Craig is wrong. Oh so wrong

For the benefit of those who haven’t yet read Craig’s well articulated argument as to why Metal Gear Solid is shit, I would draw your attention to the small, but unfinished, debate over the Hitman games that was started in the comments section of his article. You will notice that I share his frustration at the resounding recognition that Metal Gear Solid has received as a stealth game over the years, but do not share his opinion that Blood Money is the best in the Hitman series. And for lack of a more inspirational idea for my column this week, I will shamelessly continue the debate here.

It certainly had all the basics that made the previous games so good, but the tension that made them such a thrill seems to be absent. First off, nothing shattered the illusion of being a badass assassin more than those conveniently placed dumpsters/freezers/cabinets that were oh so helpfully placed next to the people you found yourself needing to kill or sedate. Silent Assassin and Contracts (the first in the series was so woefully bad I don’t consider it to be a Hitman game, or a legitimate game at all for that matter) forced you to find a suitable place to hide the bodies of your victims, which the patrolling guards wouldn’t find of their own accord. Yes, this was occasionally infuriatingly difficult, because (as Craig dutifully points out) you often find yourself about to make the crucial move on your target to find that the body of the person you sedated 20 minutes ago has eventually been discovered by a patrolling guard and the alarm has been sounded. Annoying yes, but so what? You may have to occasionally load up your save game and find a different spot, but that was a challenge I relished and something that made those games so fun. It forced you to think like an assassin and formulate your own plan, rather than it just being given to you on a platter.

The fact that it would often take the guards so long to find the body is also a great indication of the quality and detail of the previous games. The patrol patterns were often genuinely difficult to track and occasionally took a long time to decipher and integrate into your plan. Blood Money, on the other hand, too often had guards who would just wander round in the same, linear circle and taking the same, confusingly short route each time. Where is the challenge in that? Although it wasn’t perfect, the variation that the AI had in the previous games made executing your plan incredibly difficult, as more often than not, a guard whose patrol route you thought you had figured out suddenly appears out of nowhere, reducing your previously flawless plan to a depressing, turgid mess. It can certainly get frustrating, and requires you to think long and hard about your plan, but makes completing the mission, particularly with a Silent Assassin rating, much more rewarding.

The one area in which I would concede Blood Money is superior is almost certainly its plot. The missions in the previous games, although more fun to carry out in themselves, often felt disjointed, and I couldn’t help but feel the script was written long after the gameplay had been designed and mapped out. The exciting story in Blood Money, however, gives the missions a lot more context and believability, and made you feel like your hits actually meant something.

The half-baked notoriety system, however, was arbitrary and seemed to have a negligible effect on the actual gameplay. It may have added continuity between missions but that doesn’t quite justify its position as one of the defining features of the game. Equally, some of the other additions look pretty cool on paper, such as taking hostages as human shields, stealing CCTV footage and throwing sharp objects, but if you play the Hitman games as I do, and as I imagine Craig does, all of this is next to useless, as none of it is necessary to achieve the coveted Silent Assassin rating. All I needed was my fibrewire, some sort of tranquiliser and a hell of a lot of patience. Most of the time, I never even took a gun with me as I didn’t want to risk having my cover blown when walking through a metal detector. With that being the case, why the hell would I want laser sights, extended clips, or any of the other fancy pants upgrades that you can get for your weapons, when all I ever needed, if I ever thought a gun was necessary, was a basic silencer and 1 bullet? All these extra additions that were hailed as such successful ‘improvements’ seemed to me to be just for show. If you really need all that extra gear and want to play through the game guns-a-blazing, then you probably shouldn’t be playing the Hitman games in the first place.

Although Blood Money was a thoroughly enjoyable addition to the series, it felt like a slightly diluted and dumbed-down Hitman experience. Certainly more accessible and visually impressive than Silent Assassin and Contracts, both of which were, on occasion, extraordinarily difficult (although I would argue believably so), the gameplay lacked that extra level of depth that made the previous games so immersive, so challenging and ultimately so gratifying to complete.