Best Hitman saga episode until Absolution, perfect lethal sandbox. Levels are elimination puzzles with multiple solutions. The Opera, circus, amusement park - each mission is memorable. One of the best games of the Xbox generation.
Your verdict
Category
Action Adventure1 player18+
Description
Agent 47 resumes work on a series of assassinations across the United States while the Agency falls victim to a mysterious purge. Published by Eidos Interactive, released in 2006 in the United States and Europe. Introduces a newspaper Notoriety system, in-depth weapon customization, more open environments favoring accidental kills, and a spectacular narrative conclusion.
Hitman - Blood Money review
4/5
Art direction
★★★★★
"Striking"
4/5
Music
★★★★★
"Excellent"
4/5
Story
★★★★★
"Captivating"
Every contract closes on a press clipping composed on the fly: the photograph, the headline and the body of the article change according to how you operated, from an unremarkable news item to a front-page photofit. That printed object, pinned up between missions, becomes the visual mirror of your own discretion.
Most of the music belongs to the setting rather than to a score: a casino orchestra, a chapel choir, an opera house organ, a lounge pianist. Since those sources play for the characters and not for the player, drawing near makes them louder, and the killing is sometimes committed over a piece the victims were listening to.
The story is told backwards, from the bedside of a dying man giving a journalist what he knows about Agent 47. Each mission thus becomes reported testimony, with all the approximation that implies, and the purge decimating the Agency only makes sense once you understand who is speaking and why he is speaking now.
A summit of IO Interactive's assassination saga, refining the art of the murder disguised as an accident in open sandboxes with careful staging. Widely distributed in the West, its collecting interest stays measured and rests on this reputation as the best Hitman of the era rather than scarcity. A piece valued by fans of creative stealth on the original Xbox.
Is Hitman - Blood Money still worth playing in 2026?
Released in 2006, IO Interactive's fourth entry remains the most accomplished of the original Xbox trilogy. The freedom of approach inside each contract, the wealth of disguises, the level design quality and the notoriety system that reacts to how cleanly you operate still stand as a model. The handling of human targets remains cynical and inventive and Jesper Kyd's score is impeccable. A few scripted sequences are stiff and some effects have aged. Recommended today for fans of sandbox stealth and admirers of Hitman before its reboot.
