Video Game / Hitman: Blood Money

Send a killer to catch one.

Hitman: Blood Money (2006) is the fourth game in the Hitman series by IO Interactive.

Our narrator is former FBI director Alexander Cayne, the man who claims to have caught and killed "Mr. 47." The timeline is full of false leads and near-misses, but he finally bagged 47 during an attempt on the U.S. President's life. As he relates his story, we flash back to the Paris opera, where 47 was gravely wounded before fleeing Europe.

After a pit stop in Chile, the manhunt picks up in the United States, beginning with a minor hit in Baltimore and zig-zagging its way across the country: first a visit to California to rub out some mobsters, and onward to a political rally in New Orleans, a Christmas party in the Rockies, the swamps of Mississippi, the underbelly of Las Vegas, and finally the Oval Office itself.

It was a radical change from previous Hitmans, as the series moved away from its PC gaming roots. The fixed camera is gone, allowing much greater mobility than before. The difficulty is also more balanced: 47 sneaks faster than in prior games, and guards aren't quite so anal about disguises (they won't bust you for carrying the wrong make of gun, and strolling is no longer part of a disguise). A new way to keep your low profile is to make hits look like "accidents," such as rigging a grill to explode, or shoving targets off high ledges. Bodies found as a result of accidents do not count toward your total. Among other improvements:

• Heads or tails? Toss a coin to momentarily distract people.
• Hiding in closets and armories is one of your new tricks.
• Likewise, corpses can be stuffed in containers or thrown off ledges. Mr. 47 can also play 'elevator monster' where he hangs out above the elevator, garroting everyone who gets onboard and piling their bodies on top of the elevator.
• A new repertoire of melee attacks: punching, headbutting, shoving, and using people as shields.
• Use the funds you accumulate from hits to purchase custom weapon parts. There is one customizable weapon for each category (Pistol, Assault Rifle, Sniper Rifle, Sub Machine Gun, Shotgun), which can be loaded up with suppressors, sights, extended magazines, and up to three ammo types.
• 47 can leapfrog/climb over some obstacles.
• Bodies leak blood now, so keep it clean or else your enemies might find them.
• You need to keep track of cameras, as being caught on film now counts against you.

Blood Money also has an unusual newspaper feature. Each time you finish a mission, you will see a headline with all the details of your mission. When your "notoriety" level is at a minimum, you can enter levels normally. The higher your notoriety level, the harder it is for 47 to blend in. Notoriety increases when you leave witnesses to your crime alive or un-sedated, or you get caught on CCTV cameras and don't destroy the evidence.

Originally released for PC, Playstation 2 and Xbox, the game has been remastered thrice: first for the Hitman HD Trilogy for PS3 and Xbox 360 in January 2013, which contained this game, Contracts (a semi-remake of the first game), and Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, all of which received the standard HD remaster treatment. In January 2019, the game and its sequel (Hitman: Absolution) were also made available on the PS4 and Xbox One in the form of Hitman HD Enhanced Collection, which upgraded the games to 60FPS 4K resolution, among other graphical improvements. On October 4, 2023, as part of IOI's 25th anniversary, they revealed Hitman Blood Money Reprisal, an enhanced mobile port for both mobile devices and Nintendo Switch, though unique among these ports is that it will be adding features from the World of Assassination Trilogy (Instinct, ever-present mini-map, more on-screen notifications etc). The mobile ports released on November 30th, 2023, with the Switch version releasing on January 25th 2024.

Unrelated to the old Psygnosis game, Blood Money.

