Hitman: Blood money follows in the footsteps of the other Hitman games in that it focuses more on style and trickery than on combat. The controls, therefore, aren't designed for combat, so when you need to shoot your way out of a situation it gets a little frustrating. However, that seems to be the POINT, as a crack assassin like 47 shouldn't be shooting his way out of anything. If you like stealth gameplay, and very stylized storylines, you'd like Hitman. If shooting 2 bullets over the course of a 90 minute level doesn't appeal to you, go back to Halo.

First, the bad: The controls. You have no "aim" trigger, the left trigger causes you to crouch. You also have no "jump," and the environments really can't be manipulated all that much. The lack of an "aim" button means that when you need to make precise shots with your gun for whatever reason, you can't. The "look" sensitivity needs to be kept high so that you can see, which makes the sensitivity far too high for precise aiming.

That being said, the entire controller is utilized. Every button, even clicking both sticks, has an action during gameplay. They could have combined some actions, like if they had an "aim" key they could have switched reload to "press 'use' while aiming" but the lack of combo keys makes the control scheme simplified and easy to grasp. Plus, the A, B, and Y buttons are always displayed in the top corner of the screen, with the current actions of those buttons displayed, that's a nice touch. Too many games force you to point down at the ground, then try to remember which gun is the blocky-looking pistol with the weird thing at the bottom. In Hitman, when you walk over a Desert Eagle, it says "B: Pick up Desert Eagle."

The graphics are pretty terrible since this game was released within a year of the 360. However, what they lack in character models they make up for in the gameplay. Simply put, the game makes you feel like a real assassin, as best it can. This is not Assassin's Creed, where you go jumping off buildings and killing thousands of soldiers without ever taking damage. This is much closer to reality.

I'm going to walk through the first "real" level to demonstrate the level of choice you have. Your mission is to take out a father and son in their vineyard in Chile. You're dropped outside the gates, and there's currently a media event going on inside, related to the release of a new wine label. So not only are there guards and civilians everywhere, but you also have to avoid the TV news crews so you're not caught on film.

The son is giving tours of the wine cellar and generally prowling the grounds, the father remains upstairs in his suite, working, playing the cello, and generally being hard to pin down. You have a number of options to kill both men. First, the father:

• You can enter the compound like a tourist, and scale the back walls of the private compound, then sneak into the house and kill the father
• You can sneak into the house, kill a VIP Guard, and then walk pleasantly through the main house and kill the father
• Get a sniper rifle, climb one of the outbuildings, and snipe the father while he's playing the cello
• Grab a machine gun and gun your way through the private compound, until you reach the father.

To kill the son, you need to be sneakier:

• Get a guard's uniform, and enter the wine cellar. Follow him until you're alone, then kill him.
• Join one of the guided tours of the wine cellar, wait for the son to break off from the group, and kill him.
• Place a radio-controlled bomb on the winch lifting wine barrels out of the cellar. Wait for the son to stand below them, and blow it.
• Poison his drink, and be half a mile away when he dies.

Throughout any of these plans, you're constantly attempting to avoid detection by the guards, and to not leave any evidence. Optimally, you'd want to kill only the targets, without firing a single shot or leaving your original change of clothes behind. However, that's usually infeasible, though it's certainly possible for the mission I described.

All in all, Hitman: Blood Money is well worth the cost. The gameplay is fantastic, the story is actually pretty great, and it has one of the best endings of any game in recent memory. It's definitely worth picking up.