Few franchises in the history of gaming have captured the visceral joy of freedom and creativity to the degree that Hitman has done. The latest installment, Hitman: Blood Money, again places you in the shoes of Agent 47, a cloned super-soldier of sorts, and tasks you with killing a high profile target by any means possible. Where in most games this kind of freedom is illusory, Hitman backs it up with an extraordinary range of deadly possibilities. You are free to claw your way through the level, gunning down waves of guards and armed gangsters if you so choose, but the real difficult challenge is being a silent assassin – using chameleon-like espionage tactics to get close to the target and make the hit look like an accident, with no standers-by being any the wiser.

The AI can make this job somewhat tricky; being quite rightfully suspicious when 47 acts in any way out of character, especially on the higher difficulty settings. To succeed, you need to be mindful of your surroundings, and have eyes in the back of your head. Sometimes the difference between a perfect and near-perfect score is a single witness. And considering the game sports levels with several hundred characters milling about at once, it can require an exceptional amount of guile.

Hitman isn’t a terribly long game; a single play-through can be completed in less than ten hours, depending on your tolerance for imperfection. There’s a lot of replay value there though, as you can go back and collect rare weapons to putt around with in your hideout, and silent assassin ratings aren’t usually attained without a good deal of practice and an intimate knowledge of each level and its guard patterns. A serious Hitman could be looking at upwards of 25 hours to complete all the game’s achievements. The story that’s supposed to move you along is fairly forgettable, but the little nuances that have been included, such as your mission performance being evaluated in the form of a newspaper article’s telling of the events, are all icing on the cake.

Graphically, Hitman probably isn’t the most stunning game on the 360, but what it lacks in polygon counts and sharpness it more than makes up for in quantity. The levels vary from big to huge, and they’re all populated by a fairly significant number of NPCs. When you see the Mardi Gras level for the first time, you’ll come to truly appreciate the scope the Hitman team was going for with its engine. These are the sorts of things that just didn’t seem possible in years passed, and with the 360 hardware they’re accomplished smoothly and with a pretty consistent framerate.

Agent 47 continues the tradition of greatness in Blood Money, taking the sandbox formula that’s worked for years and bringing it into 2006. It’s not the kind of game that will blow you away with a new and exciting approach to the franchise, but it’s the sort of upgrade that you can feel good about dropping your hard-earned money on. 47 will thank you for it.

Score: 88%