HITMAN: BLOOD MONEY is another one of those games that is so foot-stampingly, fist-clenchingly, teeth-grittingly close to being a brilliant game that it makes me wonder yet again how things like this happen.

Io Interactive are a well known and popular game developer making a title for the current platform du-jour, the Xbox 360, and yet they’re dragging their heels in the mud, kicking and screaming and making a game which - apart from pure aesthetics - is completely previous-gen. Backwards-gen. And I’m kicking and screaming wondering how they can care so little given this opportunity at greatness.

What have they done right? Graphics and sounds. Aesthetics. This game is a visual treat. Each level could be taught in videogames design schools years from now in terms of attention to detail. A ton of original textures all in high resolution (sparing that moment when you walk upto a wall to check just how how detail they are - sometimes blocky) that perfectly fit the worlds they’re trying to create - be them moribund and grisly medical clinics or riverboat steamers. Character models which - whilst reused in basic form from level to level (sparing main characters) - are kitted out with an array of different costumery that will hide this fact unless you pay particularly close attention. The models of special characters in the levels are emotive and variously gorgeous and ghastly. As for the sound and music, everything works right, be it Jesper Kyd returning for another brilliant score (Budapest Symphony Orchestra in tow) or the ambient clicks and hums and whirrs that will fill the gaps between the splodes and kapows as you rain bloody hell upon your victims.

So that’s what they’ve done right.

On the flipside you have a million missed opportunities and game-breaking goofs that will be responsible for equal amounts of heartbreak and heart-attacks, and Io should be nailed to the roof and poked with spiky things for letting them pass into the final product. Basically, all the foibles of the previous games are here in abundance: clairvoyent enemies, rote AI, inflexible game mechanics and trial-and-error gameplay (mostly error). These things were so apparently wrong in the previous games that it’s achingly disappointing to see them again. On top of those series favourites you have the total misnomers: things that are present or missing and make everything a lot less fun that it should be.

47’s hideout is a fully fleshed out location which you only see once at the start of the game (unless you visit it via the level select), and serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever. There’s racks for your guns that you’ll collect, a shooting range, and the familiar Agency laptop, but all you can do is enter and leave via the front door. So what could you have done with it?

- Trained weapons (although 47 is highly skilled so this might be redundant)
- Selected weapons for your next mission (as in Hitman 2).
- Viewed information on the next target on your laptop (news articles? maps? information on the target?)
- Walked around the wider area, the town itself, buying disguises or weapons or information.

That’s just a few ideas off the top of my head which would have improved the game. I would even go so far as to imagine that Io planned for things like these to make an appearance but the game was rushed out without having time to finish them off. As it is, the trip to this level just highlights their absence.

So instead of planning a run before you start, you turn up on the doorstep of your next mission without any clue of what you’re meant to be doing, wearing the characteristic suit which should mark you out as prime target. Ideally, without this planning stage, you’d look at a map with notations and so forth. But the maps are blueprints that merely show you the exact locations of your targets as they walk around, a bizarre (returning) inclusion that undermines any sense of excitement or intrigue. Of course, it’s needed, because otherwise you’d have to search every single room for the enemy, but it shouldn’t be needed. It’s a weak design crux that spoils a certain element of the game: the excitement of not knowing exactly what’s around the corner, or having to track down the targets based on prior research. Hitman is an assassin and you’d think he’d be able to plan things a little more carefully. But as it is you simply have to play each level many times on a trial-and-error basis before you understand what you should be doing. This is stupid.

The trial-and-error gameplay is the largest factor marring Blood Money’s success. At the start of each level there is a huge desire to play out the role of 47 to the letter, executing a careful and largely problem-free hit on a unsuspecting target. This is always impossible thanks to the aforementioned lack of data, and the existence of many game-breaking bugs which will scupper your chances time and time again. Most of the time, even given the lack of information, you can sucessfully navigate the various danger zones and hazards of each map, but when you have to actually execute (mostly literally) everything falls apart.

