360

Ah ha!

A few days ago I was saying that I couldn’t quite connect with the Hitman games as they didn’t give me the feedback I wanted and didn’t quite understand why some things work and some don’t. Well, Blood Money looks to improve on that by quite a long way, due to a couple of relatively small changes.

Firstly, there’s a proper tutorial, which is the demo. This takes you through a linear hit step by step. Incredibly annoying for people who’ve played all the other games in the series to death, no doubt, but incredibly useful to me. Should even be good if I go back to playing Contracts.

It’s possible to get things wrong in the demo, despite it being a tutorial.

The first time I played I jumped down a hole before I should have done and alerted a load of people I was meant to sneak past, prompting a gun fight. (The demo is perfectly able to carry on when you bugger things up, which is nice.) Later, I had to take someone as a human shield and take down some guards in a room. I got my gun out, grabbed the human shield and walked him into the next room. Everything was going fine until I pulled the trigger and my gun made an empty clicking noise. Oh. Oh dear. That extra gunfight had used up all my ammo. I died and had to restart, but it was a great way to go. Sometimes it’s when things go wrong that you real start to fall for games. And that was one of those times.

So, yes, the tutorial is the first change. The second is the addition of two extra bars. One shows how visible you are, one shows how suspicious people are of you. Okay, so sometimes you might not be sure why someone sees through your disguise, but you’ll get a warning as you walk closer to them. Times when things go wrong won’t come out of nowhere quite as much.

Sometimes it’s still difficult to see why characters react the way they do, mind. I, in disguise, had to walk past a guard. He didn’t bat an eyelid as I walked past, opened a door and walked through. However, as soon as I shut the door behind me he decided I was up to no good and rushed in, guns blazing. Very odd. If the door had been open before I walked through that would make some sense as it would like I was hiding something. Still, in a game like this I suppose you’ve got to expect a few moments of that sort here and there. In fact, testing those sort of reactions is part of the whole game. It’ll make more sense when I can save mid-mission.

Anyway, I’m thoroughly looking forward to Blood Money now and would preorder it right now if, er, I hadn’t already preordered. Having to do the demo again will be a pain, but it’ll give me a nice way to compare the Xbox graphics in this demo to the 360 graphics in the full game.