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In General

A-D

• Abhorrent Admirer:
  • 47 attracts some unwanted attention in the Shamal Casino. If you stroll down the west wing of the 7th floor, you'll be accosted by a large, intoxicated woman who mistakes 47 for a swinger [!]. He responds with his usual deadpan wit, but accepts her room key. If you take the guest up on her offer, she'll gyrate for a bit before passing out from such strenuous activity. Just don't exit out the way you came, though; you'll bump into her husband. But the balcony gives you a perfect view of Hendrik's suite.
  • If 47 dons the first-class purser uniform, the Deprived Bisexual Skip Muldoon would chase him around.
  • Margeaux obviously dislikes Hank, and if 47 marries them while disguised as a priest, she doesn't even let him kiss her. After 47 pronounces them "husband and wife," all of the guests turn their backs to the gazebo and start firing their guns into the air, which gives you a clear window to shoot the groom. This will incite the wrath of the entire wedding party, but has the advantage of confirming your suspicions: What's funny is that you'll hear Margeaux sigh "Finally!" before screaming for help.
• Abnormal Ammo: The custom guns have various ammo types for different situations. For example, the Silverballer has the option of standard, subsonic, or magnum rounds with subsonic sacrificing stopping power for quietness and magnum ammo being louder, but also being powerful enough to Shoot Out The Locks of doors.
• Ace Custom: The custom guns, naturally. They're far more useful than the other guns due to being customisable with a range of different Gun Accessories. Of course, some are more useful than others; The Silverballer and the W2000 are probably the most useful of the bunch due to the former being concealable on 47's person and the latter in a briefcase. The M4, MP5, and SPAS-12 have to be collected from Agency drop points if brought along and if forgotten about, cost money to recover.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy:
  • Ironically, life at the rehab center has caused alcoholism in the wiseguys who are hiding out there.
  • The Santa at Lorne's party is completely shitfaced.
  • Corky the Clown has seen better days. He often retreats to his own van to have a drink. He can be sedated (or killed) and hidden in that very spot.
  • Mrs. Sinistra is one of the dumbest NPCs in the entire series: she starts the mission falling-down drunk (on her son's birthday, no less) while operating a gas grill, and is unable to resist the advances of any man who comes near.
  • In "A Dance With The Devil," you can dunk NPCs into the shark tank backstage, then watch as a shark swims by and gobbles them up, dragging the victim to their death. Then go outside to the dance floor to watch the shark play with its prey while everybody keeps dancing.
  • One of the targets, Vaana, will plunge herself into the shark tank if she is set aflame. A group of clubbers gather on each balcony every time the pyro show is performed, and you can hear them "ooh"-ing and "ahh"-ing. After sabotaging the pyrotechnics show and cooking Vaana, you can hear a guest saying something along the lines of, "That show was amazing—especially the shark attack at the end! How do you figure she did that?".
• Anti-Frustration Features: The 2023 Updated Re-release, Reprisal, added features from later games such as instinct highlighting, an on-screen minimap, more notification options such as alert level and tresspassing, and a more modern control scheme.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • This amusing fail when it comes to Witness Protection.
  • Diana is blowing smoke about Angelina and Raymond going crazy if they find out the other is dead. You can kill them in any order, at any time, and very little changes. Want proof? Drag Angelina's body (without being spotted) to the room Raymond is residing in. He will exhibit no reaction to the body and will go about his normal routine.
  • There is a way to trigger this by confronting Angelina while wearing Raymond's outfit, causing her to go berserk and start emptying her gun into the crowd at you (disappointingly, the cops think nothing of this and won't try to stop her. They will, however, fire on YOU if you try to fight back).
  • Speaking of which: Regardless of whether or not the guard birds open fire on 47 first, the police will join in on the shooting and take no notice of the violent gunmen. It is unknown whether this is an intentional choice of the developers or a glitch; though the former is more likely, it seems to insinuate that there has been an agreement between the local authorities and the Crows, as they rent out two separate rooms as well as an entire building as their base of operations during the level.
  • Strangely, you can chase Lorne all around the studio floor and his bodyguard will do nothing as he pleads with you to spare him.
  • In an AGQD speedrun by Saintmillion, the AI is exploited to hell and back in many preposterously hilarious ways — most notably with the coin. It is explained that if you hold and aim the coin, anyone nearby will stop what they are doing and stare at you like idiots, until you drop it. This is used as an advantage many many times in order to break the routes of civilians, guards and targets to make them easier to assassinate. Saintmillion places an RU-AP mine on the Sheik's route to the casino, uses the coin to stop the guards, detonates the bomb and runs like hell. It's one hell of a show.
• Artistic License – Chemistry: The poison syringe's description states that it's a mixture of pancuronium bromide, sodium pentothal and potassium chloride. While all three can be used as lethal injections separately, mixing all three together results in precipitation, making it unusable.