If you’re stealthily creeping up behind someone ready to give them a stab in the back, you can expect that nine out of ten times when you try to do it the victim will somehow avoid death completely and spin around to witness you. Once this happens, if you’re going for a Silent Assassin rating (which you really should be) the only option is to restart. Given the 20-some second loading times on the Xbox 360 this quickly becomes intolerable, so you pick another method which should work perfectly. This time, instead of knifing the guy, you creep up with your pistol, grab him and knock him out. Then you throw his body over the edge of whatever chasm he was looking over. Unfortunately, asshole physics is not about to let you get away that easily and what was deftly executed manoeuvre is ruined when the body flies twenty feet skywards and spins back impossibly to the same place you threw it off. This is about the point where the guy’s buddy turns up at the door and you get a faceful of lead.

Setting aside glitches in the game code, often the actual design of the game leads you inexorably to restarting a level. Io have actually placed elements in missions that lead to unavoidable death or at least complete fuckups when first encountered, the likes of which will be famililar to anyone who played the first few Tomb Raider games, or many platformers beforehand. This is gaming design sin (and indeed was referred to as one of the seven deadly ones in an excellent old PC Gamer article). If the player cannot avoid an obstacle, then it is pointless to include it. It merely highlights the separation between him/herself and the game character or the game itself, since the character would never fool for it. Lara Croft didn’t become such a successful treasure hunter by failing to avoid hidden spiky death pits. Likewise, Hitman 47 didn’t get to the top of the food chain by being murdered by female assasins - unfortunately if the player follows certain courses he will be auto-killed in an FMV (or locked into extremely tedious cut scenes leading to eventual mission failure).

When you finally stagger to the close of each mission it is with a huge sigh of relief and a growing understanding of what Phil Connors went through in Groundhog Day.

There are other issues with Blood Money. The story is convoluted to the extreme and lacks foreshadowing (in other words: good storytelling) to the extent that when it draws to a close it’s not at all obvious what is going on. In general the environent lacks interactivity so the gameplay experience feels extremely limited in terms of playing a role. There is a significant lack of dialogue or interaction with people (dialogue options would have been a boon). There are many instances of illogical or bizarre behaviour on the behalf of NPCs which go a long way to destroying the atmosphere. And so on.

Blood Money is not particularly fun or satisfying to play and is a disappointingly standard entry to the series. Rent or miss.

In this first part of what shall I hope become a long-running series of letters to editors, I’ve written to ‘The Editor’ of gamedaily.com, an impoverished videogame site, about an article published yesterday which (after three previous pieces) really set them up for a taste of their own medicine.

To: editor@gamedaily.com
Subject: Chris Buffa’s ‘How to Become a Better Videogame Journalist’
Date: 29 July 2006 11:20 GMT

Dear Ed,

It seems that Chris has forgotten the main rule of any soon to be ignored ruleset and that’s never to follow any ‘how to be a good X’ guide, especially when considering journalism. You don’t read about how to write, you write.

That said, I think the best tip he could have offered to misty-eyed future journalists would have been to pointedly avoid reading any of the review material on gamedaily.com. Let’s take Mr Steven Wong’s ‘Night Watch’ review as a first example. The opening paragraph is wanky, meandering, pretentious and grammatically  challenged. The next paragraph: “the underlying premise is..” launches into the predictable cliche of summarising the entire game plot in one block. How is it the ‘underlying premise’? It’s not underlying in the least. And so on.

The rest of the article is dull as dishwater and you surely appreciate me not analysing each sentence for errors, god knows you probably had a hard enough time passing it through (you edit these things, right?). It never steps outside what is expected for a short review about a crappy game no one is going to bother playing: there’s no personality and it’s a list of features with basic criticisms. To learn how to write entertaining and informative short reviews, Mr Wong should refer to PC Gamer UK’s John Walker who wrote the ‘They’re Back’ short review section in the magazine for years.

