Hitman: Blood Money Demo

It’s out now on Xbox Live Marketplace and online. And it’s rubbish.
NB: This post refers to the Xbox 360 version.

• The animations don’t match up properly – If you sneak up behind someone and strangle them with your fibre-wire the relative positions of the character models are misaligned so that you’re strangling thin air and the person you’re killing is busy choking to death for no reason some way behind/beside/inside you. Forgivable once but this happened with everyone I strangled.
• The game tells you what to do next – Instructions like ‘Climb up the red trellis’ dominate the screen. What makes it worse is that the demo level was so linear that there was actually nowhere useful you could go aside from climbing up the red trellis. If there’s only one way out, I don’t need to be told it in big white letters. Let me figure things out by myself. I realise this was suposed to be a training level but ‘Press X to bring up your inventory’ is training. ‘Walk through the only door available’ is patronising.
• The AI is very dodgy – In one section, I dropped a coin to distract some guards. The guards heard this, came in, walked right through me and stood there going “What was that? Nobody here.” I could walk up to, around and though them with no reaction. Eventually they noticed me and shouted but still no action. After I ran away from them and halfway across the fairground they finally started shooting. Ridiculous!
• The controls are oddly fiddly – If I put Agent 47 behind (beside, on top of) an unsuspecting gangster, select the fibre-wire and pull and release the trigger then I expect him to strangle the gangster. I do not expect him to whip out the fibre-wire, wrap it around his hands in readiness and then change his mind, put it away and stand around like a lemon.

There are some fun moments but they are largely outweighed by the clunky gameplay. If this demo truly represents the finished product (and what use is a public demo that does not?) then save your money. This game looks terrible.

Related Links:
PC Demo + demo patch. 783MB. Yes, they needed a patch for their demo.
MrSparkle77 liked the PC demo
Are games now designed for dummies?

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