• Ascended Glitch: The infamous phrase, "Allan please add details", comes from this game, being the Flavor Text of a kitchen container found in "A Dance With The Devil". The HD collection changed the line to "Any details yet, Allan?"
• Badass Bystander: On rare occasions, random civilians will pick guns off the corpses of your enemies and join in on the firefight. This is America.
• Beware of Vicious Dog: Head around the perimeter of Vinnie's house and you will run into a door marked "Beware of Dog". Well, if you break into the veterinarian's office across the street, this doggy is not going to be a problem. There's another one to watch out for at the LeBlanc mansion.
• Bilingual Bonus: The levels "A Vintage Year" and "Curtains Down" (taking place in Chile and France, respectively) contain untranslated dialogue from NPCs or radio broadcasts in Spanish and French.
• Black-Tie Infiltration:
  • In "You Better Watch Out", Lorne de Havilland throws a formal Christmas party in a stand-in for the Playboy mansion. 47 must assassinate both de Havilland and a senator's son in attendance.
  • "Til Death Do Us Part": 47 must assassinate two guests at a Mississipi wedding.
  • "A Dance with the Devil": 47 must assassinate two guests at an elaborate costume party in Las Vegas.
• Bloodier and Gorier: There's a wider variety of weapons compared to previous entries, so there's nothing stopping you from taking a swing at someone's head with a hammer, causing it to become lodged in their skull, or pinning them to the wall with a nailgun. This was also the first game to introduce the "accident" system, which allows you to immolate people by rigging grills or pyrotechnics to explode.
• Bootstrapped Theme: Schubert's "Ave Maria" — as the theme that plays while the game loads into the main menu, and as the Background Music of the final level as funeral music. For whatever reason, the song has since became so associated with the franchise it makes a cameo in almost all Hitman media.
• Bottled Heroic Resolve: Kruger-Schmidt has two healing items for sale: A syringe full of adrenaline, and a bottle of painkillers whose flavor text states they're currently being tested for use...on horses!
• Brooklyn Rage: Swing King, Carmine, and Rudy talk in amusingly thick New York accents.
• Breakable Weapons: After a fashion. When looking at the inventory screen, you'll get a description of the item or weapon. Well, some melee weapons like the bat, hedge-trimmers, hammer or fire extinguisher, get splattered with blood with the very first blow. Then the item description changes to: "It's covered with blood". The item can't be carried openly in public after that.
• Briefcase Blaster: Various containers found in levels (i.e. briefcases and toolboxes) can be used to carry a wide variety of small items including pistols.
• Briefcase Full of Money: There are a couple of missions with characters carrying these as payments for hits or deals. 47 has the option to take the money for himself as a bonus objective or to rig them up with RU-AP mines to assassinate his target.
• Buy Them Off: Not getting the Silent Assassin rating will result in 47 having to spend his hard-earned cash to silence any witnesses.
• Cacophony Cover Up:
  • You can use this to your advantage in Blood Money. If someone's firing guns for a benign reason (like celebrating a wedding), you can use the ambient gunfire to mask the sound of your own.
  • In "Curtains Down," you can also sneak upstairs and tag the Ambassador in his box. If you don't have a silencer yet, you will need to time the shot to coincide with the soundtrack gunshot. The body will be found, but his bodyguards don't leave the booth to find you (since the noise drowns out your gun muzzle), and the suspicio-meter quickly moves back into the black. Note that this doesn't disturb the actors at all.
  • Another trick is to stick a bomb in Schmutzy's payment briefcase and wait for Tariq to come have a look. BLAM. If you pull the fire alarm as you press the button, nobody will find his body.
• Call-Back:
  • "Curtains Down." Once you've caused the downfall of a famous tenor, you may be a little confused by the cut-scene if you're new to Hitman. This mission is the prelude to Hitman: Contracts wherein 47 was shot and (as we all remember) barely escaped the police blockade in Paris.
  • In "Flatline," 47's animation for injecting Agent Smith with the false poison includes flicking the tip in the same way he did when he injected Smith in Romania back in Hitman: Codename 47.
  • Also in "Flatline," the post-mission newspaper includes an ad for a new Chinese restaurant; the Cheung Chau 2. Its menu includes deep-fried Red Dragon feet, Blue Lotus spring rolls, Zun's noodle soup, and Mei Ling stir fry.
• Career-Ending Injury:
  • Raymond was a pro athlete before embarking on a life of crime. He qualified for the 1992 Winter Olympics as a biathlete, but a knee injury resulted in him missing the games.
  • Cayne's testimony to the reporter suggests he retired from the FBI fairly recently. The left side of his body is paralyzed, the result of a "work-related accident" (according to the Blood Money official website) which he believed to be a failed assassination attempt, though nothing was ever proven.
• Caught on Tape:
  • Lorne's blackmail ring is operating out of his film studio. Publicly, Lorne is a perfectly legitimate millionaire, publisher of the magazine Popqurn and producer of adult films. However, he also owns many strip clubs; the real sources of his income are the hidden cameras through which he catches well-respected people with their trousers down.
  • If you get caught on camera, and want to keep your rating, your only option is to dress as a guard and head for the security office marked on the map. The guards wander in and out of here, which should give you a chance to snag the tape.