Let’s pick another review at random: Zoo Tycoon 2: African Adventure. Oh, okay, it’s Mr Wong upto his old tricks again. I stopped reading after the first paragraph. STOP. STARTING. NEW. SENTENCES. WITH. NO. CONTENT.

Prey review by Robert Workman. A very workman like review. Yeah, don’t thank me. We’ll ignore the fact he gives the game 4/5 when it barely deserves 1. What on earth is this:

“The gameplay feels just fine, with your typical first-person shooting controls reacting very well, and some puzzle-solving coming into play so you can push ahead or find some extra ammunition and health packs. These usually come in the form of disgusting alien eggs that you can roll along, and then blow up to clear the slime off a door or open up a pipe to a lower level. The action never really gets over the top (even with the promise of an enlarged foe), but it’s sufficient for a game of this nature, and, let’s face it, it’s fun to lay out enemies and even sacrifice a few disturbed humans in the process.”

The gameplay FEELS JUST FINE. The controls REACT VERY WELL. Some puzzle-solving COMES INTO PLAY. The action NEVER REALLY GETS OVER THE TOP. This doesn’t tell anyone any single thing about the damn game, however, and it seems like Mr Workman is pushing on for his 1,000 word limit so he can cash in his paycheck. What a load of bollocks.

Cloning Clyde review: “The end result is a game that probably won’t be one of the most memorable platformers for the system, but is a good time all the same and worth a few hours of play.” Robert Workman what would the world do without your mind-numbingly pointless verbiage?

I’m going to avoid picking out any more examples. I’ve actually never read GameDaily before but since one of your writers (I don’t know, maybe you’re Chris Buffa) is ‘ragging on’ the rest of the journalistic community and you’re getting picked up by Google News, you’d think that GameDaily would be coming up with some pretty hot reviews to afford to level out such high-horse criticism. Frankly I’d be ashamed to have published any of it.

I also read ‘Why VG Journalism sucks’ (how edgy is that title?!) and ‘How to Fix Videogame Journalism’. These are laughable. Mr Buffa can’t even write a good article himself and yet somehow he apoints himself worthy enough to criticise what he perceives others are doing wrong!

“What many of us need to do is brush up on the basics. Grammar and punctuation need to be studied, and after we’re able to craft good (even great) sentences, then we can explore how to string them together to produce articles that have an even flow.”

Thanks for stating the bleeding obvious, Mr Buffa, even if you clearly don’t have any concept of what good (or even great!) grammar or sentences might look like (in fact does anyone understand what he might possibly mean by good or great grammar?). I’m beginning to wonder whether Mr Buffa had this shopping list of good reviewer skills scrawled out somewhere with a mind to actually embodying some of them in his later work, and yet through some brilliant happenstance it was written up and published on your site. “What many of us need to do is brush up on the basics.” No, what Buffa needs to do is stop patronising people and start including himself in the problem. “Grammar and punctuation need to be studied”. Sure, grammar and punctuation (more accurately known as syntax) need to be studied by kids in elementary school. Writers write for a living, they don’t need to study anything. Buffa again fails to notice the shocking irony in the sentence where he himself cannot string an interesting or informative prose together and yet criticises others. “we can explore how to string them together to produce articles that have an even flow”. Oh, now it’s ‘we’ is it? At least he’s now being honest with himself, although nobody on this everloving earth knows what ‘even flow’ could ever be understood as).

Are you getting bored of hearing your writers criticised yet? Well, I’ll start on you, assuming that you’re not any of the people I’ve already mentioned. Frankly, as I have said, if you publish articles slinging dirt (however inaccurately they might be constructed) then you have to be prepared to both receive some back and to look a little closer to home and give your site a health check. GameDaily has no redeemable features whatsoever. The writing is often incomprehensible, always information-less and about as exciting to read as love letters scribbled up the sides of school toilets, some of which probably possess a better grasp of the English language anyway. Buffa cannot write articles, as much as they miss the point, from this standpoint.

So shape up.

–

Rob

I actually got so bored thinking of synonyms for ‘worthless’ that I forgot to launch into an attack on the editor himself, whoever he is.