Hitman: Blood Money

Great game. It runs fine on Linux via Wine, so it's perfect :)

I own the game on Steam and retail DVD and I would like to reply to "beefkd"'s review. The brightness issue is related to Nvidia drivers themselves and not GOG, as I have tested the latest Steam version on a Radeon RX 480 and a Nvidia GTX 1060 and the first person brightness issue only occurs on the Nvidia GPU. Furthermore, since I have been aware the AI can track you with 100% accuracy all over the map, especially the AI that have been made aware of your cover, which is unfortunate yes, but this is not unique to GOG. Personally, I am disappointed with the fibre wire animation not struggling in the victim's hands as shown on the back-cover of the retail DVD cover, but other than that it is mostly a great game.

After this one every other game in the series will leave bitter taste in your mouth. It has great level design, no over-scripted nonsense that plague modern hitman games, unforgettable targets and great sound track. Truly must have for any hitman fan.

Like many people, Blood Money was my first encounter with the franchise. I first played it in January 2013 at now-long gone "Core Online" and immediately was enchanted by the insane weapon customization, the missions, the atmosphere etc. To be fair, the weapon customization nowadays is kinda gimmicky and hasn't aged well, the rest however, absolutely has. Blood Money is the perfection of the OG Hitman formula, from music to disguise system to level design, and even though the Hitman games post 2016 are objectively even better than Blood Money, Blood Money still has a lot going for it. The only criticism I could ever offer would be that many of the cutscenes haven't aged that well, in particular though, the story is meh at best, with it kind of being retconned by Hitman games post 2016. That being said, unlike the retconns of material from C47 regarding the cloning projects origins, I couldn't care less about the BM story. I also find the America-centric nature of the missions grading, though that's just personal preference.

This game is the best this series has to offer. While Contracts is a close, close second, this one perfected the formula that the series had tried to establish since Codename 47. Let's start with the good and work our way down to the very little bad. First off, the game looked gorgeous for the time it was released, and still holds up fairly well all these years later. The character models have a certain art style to them that keeps them from aging horribly, but they do look dated. Jesper Kyd's soundtrack is amazing as always. This game has some of the best orchestral arrangements, only bested by Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. It's a mix of orchestral and synth beats, like a blending of SA and Contracts, and every track fits the mood. The list of weapons you can use is pretty expansive, and grows over the course of the game. Upgrades can be bought for almost any firearm, which leads to a nice progression system. Also tied into progression is Notoriety, which accumulated the more witnesses and cameras spot you. The higher the notoriety, the easier guards can see through your disguise on later missions. You have to pay contract money to lower it, so any messy job will leave you shorter on cash that you could be putting to better use upgrading your gear. After every job, there's a newspaper article going through how you did in a pretty novel fashion. It's something that I wish would have carried over into later games and expanded upon. Every environment has its intricacies that could lead to multiple playthroughs to find different ways to execute your targets. Running out of room, so let's look at some of the bad. The animations are certainly dated, the AI still has some weird quirks every now and then, and the controls can be a bit awkward sometimes. Also, it can be easy to accidentally get stuck in a mandatory animation if you get to close to an object that triggers one (like a pipe you can climb). Outside of that, simply the best Hitman has to ffer as a series.