• Clone Degeneration: Clones are now relatively commonplace; however, Agent 47 stole his creator's notes in order to prevent further Agents from being made. As such, these clones are created with an imperfect procedure, which has resulted in a number of flaws — all the clones are albino, they suffer various physical ailments, and none of them can survive for more than a few years.
• Continuity Drift:
  • It's apparent from the promotional materials that Cayne was originally going to be an oddball business tycoon named Jack, but this was changed in rewrites to give him a law enforcement background. However, Rick Henderson still refers to him as "Jack" throughout his interview. (A radio program overheard in Hitman: Absolution refers to him as Alexander Cayne, finally putting the naming confusion to rest.)
  • "Death of a Showman". This mission takes place on Jan 9, 2004 (based on the paper with your stats at the end of mission). However, in the introduction video, the papers on the father's wall all have the date Jan 20, 2005, even though they depict events that would have logically taken place over the course of years. (The dialogue in the introduction implies that at least five years had passed.) Also, Diana mentioned at the beginning of the mission that the accident took place a few years ago, further highlighting this inconsistency.
  • Several sudden changes to the story line were made during development, and IO left some uncorrected lines of dialog in Lorne's mansion. The drunken Santa Claus claims that it's April, and Diana's briefing claims it's a Tax Day party (which fell on April 15 in 2004). The bartender calls Chad Bingham "the Gubernatorial mistake" if the player keeps talking to him, suggesting Bingham Sr. was originally written as a Governor instead of a Senator.
  • In the briefing for "'Til Death Do Us Part": Diana gets the gang name wrong by calling them the "Blue Claws." The text clearly says "Blue Crabs."
  • Also, there is an open grave reserved for Pappy's brother on the mansion grounds. The in-game dialogue seems to suggest the coffin belongs to Skip, whom you assassinated in the previous mission, and that the groom is Pappy's nephew. For some odd reason, this connection between the Muldoons and the LeBlancs was removed from the finished game (to remove any inflammatory subject matter?), and "Buddy Muldoon" was renamed to "Hank Leitch." In the first draft, Margeaux wished to eliminate Skip due to a prior incestuous affair with him, whereas in the final version, she just wants to shut down his business.
• Cover Drop: The main menu shows various people in a church, attending what appears to be a funeral. This turns out to be the last mission of the game.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
  • If you played any Hitman game from Absolution onward, be prepared. Remember to snag disguises from your unconscious or dead victims before you hide their bodies in a container, otherwise their disguise becomes impossible to get (later games let you take disguises from them).
  • Also, some melee weapons from Hitman onward are non-lethal. Hammers kill in this game, not pacify as they do in the later games, and you only discover this after you cave some poor sod's head in.
• Dead Baby Comedy: "Poodle Explodes in Microwave Killing 2." Funny article about a woman attempting to fast-dry her poodle in a microwave.
• Deadly Bath:
  • The controversial advertisements for Blood Money with the toaster and such.
  • "You Better Watch Out": This one is so easy and fun, it should be illegal. Chad and his entourage are occupying a cliffside jacuzzi with a glass bottom. Select your silenced pistol, take aim at the big, blue circle, and fire.
• Death by Falling Over: The "Accident" gameplay mechanic in Blood Money leads to some quite ludicrous results at times. Shoving someone off a high balcony which overlooks a frozen lake? Fine. Shoving them down a ten-foot flight of stairs? Not quite so believable, but plausible. Shoving someone into a three-foot deep pool of water? Oh come on...
• The Deep South: The Mission "A Murder of Crows" takes place in New Orleans, Louisiana, "Death on the Mississippi" takes place on a paddle boat on the Mississippi River, and "Till Death do us Apart" takes place on the banks of the River, in a plantation mansion.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage:
  • One of the tunes in "Death of a Showman" ("Amb Zone") is a remix of the main Freedom Fighters (2003) theme (also developed by Eidos and scored by Jesper Kyd!).
  • The elevator muzak in "A House of Cards" is the Hitman: Codename 47 opening theme.
  • In "A Dance with the Devil," the song Eve is butchering on-stage is "Tomorrow Never Dies" by Swan Lee, which also plays over the end credits.
• Drop Dead Gorgeous: An ad series for Blood Money featured various victims of 47, including one who resembles Delgado. The other two female victims are both sexualized in ads, with one dressed in lingerie and the other naked in her bathtub. Didn't make IO Interactive too popular with parents' groups in the US, naturally.
• Duel Boss: Note that a headshot will drop 'em both, just like any other enemy.
  • In the second Vegas level, 47 encounters rival assassin Maynard John while on an assignment. John has been looking forward to this for some time, and because he wants to prove himself superior, he challenges 47 to a one-on-one gunfight in a soundproofed room: No sneak attacks, bomb traps, or coin tricks. He even provided semi-autos and magnums on a display table for you to use.
  • 47's final battle with Mark Parchezzi III is, at Mark's insistence, a duel. Mark had the perfect opportunity to kill 47 with a bomb earlier, but just used it as a distraction so he could go up to the roof and await 47's arrival.
  • Of course, both fights can be circumvented with some clever thinking (or metagaming).

