Spoiler Warning - the first few paragraphs of this review contain a fairly detailed run down of a level in the game. Skip ahead if you don't like spoilers.

The setting: a quiet suburban cul-de-sac. Birds are twittering in the trees; the garbage man is making his rounds; one lady is lovingly clipping her roses and one house in particular is full of activity - agents in black suits, catering, even a clown.

The Hit: Take out the mark whose daughter is having a birthday party.

Option 1: Well, that garbage man seems to be leaving his mate all alone to fix the garbage truck, so I could grab him from behind, knock him out and take his clothes, not forgetting to 'dispose' of his body by squashing it in the back of the dump truck. Then, thusly disguised, I can make my way to the back of the vet's house - across the street from the mark's - climb in the back window and grab the ether and tranquillizer darts. I remember there was a tree house overlooking the backyard so I can climb up there and scope out the terrain... What's this... an air rifle? Well, bloody great, I'll use the tranquillizers to shoot the nasty dog guarding the back entrance. Then it's simply a matter of disposing of the mark and somehow getting the roll of microfilm from around his wife's neck...

Option 2: If I time it correctly, as the catering man goes into the house, I can add either sedative or poison to the box of donuts in the back of his van. Then, as he delivers them to the agents in the surveillance van and they succumb nicely to my nefarious tactics, I can steal their suits and the surveillance video, thus removing any evidence of my being in the house. It's also possible to call the mark from the van and get him to come to the front window. Hmmm... Should I plant a bomb in the catering tray and put it next to the phone and then when he answers it BOOOM? Or should I ring him and then set up across the street to snipe him?

Option 3: Stuff all this planning and stuff, I just wanna shoot people...

As you can see, Hitman: Blood Money, the fourth in the series, is a game primarily about freedom and choice. The three options above are only a few that I've explored; I've not even attempted to grab the party clown and steal his costume, nor have I managed to sedate some of the drinks around the house to see who gets affected. Though not endless, the options for completing mission objectives in Blood Money are mighty impressive and take me back to the feelings I had when first playing Deus Ex on the PC.

End Spoiler.

How do I explain just how damn cool this game is? I mean, there's the ability to poison drinks and food, which you'll use to take out main targets as well as get annoying bystanders out the way so that you can make your move. There's the fact that Agent 47 is the coolest mofo this side of Mofoland. Morally ambiguous, yes, but cool nonetheless, a super-human clone killer of the highest caliber (excuse the pun). The graphics are gorgeous and the game as a whole is extremely polished and, like the hardest difficulty setting in the game, professional.

The first level of the game is a tutorial through and through and is in no way indicative of the rest of the game. It simply provides you with a few of the scenarios and situations that you'll come up against during the game's main missions (as well as some cool rag-dolling shotgun fun). Blood Money employs an interesting mix of stealth and action that, if you haven't played the previous games, may at first confuse. Going in guns blazing will draw heat to your butt like a lit fart gone wrong; it seems a good idea at first but beware the consequences. Enemies have a very keen sense of hearing and the radius for drawing them to you via the sound of a gunfight is quite large. On some of the smaller, less populated levels this will be no problem but some levels take place around lots and lots of very mean looking and heavily armed bad guys.

So, providing you're cool with this mix of stealth and gunplay, Blood Money will give you many hours of ear-to-ear grinning fun. Perhaps its best aspect is that you don't have to complete missions in any set way. Certainly there are particular ways that are the best or cleanest way to complete a mission, but there are also extra options provided for, so much so that the game's producers are even citing surprise at the ways people are killing their targets.

Generally, NPCs in each level follow a set path - they have four or five things they like to do: going to the bar for a drink, tying their shoelace beneath a precariously hanging wine pallet, or pointing Percy at the porcelain (complete with realistic 'shaking' animations) to name a few. To some this will be a negative aspect but honestly without some kind on prediction the game would be nigh on impossible. At different points of a character's route there may be several ways to 'take them out'. Of course, there's the bullet-in-the-skull method, but there's also other cool options to explore. How about an aphrodisiac to make your mark disappear to a private place with a girl? Or you could try sniping instead of pushing the poor bastard off the balcony. On that same level, an annoying yapping dog always alerted the second mark to my presence - that is until I left him a nice little poisoned sausage to nibble on.

You get the point - there are more options than a walk through Kings Cross. At the beginning of each level you're treated to a story scene, where it seems Agent 47 is actually dead and an investigative reporter is hearing about some of the important missions that led to his demise. Each of these missions is where you'll be given free reign to do as you see fit. But first of all you need to choose which tools to use to get the job done. The Silverballers are always a good choice, silenced of course, and if you've got enough cash you can upgrade and tweak your weaponry in some interesting ways, magnum ammo to shoot through doors for instance.

