Developer: IO Interactive
Publisher: Eidos
Genre: Action / Adventure
Official Website: www.hitman.com

Minimum System Requirements
Pentium 4 1.5GHz or Athlon XP equivalent CPU
512MB RAM
Direct3D 9 compliant video cards supporting pixel shader 2.0 (nVidia GeForce FX or ATi Radeon 9500)
DirectX compatible sound card

Test System
2.0 Ghz AMD Athlon 64 3000+
1GB Dual Channel RAM
ATI Radeon X800XT Platinum Edition 256MB



In this game, you are still playing as the world's best hitman, Agent 47. You are forced to go into hiding, as most of the agents of your contract agency have been hunted down and killed. You fly to the United States to discover the truth, and it involves killing a lot of people in the process.

Gameplay

Fans of the series will feel at home instantly, as almost nothing has changed too much with regards to general gameplay. You are still the baddest assassin in town, going from location to location, hunting down your targets. However, this time around, you have got a whole lot more freedom and a whole new dimension of choices to make.

With the new game engine comes physics, and with physics comes the opportunity to stage accidents. This new feature enables you to disguise hits, so that there's no evidence of foul play. For instance, if someone is standing underneath a light fixture, there probably is a way to rig the lights so that they fall directly on top of the unlucky victim. You can even throw people off ledges once you have sedated them for easy disposal.

A.I.

The AI has been improved over the last games, making them less likely to catch you unless you are doing something out of the ordinary. Previously, the AI has been a big cause of frustration, as the AI was either too alert or too sloppy in the earlier games. Now, I would say IOI has managed to create the right balance. There is nothing too extraordinary about it though, the AI works as it should be.

Notoriety

The Notoriety system is one of the new additions to the Hitman series. What this feature means in practice, is that if your hits are sloppy and unprofessionally, you will start seeing your picture in the papers, and people will recognize you on the streets. This puts an added challenge on the player and implies that killing is best done when no one sees anything, or that no one should be alive to tell the press what happened.

After each mission, you'll see the front page of a newspaper. This front page is basically your debriefing, on how well your hit went. You'll see an article about the death of your target. If you did the job quietly, there will be no details about how well your shots were fired, no witness report, and no detailed sketch featuring your likeness. Expect a reaction if you slaughter 47 people and leave 10 more alive to tell the tale. You will get reports on how you dressed, how many shots you fired, an evaluation of your marksmanship skills, and even more details on just why the hit went sour. However, there are remedies. You can use some of the money you earn to get the civilians to keep the story to themselves, get the local "prone-to-bribery" police chief to clutter the investigation, or you can buy yourself a new identity and get all information about you erased. The latter is of course the most effective, but also the most expensive, so you won't need it unless you are really in trouble.