E-L

• Early-Bird Cameo: Around the tutorial level you can spot a few instances of a cartoonish devil head. This is the exact same design as the devil mask Anthony Martinez wears in the penultimate level.
• Easter Egg:
  • EXCELLENT WORK MARINES YOUR RIVERDANCING SKILLS ARE BETTER THAN THE IRA! DISMISSED!
  • An interesting easter egg exists in "Curtains Down". If you explore the Backstage area, on 3rd floor, you will find a door that requires a keycard to open, but this keycard is nowhere to be found. In the 1st floor room with some garbage bags, there are 3 rats. Kill them all and a keycard named "Keycard RatClub" will appear at the table. Head back to the door on the third floor, and open it with the RatClub keycard. There will be rats playing Poker, smoking cigars, and boxing.
  • A very subtle one in '"A New Life". It's a rank called The Russian Hare, based on the real life exploits of a WWII sniper for those who one-shot kill combatants with the sniper rifle. You need to snipe every FBI agent on the level, with at least 10 headshots. Don't kill any civilians or the dog.
  • "Death on the Mississippi"... for real. There is an easter egg where if a certain amount of requirements are met, everybody in this mission will start limping or dragging around the ship, and anything but sufficient damage from explosives or a headshot can't kill them. They use melee attacks, which are incredibly ineffective against 47, so the mission's a cakewalk. Having to kill everyone on the cruise ship gets you a much lower ranking than Silent Assassin, but whatever.
  • There is a small silver coin outside the far left side of the front of the LeBlanc mansion, partially hidden in the swamp water. Shooting it will cause the men who are fighting outside to instantly lose their clothes, rush over to 47, and start applauding him. They will return to fighting after a time, albeit still in their underwear.
• Everyone Is Armed:
  • In "'Til Death Do Us Part," all of the guests, half the guards, the two targets, and the dog (probably) are packing heat. The Blue Crabs who don't have six-shooters have shotguns instead. This mission is one of the "heaviest armed" in the Hitman saga since every NPC apart from the bride and the priest carry weapons.
  • "Requiem" drops you in a confined space with 12 members of The Franchise, including Cayne himself. One of the agents in the crowd carries not only a stiletto, but also sometimes lobs an RU-AP mine at 47 as a grenade [!].
• Everything Fades: Yes and no. Just as in past games, bodies stick around for the entire mission. However, in Blood Money, guards are fairly *ahem* unceremonious with the bodies of their dead buddies. The standard treatment is bag and tag in a black body bag and then *drag* said body bag across the floor, up stairs, through water, past civilians, and dump it in the nearest security office, and no one seems to care or be the slightest bit concerned. It's quite a macabre sight if you've been on a rampage: the pile just grows and grows.
• Evil Elevator: 47 can garrote someone who's using an elevator through said elevator's ceiling trap door.
• Evolving Credits: The title screen shows an audience inside a church at sunrise. The audience dwindles as you progress through the missions, with each member disappearing as you kill them, until only Alexander Cayne is left. It's also daylight outside, revealing the others were just ghosts, and Mr. 47's funeral is now at hand. Strange stuff.
• Facial Composite Failure: Some of the artist's renderings of 47 in the paper are hilariously inaccurate. One of them is overweight with shoulder-length hair. At low notoriety, the image will be wildly different from 47's rather distinctive face, but eventually the sketch artist does begin to catch on.◊
• Fat, Sweaty Southerner in a White Suit: 47 is flown out to Mississippi to mop up after two of them: Skip Muldoon and Pappy LeBlanc.
• Femme Fatale: This being a Hitman game, there are a few:
  • The Franchise hitwoman at Lorne's. When she sees 47 pass through the VIP area, she will seductively gesture for him to follow her into a private room. If he does so, a cut-scene will play in which she stabs him in the neck with her nail file after making a remark. ("Men are so easy.") On the other hand, if you attack or try to run away, she'll pull a gun.
  • Eve will pull the same trick, and apparently uses this as her MO.