Cold hard cash is the name of the game. Despite many of the targets being explicitly evil individuals like pedophiles and drug dealers, Agent 47 couldn't really give a toss - he's in it for the money. The title, Blood Money, refers to the fact that the amount of money you receive for each mission is dependent on how professionally you carry it out. Go through a level only killing the mark(s) with no witnesses or disguises blown and you'll score an elusive Silent Assassin rating (I got 5 of these on Expert, working on Professional difficulty at time of writing). However if you draw more attention to yourself than Guy Sebastian at ones of those totally fake shopping centre concerts then you'll quite literally pay the price (on the harder difficulties at least) and be docked for sloppy execution and/or leaving evidence behind. On top of that, your Notoriety level increases with sloppily finished missions, and you may need to spend some of your own hard earned to bribe witnesses or, at the extreme end of the scale, create a new identity to keep your anonymity - an essential part of any hitman's CV.

You'll know how well you went on a level because at the end of each you get to read the particular newspaper article on your hit, which changes dynamically according to your actions. For example, the headline could read 'Silent Assassin Wanted' or at the other end of the scale 'Madman Strikes Again'. Each paragraph of the story details how many bullets were fired, how many people were slain and any clues the police have about Agent 47's identity. It's a neat idea and one that is great for reliving your actions before proceeding to the next level.

The beautiful thing about the Blood Money system is that as you become more proficient at killing and as you perfect each hit, you have a lot more money to spend on upgrades such as body armour, a long range detonator and even a foil-lined rifle case (for those pesky metal detectors). Then, if the moment arises when you need to spray some lead around, those fully-customised, automatic Silverballers feel oh-so satisfying to pull out.

There are four difficulty levels in the game and each provides for a different experience. The Rookie level allows unlimited saves and minimal Notoriety effects. Normal, Expert and Professional, on the other hand, impose increasing limitations and consequences such as limited saves (no saves at all allowed on Pro) and the fact that if bodies are found in levels your rating will be affected. Having limited saves really forces you to think about the level and where you really need to take risks.

There's no doubt about it, Agent 47 is one cool biccie - cooler than a frozen packet of Tim Tams in fact. It's great fun to watch him swagger confidently past FBI agents, the knowledge that he's just garroted one of them and stolen their clothes nonchalantly locked within his brain pan. He's certainly not a one trick pony either, and the range of moves and context-sensitive actions available is impressive. He can, among other things, grab human hostages to use as shields, throw coins and knives, use syringes on food and drinks and in people's necks, jump balconies, head butt, disarm enemies and drag bodies around to dispose of them before they're discovered.

The A, B and Y buttons all have context-specific purposes. So if Agent 47 is standing over a recently strangled security guard he may have the option to drag the body, pick up his gun or change into his clothes. If there are multiple objects that can be interacted with, holding down one of the buttons (depending on the context) will bring up a list of actions. In several instances I found the context-sensitive system to be slightly annoying, especially when I wanted to syringe a guard and instead ended up disarming him and firing an attention-seeking shot. I also inadvertently started picking locks in front of guards a few times when I thought I could just open the door. But on the whole it works well and after a while you'll come to know which buttons are used in particular situations.

The achievements are all quite relevant to the game: get 5 Silent Assassin ratings, fully upgrade particular weapons and the like. There are also some secret achievements, one of which I unlocked by killing exactly 47 people in a level - pretty cool. Actually, one thing that I need to convey is how impressive many of the levels in the game are. Though some are smaller than others, I found each and every one to feel unique and original. In some levels there are whole floors and areas that you probably won't even need to go into. But should you do so you'll find each room to be decorated, filled with furniture, and generally congruous with the rest of the level's design. This is conducive to exploration and experimentation. You don't absolutely have to hide bodies in the most apparent areas and may instead opt to stay on the fringes of a level and watch from afar.

Perhaps the only other negative thing to say about Blood Money is that it requires a lot of patience. I've probably reloaded my game hundreds of times in my quest to be an uber assassin and it can be frustrating to wait in a closet for five minutes and then stuff something up and have to reload all over again. The AI of NPCs is impressive but not perfect and several times my cover got blown for no discernible reason. This trial and error gameplay has been an element of the series, so if you don't like that sort of thing then your enjoyment of Blood Money may be somewhat tempered.