Hitman: Blood Money

I've spent a good chunk of time watching plans fall apart beautifully in Hitman: Blood Money, and that experience is almost the whole point. This is a third-person stealth puzzle game wearing an action game's coat. Each of its roughly dozen-plus missions drops you into a densely packed, semi-sandbox environment - a Mardi Gras crowd in New Orleans, an Egyptian-themed casino in Las Vegas, a witness-protection suburb straight out of a crime thriller - and then steps back to let you figure out how a target dies. Do you spike a drink, tamper with a gas line, push someone over a railing, or just walk up with a fiber-wire garrote and hope nobody notices? The game rewards patience and surgical precision, but it never locks out the player who wants to shoot their way out - it just makes that path harder and messier in satisfying ways. What Blood Money added to the Hitman formula was meaningful enough to cement its reputation. The weapon upgrade system lets you sink money earned from clean contracts into suppressors, scopes, and custom ammunition for your personal arsenal. Body concealment - stuffing victims into containers so guards don't stumble across evidence - changed how the stealth loop felt, making a clean run feel genuinely earned rather than lucky. The notoriety system tracks how badly you've behaved across missions and can make future contracts more dangerous, which is an elegant way to penalize recklessness over time rather than just in the moment. The Silent Assassin rating, which demands zero witnesses, zero unintended casualties, and ideally a kill that looks accidental, is the self-imposed hard mode that keeps veteran players coming back to maps they've already memorized. The locations are the game's biggest asset, even now. Each mission is essentially its own small open world with its own logic, civilian routines, guard rotations, and environmental kill setups. The level in a suburban neighbourhood, where your target is in a witness protection program surrounded by oblivious neighbours, is a masterclass in grounded sandbox design. The amusement park opener and the White House finale show the range the game is willing to swing across. Gameplay runs roughly 12 hours on a first pass, closer to 20 if you're chasing completionist goals, and replay value is genuinely high because the missions support radically different approaches. The weaknesses are real and worth flagging for newcomers. The AI has quirks - enemies sometimes react to things they shouldn't and ignore things they should catch. Controls feel stiff by modern standards, and the disguise system, while more forgiving than earlier games in the series, can produce moments that break the mood when a guard you just walked past decides to spin around for no reason. The graphics have aged visibly; this is a 2006 game on a 2006 engine. None of these issues are deal-breakers, but if you've come straight from the World of Assassination trilogy you'll feel the generational gap immediately. For pure stealth fans, Blood Money remains one of the genre's benchmark titles. It does one thing - building a sandbox around a single assassination target and letting you invent the solution - with a confidence that many games since have tried and not quite matched. If you can meet it on its own terms, it holds up. Alex, Scout Team