  • Diana has shades of this when betraying 47 and then Cayne.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The main menu of Blood Money shows a group of strange people attending 47's funeral. As one plays through the game, it quickly becomes apparent that each 'mourner' is actually a target from one of the game's missions. As each level is completed, the corresponding 'mourner' disappears, until, in the end, only Cayne is left...just in time for the final mission.
  • The "story" being recited to Rick, the reporter from First Edition, is a pack of lies. Not only that, Cayne mentions at that start of "You Better Watch Out" that the Feds "had our best agent on the spot. We were ready." The 'agent' is a female assassin placed at Lorne's party, a hint to Cayne's true role as The Franchise boss. The hitwoman will sneak up and kill 47 from behind if she gets the chance.
  • In the newspaper you get after "House of Cards," there's an advertisement for the Heaven and Hell party which makes up the next mission. The angel is in Stripperific clothing but sports a sinister grin and a stiletto just like Eve while the well-dressed devil just sort of stands there looking professional, just like Maynard John.
  • Most of the newspaper scenes include some reference to the next level (i.e., "Flatline" has an ad for Del Mar, which is visited in "A New Life") and there are even some articles that vaguely outline what The Franchise is doing behind the scenes (i.e., Morris ascending to Vice President). They seem unrelated on the first playthrough, but are much more coherent once you find out what's going on.
• Frame-Up:
  • Cayne's version of the White House attack puts the blame squarely on 47, when in reality, he and Smith were in Washington to prevent the hit.
  • This one is worth a few yuk's: In "Amendment XXV," 47 begins the mission in front of a charter bus full of tourists. Sneak a weapon in the suitcase belonging to one of the women, and she'll get a big surprise when she comes to gawk at the White House. ("Talk about an Army of One!") Another possibility is to push the lady into the security lasers in the museum. Do it from behind the wall so that the cameras don't catch you in action.
• Gang of Hats: The Gators are a notable gang which operates on the Mississippi River, using the riverboat attraction as a front. The gators all wear telltale ball caps. They reappear beside Hank in the next mission, "Till Death Do Us Part," now wearing Tacky Tuxedos. A sister group, the Blue Crabs, function as Pappy's private army. They each wear a charcoal suit, blue shirt, Stetson hat, sunglasses, cowboy boots, and carry double-barreled shotguns.
• Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: Cayne classifies 47 and the cloning project as a weapon of mass destruction, in that a dictator could clone an entire army to give themselves much better-quality and quantity soldiers. Cayne however is lying about the events in question and is revealed to be only using the reporter as a mean to advance his plans for The Franchise's cloning capabilities.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss:
  • The "Torture Room" in the Shark Club is set up to give Maynard lots of cover and prevent you from just running up to him and shooting him point blank, since he doesn't really have that much health. Challenging him to a duel is also the only way to assassinate him "silently," bar wearing the wrong disguise for the area and getting him to chase you.
  • In "Amendment XXV," Mark will make you chase him through an endless maze of file cabinets. If you're quick, you can kill him before he reaches the rooftop, but it will probably attract attention from all the agents milling about. An alternative way to kill him quickly is to enter first person mode before you enter the room he is in, and as soon as the cutscene ends, fire upon him before he starts to run.
• The Ghost: The President. His pro-cloning stance is the driving force behind most of the game's plot and an entire mission is about preventing an assassination attempt on him at the White House, but he never appears or is even heard.
• Gilded Cage:
  • Pine Cone, a celebrity rehab clinic. The mafiosos have no need of detox or therapy, and are only there to evade an assassination attempt by their friends back east. They are very relaxed and even suggest just shutting their eyes during their psychiatry sessions or talking sports instead.
