Money talks. This review of Hitman: Blood Money pays.
When you played through a mission before, you had no one recognize you after you finished a level and began a new one. Now, when you finish a mission, you gain notoriety depending on how you approach the objective. When you put on a disguise, try to blend in with the crowd while rigging a grill at a child's birthday party and walk away unnoticed, you will get very little notoriety, allowing you to complete the next level with the same ease. But if you decide to run-and-gun your way to the next objective, your notoriety will skyrocket and you will have a harder time on the next level. You can also see how you did by looking in the newspaper. This in turn affects your rating and how much money you get at the end of a level. Unlike all of the other slap-dash features in other stealth games, the money actually affects the game. At the end of the level, you can use the money to either lower said notoreity or purchase upgrades for your guns. The biggest thing that affects the game is publicity. Most of the time in regular stealth games or the previous Hitman games, you spent most of the time in secluded areas. Sure, there were the occasional mansion or bank missions that have tons of guards and cameras, but they were few and far between. In Blood Money, you are always in a heavily populated area. The citizens won't just stand in a corner and let you kill your target. If they spot something wrong, they will immediately run to the nearest guard or police officer. These three additions to the series makes Blood Money the best Hitman game to date.
But as much as I loved the game, I had some major problems with some of the bigger details. First off, the crap save system was never fixed, especially in Silent Assassin. You basically have a set number of in-game saves depending on what difficulty you are playing on. Once you quit during the game, those saves are lost. So basically, if someone crashed into my car, I couldn't stop the game, sue who crashed into it, and continue playing my game; I would have to lose my data and start all over. Another problem is that the AI still needs a little tweaking, especially for the Xbox 360. Despite these problems, I still had a lot of fun with Hitman: Blood Money and it's also a fresh breath of fresh air in a genre mainly dominated by Splinter Cell and Metal Gear.