Partridge Senpai's 2025 Beaten Games:
Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat
1~50
51~100
101.
Rayman 2: The Great Escape (N64)
102.
Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa (Famicom)
103.
Panic Restaurant (NES)
104.
Mr. Gimmick (NES)
105.
Bucky O'Hare (NES)
106.
Wheel of Fortune (N64)
107.
Resident Evil 2 (PS1)
108.
Dragon Quest VI (SFC)
109.
Ninja Gaiden (NES)
110.
StarTropics (NES)
111.
Parody World: Monster Party (Famicom)
112.
Super Mario Bros 2 (NES)
113.
Kamen No Ninja Hanamaru (Famicom)
114.
Power Blade (NES)
115.
Power Blazer (Famicom)
116.
Metroid (NES)
117.
Kid Icarus (NES)
118.
New Super Mario Bros. U (Wii U) *
119.
Ganbare Goemon 3: Shishi Juurokubee no Karakuri Manjigatame (SFC)
120. Hitman: Blood Money (Xbox 360)
I’ve been watching my partner and her sister play through the first of the newer Hitman games recently, and it’s been a lot of fun. I was getting in the mood to replay that first World of Assassination game myself, but then I happened to come across this! These PS2-era Hitman games actually did all come out in Japan (albeit this one only came out on 360), but they’re pretty darn rare, so I snapped this one up as soon as I could even if it was a little more pricey than I usually prefer my stuff to be. I’d watched a Let’s Play of this game MANY years ago, but I’d basically totally forgotten it. All I knew is that this is the old Hitman people really like, and that people credit it with finally getting Hitman right after a few decidedly less than perfect previous attempts. I did my best to be as stealthy and low-kill count as possible as well as never finish a level with any notoriety/wanted level. It ultimately took me a bit over 16 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on normal difficult playing it via the Xbox One’s backwards compatibility feature.
As the back of the box totes, “Agent 47 is back, and this time he’s here for cold, hard cash!” You once again play as Agent 47 doing a series of assassination missions, but it takes place through a series of flashbacks. An unknown man in a wheelchair is giving a detailed account of his agency’s attempts to take down Agent 47, and the stories he tells are how your missions go. This framing device is clever, but the actual stories in the mission extremely rarely actually touch on them at all. The last few missions begin to touch on it more directly, or at least acknowledge the larger changing circumstances the story takes place in, but even then, it’s only a little. The game’s overarching story is pretty ignorable for the most part, but when it decides to be relevant, they do a good job at making it take the form of fun and novel twists (ones they even foreshadow!). Hitman doesn’t need some big overarching narrative, and this game is absolutely better for not having some really involved, mission-by-mission story. It does a fun job of providing twists when it decides to, and it provides a more than adequate excuse for all the Hitman-y fun you get to have on your missions.
The weakest part of the writing, both in comparison to the newer games and just in general, is the comedy (or the attempts at such). Hitman is already a very silly premise between the ragdolling bodies and the sheer nonsense you can get up to in the missions if you’re playing creatively, and something the World of Assassination games lean into this campy element really well. Blood Money either doesn’t realize the camp, or it plays into it way too subtly to be very effective most of the time. It’s not helped with some casually racist and homophobic caricatures here and there, but even outside of those mercifully scant bleaker aspects of this game being from 2006, it’s just overall not very funny either. It’s not a terrible mark against the game (outside of the very 2006-y stuff just mentioned), but it’s also a place where this game comes up very short compared to the newer games.
The gameplay is 12 or so missions of Agent 47 getting his info on the target and being dropped into the stage to take them out in whatever means he (the player) deems necessary. And you have an awful lot of means to do so! Your ultimate mission objectives are generally very flexible, so you’re free to do whatever you want as long as you take out the targets and escape at the end. You can go in guns blazing, but this is ultimately a stealth series at its core. As such, you can both find disguises around levels or just take out NPCs and steal their clothes for a disguise too! In terms of offense, you’ve got some covert weapons like lethal or non-lethal syringes of poison to take down unsuspecting victims, or you can always take out your trusty piano wire and strangle them that way. You’ve also got a bunch of guns you can take with you to each mission (and even ones you’ve found and brought home from other missions), and that custom supply of 5 can even be upgraded between missions to be more effective next time.
That’s where the titular “blood money” comes in. You get a base amount of cash for just completing a level, and then you get an extra bonus depending on how well you did it. You also have optional extra objectives in some stages that you can do for extra cash, and there are also penalties that’ll lower your final reward if you do things like leave collateral damage or forget your custom weapons or signature suit behind. It’s a neat idea, but it’s ultimately not a very compelling upgrade system. Sure, you can play the game as a full out 3rd person shooter and take down as many hostile NPCs as you can with your custom modded assault rifle, but why are you even playing a stealth game like Hitman if that’s your objective?
