Hitman: Blood Money

No wonder why this one it's considered one of the best. It has everything: solid story, good mechanics, variety on accomplishing your missions. If you are new in the world of Hitman, this is a solid choice to start into it.

Still thrilling and exciting to play

I played this game in 2021 for the first time in my life and really enjoyed it! This is amazing, but after all these years even graphics look good, which is not common for 3D games. Every mission can be completed in different ways, depending on your game style, but on higher difficulty level brute force usually makes you load the previous save quite fast :) I also liked the fact of limiting the number of available save games on higher difficulty - this really increases the pressure but at the same time doesn't lead to frustration, at least in my case. Also noticed that save games were removed when I restarted the game, so I had to complete every mission during a single gaming session, but since missions are not that long (45min-1h maybe), that's also ok. My only complain is the animation, especially in cutscenes - looks a bit clunky, but that's the only sign on an old game (good old game to be precise ;)). Anyway, great, great game, highly recommend if you like stealth games.

This is a true five-star. Even graphically, it holds well. The gameplay is improved. Missions are more interesting, execution options vary, there is a lot of replayability to explore another options or just locations itself. And story wise, it all makes sense. There is continuity to all the parts. I had a blast. Had to skip launcher, though. Game crashes way less often without it. It still may crash rarely. But it's no biggie. The fun is there and it's awesome.

By this point IO Interactive have completely perfected at least this iteration of the franchise. Everything is improved upon from earlier entries. The biggest game changer here is the ability to arrange supposed accidents which will improve your rating, if you can make it plausible that the deaths that have to happen in order for you to complete any given level were accidental. It has you thinking creatively, exploring, carefully planning things out and it doesn't exactly hurt that the amazing score kicks in when you're just about to pull off something epic, essentially serving as confirmation that what you're about to do, if you get it right, will definitely work. You are given a tiny number of little bombs that can, say, loosen something that's positioned in a place that means it could be part of taking someone out if it fell on them at the exact right time. It is possible to push others, including off tall drops. Every level is spectacular. This was the first time in one of these that given the option to replay everything, I actually eagerly chose to do so rather than skipping certain ones. Not a single one of them is just there to get you from point a to point b. Sometimes you will have multiple targets. In contrast to the second game they went for quality over quantity, similar to Contracts. The upgrade mechanic hugely changes how you play; before this one money in these was basically just to purchase specific guns and the amount of ammo and such. Now you can also improve the ones you have, including stuff like ensuring that you can get your sniper rifle case with its contents inside past a metal detector. It goes without saying that this opens up a lot of options. The notoriety system is quite clever. Basically if you don't take care to hide your identity you will become recognized more and more the further you get. Apparently someone failed at one of the last levels because they were immediately recognized as an assassin.