  • The gated community within Del Mar in San Diego. Vinnie was caught by the FBI and went into witness protection after snitching on his cohorts in Cuba. In no time at all, he is sick of the suburbs, lamenting that he will "literally die of it!"
• Girlish Pigtails: Carol Anne, along with some of the other female NPCs.
• Going Native:
  • "'Til Death Do Us Part": When 47 starts the level (the boat dock), a particular group of rednecks are shooting at the wildlife. Pull out your piece and fire at the 'gators to get them to stop and watch you in awe. (Or jealousy.) You can also shoot at some bottles sitting on a tree stump, causing the boys to cheer you on.
  • Also, if you stand idle on the outdoor dance floor for approximately two minutes, 47 will perform a square dance with one of the women present. Even better, 47 can join in on a drunken fight going on without it counting as a crime. (When in Rome...) However, if an opponent is knocked unconscious, he will open fire on 47 the moment he is woken, causing the rest of the party to turn hostile.
  • This also happens in "The Murder of Crows" if you loiter around one of the clubs. Just leave 47 on the dance floor without touching the controller, and he will start to boogie. It's possible to rotate the camera or enter first person mode to watch 47 tearing it up.
• Government Conspiracy:
  • "Amendment XXV". Smith claims the Secret Service and the intelligence agencies have been compromised by Alpha Xerox.
  • Someone from Senator Bingham's campaign team—perhaps even the Senator himself—hired Agent 47 to kill Lorne and Chad Jr., and retrieve the sex tape.
  • US ambassadors are appointed by the president (Tom Stewart) and approved by senators, implicating them in Richard's death.
• Grilling Pyrotechnics:
  • The headline "Grill Code Sparks Debate" parodies this trope. Industrial Grills FTW.
  • "Flatline": Tamper with the gas in Lorenzo's suite, and the target will eventually blow himself up for you. You'll know he's dead from the split-screen view showing his ass going up like a fireball.
  • Mrs. Sinistra has to be knocked out or killed at some point. A last resort is to grab some lighter fluid from the shed and sabotage the grill in the backyard. After wifey meets her crispy demise, you can claim the necklace off her bones. There are much less violent (and noisy) methods of accomplishing your objective, though.
• Gun Accessories: You can now slap a ton of mods on your custom weapons. Each category (pistol, SMG, shotgun, assault rifle and sniper rifle) has a dedicated weapon which you can customize to your heart's content, with everything from suppressors to extended magazines to stronger ammo types. Want a fully automatic pair of silenced Hand Cannons with scopes and Laser Sights? As long as you have enough money for the upgrades, you can.
• Guns in Church:
  • "Requiem". There are so many pistols and SMGs on display, you'd think this was a state funeral, and not just a send-off for a departed hitman. Even the stiff is armed!
  • In "'Til Death Do Us Part" 47 can actually openly carry guns without provoking return fire. Justified by it being a really, really redneck wedding; out in front, a bunch of guys are firing shotguns, presumably at gators or something, and several other guests openly carry as well.
• Hint System: Before each mission, the Agency will offer you 5 hints for a fee. This will cost you approximately $28,000. Just purchase the hints, read them, and restart the mission. Hey, presto, you have all your cash back!
• Honey Trap:
  • "Business man gets robbed of kidneys by sexy woman" — headline.
  • Lorne is mentioned as having cameras installed in his gentleman's clubs without the knowledge of his VIPs. His blackmail poses no threat to 47, but this might: In the Pink Mansion there will be a couple making out in the east wing. They will stop kissing when you arrive and the woman will gesture for you to follow her. Ignore her, as she is the "?" person from the loading screen: the "best Agent" mentioned in the opening cut-scene by Cayne. If you do follow her, she will attempt to kill you. However, if you wait until she attacks and then dispose of her, she counts as one of the targets and you receive a $100,000 bonus. If you kill her right as she enters the nearby room, she counts as a civilian and you get penalized.