Hitman Blood Money runs into the issue that a lot of stealth games in this sort of genre do where there just aren’t that many ways to have meaningful upgrades for a stealth playthrough that aren’t either meaningless or game breakingly good. You can upgrade your pistol (the one custom weapon that can be hidden inside containers and such) with stealth features like low-velocity bullets, scopes, and silencers, and you can also upgrade your lockpicking ability to be faster with better lockpicks, but that’s really it in terms of stealth-focused upgrades. This is nothing that really makes the game worse by any means, as the stealth mechanics are already great and the missions are very well designed too. The game is not meaningfully lesser just because it lacks a meaningful system of progression for a stealth-focused gameplay loop. Even still, when you compare it alongside the challenge-based system that the World of Assassination games have developed, it’s hard to view this one as very impressive (and it’s not hard to see why they saw it fit to get rid of it).
This is the oldest Hitman game I’ve played and the oldest one I’m familiar with. I’m familiar with how the World of Assassination games play and are designed (to a point), so I can compare it with those mechanically, not much more than that. Blood Money’s design is very clearly what the WoA games are building from, but the sheer amount of polish and extra quality of life features that were added between BM and WoA are impossible to ignore. On a larger level, it’s impossible to actually save the game and come back to it later mid-mission. You can have a certain amount of mid-mission saves depending on what difficulty you’re playing on, but these are wiped if you turn the console off. The only hard saves you get are between levels, so if you want to leave the game and come back to it later, you’ve gotta just leave the console on until you get back. I imagine this was likely done just because it’d be SO much data to store on a PS2 memory card to suspend a level’s state like that, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying (especially when you’re playing on the much more beefy hardware of an Xbox 360).
The game’s basic mechanics are also much too fiddly in places. This game generally lacks most of the non-lethal options that the WoA games make so readily available to the player. However, mission rankings like “silent assassin” for never getting spotted and only killing your designated targets still exist. Having so little ability to actually remove enemies nonlethally makes it a really cool and engaging challenge to get a silent assassin ranking in Blood Money, and it was SUCH a satisfying and awesome feeling when I finally managed my first one. However, the game is constantly working against you doing this in any reasonable fashion because of how awkward the close-combat mechanics are. I never found any way to walk up behind an enemy, without them seeing me, and using any point-blank weapon (like a syringe or the piano wire) with any kind of reliability. It seemed like a totally arbitrary roll of the dice if Agent 47 would cooperate with me that time or not, and I just consider it a small blessing that enemies somehow never consider him suspicious or dangerous when he’s got his piano wire drawn.
Compared to how fluid and easy the WoA games make this kind of thing, it makes Blood Money a consistently awkward and frustrating mess to try and do proper stealth challenges in, and it makes this game a lot harder to enjoy and recommend as a result. And that really sucks, because this game’s quality is otherwise really well thought out and great! The mission design is really well considered, and solving the puzzle on how best to get disguises, smuggle weapons, get close to targets, and hide bodies was always super fun. Some aspects of it being older actually really work in its favor in this regard as well.
Unlike the WoA games, this game doesn’t have any “Hitman Vision” mechanic to see through walls. It also lacks any sort of objective markers either. You’ll occasionally get a cutaway to show you a particularly important time-specific event happening somewhere else on the map, but that’s all you’re getting. As a result, you’ve got a *lot* less handholding than the WoA games give you. In some ways, this makes Blood Money a relatively speaking far less approachable game, but it also makes it a game with a much larger aspect on exploring the environment and rewarding feelings of discovery for finally finding what the right solution is. There were so many tense, exciting moments where I managed to get a target exactly where I wanted them. Heck, there were a good few times where it was a struggle to even find the target at all, and I had to come up with other strategies to stake out how the other targets moved or watch locations they were most likely to be. It really pains me so much that Blood Money’s close-combat mechanics are such a mess, because lacking extra features like Hitman Vision really gives Blood Money a novel feeling of actually being this sort of Hitman. You really do feel like someone sent on a mission with only a vague briefing who has to come up with strategies while they’re already in the thick of it, and it makes for a downright addicting gameplay loop.
The aesthetics are generally alright, but they’re definitely from one of the eras of 3D in games that’ve been hurt by aging the hardest. The more realistic art style this game goes for certainly does have a kind of retro janky charm to it, but it still makes people look really strange and freaky quite often between the generally low polygon count and the pop-in tricks the game pulls to get more NPCs on screen at once. The upscaled version I played on the Xbone doesn’t help much either, because now all those very playdough-y looking people are in VERY high resolution for your eyes to enjoy XD. The music and soundtrack is generally pretty solid, but the game doesn’t have a ton of music in the first place. It mostly relies on diegetic sound, and music only plays to highlight tense escapes or action scenes. It’s an effective soundtrack, and the sound design in general is very well done.
Verdict: Recommended. As much as the jank of the mechanics drove me crazy and the lack of quality of life with the save system drove me crazy, I was not at all lying when I earlier described this game as downright addicting. While it may live very firmly in the shadow of just how excellent the World of Assassination Hitman games are, that does not at all detract from just how high the quality on offer still is with how fun this game is to play and how well designed the mission are. I’d never ever recommend this game over the World of Assassination games, but if you’re someone who loved the newer Hitman games, want more Hitman fun in your life, but have been too afraid to check out the earlier games because of how great a jump in quality you’ve heard WoA is, I can pretty safely say that you’ll have a whale of a time with this game too if you’re willing to put up with the more awkward growing pains the series found itself in at this time.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
