Hitman: Blood Money returns to the root of the series. Back to a sequence of missions, rather than the fractured, annoying flashbacks of Contracts (many of which were rehashes of original levels).

Every Hitman seems to tweak the unlock system. Here you earn cash based on your level ratings. That money can then be spent on weapon upgrades for your core equipment - your trademark silverballers, a shotgun, a submachine gun, an assault rifle, and a sniper rifle. These improvements include silencers, better sights, stocks, and a variety of ammunition choices to do more damage or make less noise. Additional weapons can be added to your arsenal by carrying them to a mission exit, though to be honest there didn't seem to be any point in doing so because with a few exceptions, your standard choices are unquestionably superior.

Blood Money makes a few changes to the mission ratings. Upon completing a mission, you're presenting with your score in noise and violence. Obviously both should be low to achieve the optimal "Silent Assassin" rating. Additionally the game tracks how many witnesses there were and if your face was captured on video. A witness, as it turns out, is anyone who sees you carrying a weapon, even if appropriate to your costume (such as a guard). High noise and/or violence will increase your notoriety, though you can spend some of your earnings to lower it. I'm not sure exactly what happens if you get a high notoriety.

I noticed that there are fewer obvious silent assassin methods presented to the player and the mission levels seemed more complicated on average than many of those from previous games. For instance, it's rare to find a vial of poison sitting a few paces away from a bowl of soup. This game also requires a bit more patience than previous iterations. There's a lot of time spent waiting for people to hit their waypoints for optimal killing (especially when it's one of the levels where the AI characters stupidly and rigidly follows a seriues of baffling waypoints).

On the other hand, this game introduces the ability to make kills look like accidents. An explosive on the cable holding up a chandelier, for example, can detonate just as the target walks underneath. It's then considered an accident, so there's no need to hide the body. Accidents tend to be somewhat hidden, so you have to search for them. One side effect of accidents and Silent Assassin kills is that you have almost no need of any of your weapons except the fiber wire. It's disappointing to have all these options for upgrades and yet to get the money needed for upgrades, you won't want to even use the weapons you're upgrading.

Though graphics are improved, there's one big problem that's impossible to overlook: the "hot" women are freakish. They all have giant globe breasts that are unnaturally round and body proportions that strain credibility.

I had a few problems with the interface. The menu system had a few glitches when it came to clicking on things. Every once in a while I'd click something and it would not register. Instead, my mouse cursor would be relocated to the center of the screen for some reason. The ESC button would often be disabled during certain scenes and even beyond that it would occasionally be unresponsive. My standard method to get to the game menu was to double-tap ESC because it would often disregard the first one. Save games are entirely transient. Once you finish a level or quit the game, your saves are gone. So while the game tracks your progress by level, you can't save the game in the middle of a mission and quit the game with plans to come back later. You'll have to start that mission over from the beginning.

This game has one of the better endings of the series but it's a bit too easy to miss the hidden "treat". Even so, it was well done. All in all, I found this to be a good addition to the Hitman series.