Product Reviews

This is the fourth in the long-running Hitman series, and it once again features the notorious cloned agent as he travels the world with his range of weapons.

If you haven't come across Hitman before then, put bluntly, it's all about the fine art of murder. Now we're not talking about wanton mindless destruction Grand Theft Auto style. We're talking assassination of the highest order. This third-person shooter does a pretty fine job of walking a moral high wire: the subtext is that killing is a bad thing, but sometimes there are exceptions.

The game was, and still is, an interesting hybrid, combining stealth and tactical thinking with the frenzied action of a first-person shooter. What's more, there are puzzles and elements of role-play thrown in for good measure.

The lead character - Agent 47 - is quite singular, not least because he has a barcode tattooed on the back of his head. His choice of attire also gives him an air of serious authority. In addition to being a dedicated follower of fashion, Agent 47 is a dab hand with practically any weapon. While the tool of choice for a quick, silent kill would be piano wire, he's equally at home with a sniper's rifle, a syringe full of poison or a pump-action shotgun.

The game kicks off with a sequence of a fairground disaster resulting in more than a few fatalities. Cut to a series of newspaper clippings following the case of the fairground's owner. Arrested for corporate manslaughter, he wriggles off the charge and files for bankruptcy to avoid paying the bereaved relatives any compensation for their loss. Cut to a man holding a photo of his dead son and placing an "order".

And this is where you come in: your first mission, via a rather well-designed tutorial, is to take out the former owner of the fairground, making sure that the last thing he sees before you shuffle him off his mortal coil is the photo of the dead child. And just to make sure that morality's on your side, the fairground owner's opened up the now disused amusement park

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to a gang of gun-toting, drug-dealing ghetto gangsters (and their women of negotiable affection).

So you start off by breaking into the funfair with your target somewhere inside. And it's here that the developer, IO Interactive, has been rather clever. Whereas most action-adventure games have a single way of completing a mission, there are literally dozens of different ways you can complete them in Hitman. You can adopt a stealth approach, utilising disguises, hiding weapons and cutting power lines to allow you to sneak past enemies in the dark. Or, you can go down the Terminator road, entering every room guns blazing and killing everyone in sight (it's okay though, they're all drug-dealing sexual deviants).

Not only does this add serious longevity to the game, but it means that if one approach fails, you don't have to keep banging on with the same approach until you get it right; just try another tack. It's a great idea for alleviating frustration as well as making the environment seem more real, and we hope other developers adopt a similar approach.

But there's more to this latest edition than re-inventing the wheel. There's now a significant plot. We're not going to spoil things by giving too much away; suffice to say that the game starts with an investigative journalist interviewing a former head of the FBI, who's recounting a series of unsolved cases. Unsolved in this instance meaning they haven't caught Agent 47. And it does draw you in - certainly enough to entice you into playing the next mission just to see where the plot takes you.

After each mission, the front page of a newspaper is displayed giving a synopsis on how you've done. Commit the perfect assassination and the headlines are full of wild speculation on how the killings could have happened. Go berserk with a machine gun and the headlines change accordingly.

Beyond the overall structure of the game there are dozens of finer points, ranging from the humour aspect where you don a tour guide disguise and lead a party of unsuspecting tourists round an opera house, through to hiding in a cupboard as some of the locals get a bit frisky.

The game deserves its 18 rating, both for the subject matter - some of the killings can be quite grizzly - and the language, which is very strong in places. This is an adult game that plays fast and loose with morality, but is both addictive and compelling. What's more, with its diverse non-linear gameplay, good-looking visuals and captivating plot you're getting an awful lot of game for your money. Expect Eidos to make a killing on this title in more ways than one.