The confessions of a hitman
I downloaded Blood Money demo a few nights ago, and spent the few nights playing and struggling with the lag. It features a tutorial mission only, for 750+ MB, a fairly poor trade if you ask me.
Hitman: Blood Money Demo Impressions
What is it like: Hitman: Spoon Fed Edition
What is it not like: A Hitman Game.
Platform Played: PC
Before anyone make quick judgement, my impression is only of the demo, whatever little it gave. It's the tutorial mission, and I hope it won't be so linear in the full game.
The tutorial mission is to get you familiarised with the controls, and to showcase the upgraded engine. My first attempt at launching the game though... resulted poorly. After the intro movies (which was accompanied by a soothing piece of "Ave Maria"), my computer did a hard restart, though the problem was resolved after upgrading my graphic drivers to the latest.
Then I encountered another problem, it lags too much. The first round I played was never completed, because it lagged so much (even on the lowest graphical settings), the game became worse than a slideshow, though it was resolved around yesterday by the developers releasing a patch for the laggy demo. It succeeded in some form, that at least I got through the 2nd round, with occasional lag still.
Gameplay-wise, the tutorial features barely anything. You walk, transverse obstacle, learn how to distract, garrote, fire, disguise, hide, poison, push people out of windows through out the tutorial. Unfortunately, it was programmed in such a way that you can't seem to get though it in an assassin's manner, requiring you to nail at least 3 to 8 "passerbys" before reaching your target.
The good thing is that I hope they do the 'morality' check thing, as shown in the demo. Where they depicted your target, who was supposedly a mass murderer with his "Ferris Wheel of Doom", as a weak, meek, unlucky man. The more moral gamers out there may feel a tinge of guilt or pity when confronting your target, unarmed, at point-blank range, already seeing how he is struggling with his life.
Though negatively the demo gives you zero freedom on the way you want to carry it out. Hopefully the full game won't be spoon feeding you which way to go. The inventory system is a farcry to Tomb Raider 1, though may be nice, is terrible when you got a lot of weapons or items.
Also, the engine lags a lot for my Geforce 5600, though looks way nicer than the prequel, Contracts. There are a few new stuff, like you can use 'incidental objects' like a hammer, fire extinguishers to dispatch of foes, but overall the tutorial mission is poorly made, enemies don't react realistically, they stand around listening to gunfire, and never took cover while watching fellow comrades get sniped.
Disappointing for a 750MB demo. At least the main music is soothingly ironic.
Postscript: It is a torture to play in 12 FPS. Even FEAR (which IMO looks nicer) runs better.
Today I...
want to start drawing in Photoshop again. But somehow I don't feel motivated.
The Temple Of Thoughts 2.5
