The bald mass-murderer goes at it again, this time more inventive than ever!
Compared to Hitman: Silent Assassin, Contracts improved the game in quite a few ways.
One of those improvements is the amount of options you have to complete your mission. In Silent Assassin your only options were mainly to either shoot or strangle your target. Sometimes you’d get a knife so you could try gutting ‘m. In Contracts, depending on the mission, you can poison, strangle, stab (ordinary slashing with knives), shoot, gut (by which I mean meat hooks that tear open your victims and swords that go right through ‘m), choke (pillows and overheating saunas), blow up (ordinary car bombs or improvising with gasoline) or even electrocute your target. The possible ways to get to your target have also increased; front doors, back doors, multiple other doors, basements, open windows; plenty of opportunity. All of this makes this game a lot more fun than it’s predecessor and it makes it more likely that you’ll want to complete the game again, only then in a different way.
Another improvement is the way your victims go down. If you shoot them in the stomach for example, they don’t die right away and fly two streets further, like in the previous Hitman game. Now, they fall to the ground, moaning in agony. In addition, they just stay that way until you shoot them again or wait until they bleed to death. What realism!
As with almost every follow-up, the graphics have improved a lot too. Better lighting and shadows, the dust, smoke and water effects look more realistic and the details are nice too, not only qua graphics, but also in the rest of the game’s aspects.
For example: As a Dutchman, I really enjoyed Rotterdam. I was amazed to hear actual Dutch, instead of some English/American guy trying to speak German. Moreover, when those Dutch guys tried to speak English, it was the true (terribly bad) Dutch-accent kind of English. And the police! Wow, everything was perfectly done. Both my parents are cops, so trust me; I know how they ought to look.
Their uniforms, the vans, the AT (Dutch version of SWAT); all looking good. Except for the reactions of the police officers of course, but if they’d make that realistic, the Rotterdam level would be too easy. Dutch police is namely never allowed to shoot, only when shot at of course, but then they always have to aim for a leg. Yeah, here in Holland you can’t even hit a guy who’s trespassing (especially not if you’re a cop), without running the risk of being sued :S
But let's get back to the game.
Luckily, Hitman: Contracts also still includes a huge amount of weapons to pick from and some weapons that can only be obtained via getting the Silent Assassin ranking. I must say that this time I was more motivated to be a silent assassin than in Hitman: Silent Assassin itself. Murdering without anybody noticing you requires some thinking and stealth, but is quite a nice challenge and it makes the kill extra satisfying...
On the whole, the game is absolutely fantastic, so number 4; Blood Money, has some high expectations to live up to.