We... look.... FABULOUS!The feedback loop for this game is one of its smartest systems, because it encourages exactly the kind of behavior gives the player the best possible "Hitman" experience.Players start with a single entrance point, and a single location they can smuggle an item into, along...
Welcome to the Paris fashion show: Home to chic design and fabulous murder.One of the things I am grateful to Absolution for is that it forced IO Interactive to seriously improve on the sneaking/stealth mechanics of Blood Money. Where we once had this terrible binary of "detected/not detected",...
Today, we finish the tutorial.There's some dispute over whether or not this section can be treated as part of the tutorial. I lean on the side that it is part of the tutorial, because it makes sense if you treat like a further escalation on the Freeform Training.At the start of the training, the...
Welcome to the smartest Hitman tutorial IO has ever made.I really can't stress how smart a decision this was for the tutorial. While any tutorial can be used to introduce the basic mechanics, the mechanics themselves are only half of a Hitman game.The other half of teaching someone how to play...
Welcome, my friends, to a World of Assassination.I never went through the tutorial for Blood Money when doing the LP for it, and there's a very specific reason for that. Said tutorial is so poorly done that it makes my blood boil ever more than the White House mission.It's does teach the basic...
Anyone who knows about Blood Money knew this episode was coming, but it is the finale and the natural place to end an LP of the game.I'm a little disappointed, because I was prepared to go into a large tirade about how difficult this gunfight is, because I died so many times to it.But then I went...
We finish the worst, and final, mission in Hitman: Blood Money today:Last time, I wrote about how awful it was that this level runs you through a linear sequence of rooms like the tutorial.But now, we can finally understand exactly why that is. This level culminates in a set-piece where 47 is...
Today, we break into the White House to stop the president from killing the Vice President:With the exception of the tutorial, which is only linear so that it can teach players about the game's mechanics, this is the worst, most linear level in the entire game.No matter which disguise you use, no...
Today, we finish up our Vegas activities.Another thing this mission highlights is the thrill of system/simulation-driven design. Every NPC in this mission has a set routine, and the player succeeds by recognizing those routines and exploiting them, either with disguise. Though he spoke about it in...
Today, we return to Vegas in order to have a party.This mission is a great example of how Hitman uses it's disguise system to create interesting scenarios. Each section of the level is governed by it's own set of disguises. In a sense, you can treat each costume as a "key" to getting to a different...