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"Hitman: Contracts" lets you kick major bad-guy butt -- but dealing with all the blood-oozing dead bodies isn't so easy.

By Jeff Alexander and Tom Bissell

May 27, 2004 | HITMAN: CONTRACTS (Eidos Interactive)

Jeff: Agent 47, how do we love thee?

Tom: Let us count the ways. Actually, let us not. But he kicks more ass than any other video game antihero, that's for certain. I think he may even be better than Max Payne.

Jeff: I love Max, but he wouldn't stand a chance against 47. Agent 47 could kill Max with a rusty lock-pick. "Hitman 2": the greatest game we've ever played?

Tom: Man, I don't know, but it's up there. Why don't you clue everyone in on old 47?

Jeff: He's a trained killer with the sense of duty of a British soldier circa 1841 and the sense of mercy of Lucifer. He's bald, wears a black suit, and has a bar code on the back of his head.

Tom: This is because 47 is a clone.

Jeff: Yes. But most of his line is dead now. He's one of the last cloned hitmen left. The last game saw him trying to abandon his assassin past and living as the groundskeeper for a quiet church in Italy. That didn't work out too well for our 47, or ultimately for the fools who kidnapped his church's priest.

Tom: The last game took 47 from Afghanistan to Kuala Lumpur to St. Petersburg to India on assassin missions, all of which were just phenomenal. The graphics! The action! The options!

Jeff: That's the great thing about the "Hitman" games. There's never any one way to do a mission. You can go stealth and try to poison your targets, or strangle them in dark corners, or stab them silently with a knife, or poison their sushi, and not hurt any innocents in the process, or you can be, well, less subtle about it -- neither of which the game implicitly rewards. It lets you listen to your dark, sclerotic heart.

Tom: I love how the "Hitman" games rank your performance. "Professional" if you do it really quietly, for instance, and "Psychopath" or "Mass Murderer" if you go guns-blazingly nuts.

Jeff: We should point out that we always try to go for the stealth option...

Tom: But, you know, things fall apart. It's damned hard! Which brings us to the singular aspect of the "Hitman" games: the dead bodies and costume changes.

Jeff: Unlike most video games, the dead people in "Hitman" don't simply disappear. You kill someone, and the body just lies there. So you have to hide the bodies -- in closets, behind boxes, in shadowy corners. And the bodies are so realistically rendered that while you're dragging them they flop around unsettlingly and leave a big bloody smear.

Tom: After you knock someone off, you can take his clothes and disguise yourself and walk around. Unless you do something stupid like strangle someone in full view of the guards, your disguise allows you to pass through levels more or less unimpeded. And there's this awesome little "suspicion monitor" that keeps track of how suspicious you look. How your heart starts pounding when you're out of ammo, just finished stashing a body in an elevator, and are strolling past a heavily armed guard would be hard to describe for someone who hasn't played the "Hitman" games.

Next Page: Violently amoral, sure, but the bad guys really have it coming to them

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