I just played the demo of Hitman: Blood Money, and I must say I was not at all impressed. Something about the whole game, from the environments to the character models to the gameplay, seemed cheap, awkward and sub-par. For example, the fact that when you press E to open a door, the door simply swings open - 47 doesn’t even stick out his arm to open it, it just opens by magic. SO cheap! How the fuck could the developers have overlooked that? Maybe it’s fixed in the full version. If not, I will be severely dissapointed.
It’s like when you play the latest FPS and you find yourself clipping through dead enemies - the bad guys were solid when they were alive, but once they die, you can walk through them AND see empty space inside their bodies? Half-Life 2 was notorious for doing this with certain enemies like the Striders. Is it that much harder for the damn programmers to just keep the dead model a solid, or do they have to keep breaking the fucking fourth wall?
The first and only level of the Blood Money demo was a lame-o abandoned carnival (we’ve never seen THAT setting before, no siree, not since Max Payne 2 and Manhunt and a whole horde of other “gothic-noir-feel” games,) and you have to assassinate an incredibly bizarre character named Joseph Clarence. He is a short, fat man who looks like a light-skinned black man, but sounds for all the world like a nasally-voiced Jew from Queens. I have absolutely no idea if the people in charge intended his high-pitched, whiny voice to sound like someone’s shitty impersonation of a whiny Jew, but it has an unsettling effect. Clarence is surrounded by a horde of black gangbangers who are all dressed like they came from a rap video and who speak in very cheesy stereotypical gangsta-speak. Good Jesus, after a very unique series of Hitman games, they’re reverting to this hashed-out crap? I don’t get it at all.
The graphics overall just seem kind of hacked-out and not really good. Far Cry and Half-Life 2, for instance, were graphical stunners - Blood Money just looks average. The screenshots make it really look incredible, but they are posed with all sorts of camera angles looking at 47 from different perspectives as in some kind of movie. The actual play, behind-the-back style, is mundane and devoid of all the dynamic appearances that the screenshots offer.
I will have to read the reviews once the game itself is released on May 30. But I suspect that a great many reviewers will share my opinion. I have been playing computer games with a passion for 15 years - I’m a pretty good judge of what is excellent and what is just so-so. And Blood Money seems to just be so-so. Maybe it’s time for 47 to retire.