Hitman: Blood Money – Reprisal
Another surgical strike from Feral Interactive
You get sandbox-like levels, filled with multiple ways to bump off your target
£12.49 FROM feralinteractive.com NEEDS iPad/iOS 16 or later
Nimbly avoiding the dreaded doublecolon title with the tactical deployment of a dash, Reprisal reprises IO Interactive’s 2006 stealth assassination game in a way that will quash any doubts you might have about playing a PS2-era game in 2024.
Blood Money was the Hitman series entry that introduced many of the interactions that have made the more recent games great. You get the sandbox-like levels, filled with multiple, improvised ways to bump off your target. You get rewards for clean kills and for not being noticed. And you get the ability to climb over low obstacles, which Agent 47 didn’t possess in earlier games. There’s also now a mini map, more obvious alerts if you’re spotted, and Instinct Mode, a visual overlay grafted on from more recent titles that lets you see through walls and plan your route to the target accordingly. A new over-the-shoulder camera view also makes aiming easier.
Blood Money was in many ways the ideal Hitman game to adapt for iOS devices. Its levels are more self-contained than the enormous areas explored in the World of Assassination games – though we’d still like to play Hitman II’s Dartmoor level on the go. Instead, Blood Money tells the story of a feud between rival assassination agencies, plus flashbacks to contract killings Agent 47 was involved in in the past, as told by a former FBI director to a journalist. It’s an effective framing device, presenting a greatest hits package of 47’s eventful life.
The game was good in 2006 and it remains good now, but what really buoys Reprisal is the way it’s been converted for the touchscreen. It’s still a game you’re going to want a Bluetooth controller for, though there’s keyboard and mouse support on iPad for that classic PC game feel – and Feral has done an excellent job welding touch controls to the game. They’re fully customisable, with presets for left-handers, adjustable size and sensitivity, and you can set things like auto-reloading of weapons and hot-swapping without having to go to the inventory. There are also graphical options that will improve the frame rate all the way to a solid 90fps, but at the expense of graphical fidelity.
What it doesn’t have is a great visual improvement. There was already an HD remaster of the game, released on PS3generation consoles, and Reprisal doesn’t take things much further. The enhancement of the game comes in quality-of-life updates, such as the target-spotting Instinct Mode and those controls. A somewhat ponderous shooter about dressing as a clown and firing precisely one shot has become an essential mobile title. Ian Evenden