This is one of the most anticipated games in my life. After dominating Hitman: Contracts on every difficulty setting, I'm ready for the next Hitman. I can not wait for this game and here is the review that got me even more fired up.

In its fourth stab at the Hitman franchise, Io Interactive is adding a few new twists. As the title implies, there's going to be a financial side to Agent 47's adventures in assassination. Between missions, your performance is rated for two things: a monetary reward and your notoriety rating. If you manage to stealth your way through a mission and make all the deaths look like accidents, you'll get a newspaper with nothing but unsuspecting obituaries for your victims. You'll also get a healthy reward that you can use to buy new weapons or upgrade your arsenal with silencers, scopes, laser sights, improved firepower, and so forth.

But if you make a big noisy mess and leave lots of witnesses, you'll get less money. You might even have to pay off your agency to clean up after you. A newspaper will report the events with an artist's rendition of Agent 47. The more you mess up, the more accurate the picture will be. This is a factor of your accumulated notoriety, which determines how likely innocent bystanders are to recognize Agent 47 and freak out, as they're wont to do in the presence of a violent killer.

Io Interactive is also addressing some issues that have plagued the series. For instance, if a patrolling guard discovered the body of one of your victims, you had no way of knowing what you did wrong when the alarm was sounded. But now you get feedback through a little picture-in-picture window, giving you a better sense of the consequences of your actions.



Agent 47 has a few new moves. If he pulls out a gun, he can casually hide it behind his body until he's ready to open fire. He can also take a human shield, a tactic befitting any ruthless assassin, which will keep enemy guards from shooting back. He can even take enemy's weapons with some slick disarming moves. And if there's nothing handy, there are plenty of new improvised weapon. Io Interactive's Tore Blystad mentions that Agent 47 can even use a pen. Perhaps not as mighty as a sword, but it'll get the job done. "There are more close-combat moves to make him more interactive with other characters rather than just shooting them," says Blystad.

The thirteen missions, which are supposed to tell a much more cohesive story than the previous games, are almost entirely set in the United States. The exception in a Paris opera mission in which you have to kill a singer during a rehearsal. The levels are still full of clever solutions for you to figure out. For instance, in the opera level, the singer is shot during the course of rehearsing her death scene. If you swap the stage gun out for a real gun, you can get someone else to do your dirty work. Alternatively, there's a chandelier that you can arrange to fall at just the right moment.

In a Vegas hotel, if you set off a fire alarm, everyone on the floor with run for the exit where you can take them out en masse with a conveniently placed bomb. In a mansion in the mountains, you can shoot the bottom out of a hot tub on a high patio, plunging the hapless tubbers to their death. During a photo shoot with scantily clad models, one of them has a little dog who will blow your cover if you try to use a disguise, but if you poison the yipping beast, you'll be able to take the photographer's place. A lot of the appeal of the Hitman games is discovering these sorts of vignettes, which can easily be missed. So one of the things you'll be able to do with your blood money is buy hints that will reveal a level's tricks in all their grisly charm. Hitman Bloodmoney is set to arrive on PC, Xbox and PlayStation 2 this fall.