood with armor-piercing bullets, stalking madly between hedgerows and slitting the necks of any near passers-by, or even being a little serious about it and actually killing the target before making your escape.

I easily think of the word ‘solid’ when trying to describe the game and remembering the countless replayed levels. I thoroughly enjoyed returning to favorites of mine, regardless of whether or not I varied the style of each play.

Anyway, there’s more to the game than that. The narrative’s told in a matter-of-fact explanation of Agent 47’s past, with two characters discussing his previous endeavors as a prelude descriptor for each mission before it begins. Your present gameplay is actually the past, and it’s kind of a neat fact during the interludes but it’s almost forgotten between. It does, however, allow for clues to be dropped in the ‘past’ missions that have very much to do with the ‘present’ storyline, and when the two catch up, it’s a great moment.

The music is the usual, and quite fitting for all of your assassin-like activities, with an Ave Maria theme perfectly suited to the encompassing motif. The graphics are decent, at best. They’re not poor, they’re just appropriate for the game. The animations are quite good; as fluid as can be expected.

Obviously there are quirky black spots in the form of the game, like the fact that the super stealthy 47 can hide a submachine-gun with an extended butt stock within his dress shirt, or change out of said dress shirt into virtually any outfit within a moment’s notice. But these are accepted in the Hitman universe. What’s not so acceptable is the lower count of weapons than were available in previous iterations. Or the [un]amusing spread of weapons throughout a level, like repeatedly finding only nail-guns and hammers in construction areas; we get it.

And while the narrative is definitely engrossing and in a unique form, it’s not as appealing, again, as the past games in the franchise. Revenge was a palpable justification for the missions and executions in the last few games, but now 47’s beyond that, and killing anyone for the right price.

You might think this makes him a little emotionally shallow(er) compared to his previous manners, and I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but you’d be dead wrong. Agent 47 is hard shit, and he puts it on display for you before the curtain falls.