  • Another one from this level: The aphrodisiac won't attract too much attention, considering this is a soiree held at a porn tycoon's house. Add it to Chad's drink and your job is nearly done.
  • If Eve spots 47 in the Shark Club she, too, will invite him to follow her to a side office for some nookie. Once there, she'll brandish her stiletto and try to kill you.
• Hookers and Blow:
  • Manuel Delgado likes to sample the merchandise a little too much. Hide in the snorting room and knife/wire Manuel while he's on his way in or out.
  • Chad Bingham has a taste for exotic dancers, one of whom he murdered accidentally during an attempt at rough sex.
• Human Shield: You can do this in Blood Money, and it's usually a very easy way to manipulate a pesky guard or civilian. Once you have the gun to their back, you can march them to wherever you want, and buffalo them into unconsciousness.
• Idle Animation: You can dance if you want to. (You can leave your friends behind.) In New Orleans, 47 will start weaving and snapping his fingers if left alone on the dance floor. In Mississippi, he will even join in on a square dance!
• Inconsistent Spelling: The games goes back and forth between referring to the President as Tom Steward and Tom Stewart.
• Insecurity Camera:
  • If 47 gets spotted by a camera, he's awarded with a brand new task: break into the security office and steal the footage. It's a big bother, since only security guards are allowed in there, and 47 has to eject the tape when no one's looking.
  • It's also possible to listen in on the two FBI agents in a surveillance van "A New Life" for a handy piece of information: namely, that the camera monitoring the kitchen entrance is not operating.
• Just Desserts: There are two. The "Till Death Do Us Part" level has an easter egg in which any bodies (alive or dead) can be pushed into the swamp to be eaten by alligators. One of your targets likes to feed chum to the reptiles, which makes your job easier. The other one is "A Dance With the Devil," set in a Las Vegas nightclub with a massive shark tank in the Hell-themed basement area. People can be pushed into the water from the feeding area, but rigging the pyrotechnics show will immolate one of your targets and cause her to jump into the water, where the sharks gobble her up.
• Kent Brockman News: The radio reports on the Presidential race. Also, every time you finish a mission, you see a clipping from a newspaper article which records all of your stats, from the amount of shots fired, to the "assassin's" favorite weapon, to how many people were killed or wounded.
• Lethal Negligence: Joseph "Swing King" Clarence is described as having caused the death of 36 people in the collapse of a Ferris Wheel in his popular Southland Amusement Park by skimping on maintenance. He was acquitted on all criminal charges, though the park's closure, lawyers' fees and subsequent civil suits have left him bankrupt. He's the first target 47 will have to kill in the game.
• Limited Loadout: Blood Money marks the point where 47 cannot carry more than one pistol and long gun (SMG, rifle or shotgun) into a mission. He can, however, pocket as many weapons and items as he wants once the mission begins.

M-Z

• Make It Look Like an Accident:
  • The late VP Spaulding Burke was killed by The Franchise in a staged car accident.
  • "Dance With the Devil": Various clues suggest the woman singing a torch song isn't who she seems. The bartender in Club Heaven will also tell 47 that the original singer had a "fatal accident."
• Mole in Charge: Following a seemingly innocent car accident that kills Veep Spaulding Burke, the incumbent President is forced by Congress to elect a Vice President who has a strong opposition to cloning. President Stewart favors the idea of human cloning and wishes to make it legal in the States, but he can't do it without the public's support, and for that he needs Daniel Morris. In actuality, Morris' boss is the former director of the FBI, who is strongly opposed to legalized cloning insofar as it takes Ort-Meyer's research out of private hands; The Franchise employs at least two clones to carry out their hits.
• My Name Is ???:
  • If you manage to kill the target without wasting any civilians or being spotted, and your Notoriety is at 0, the newspaper will report on a "Silent Assassin" on the loose and print a front-page splash of the victim (the primary Target). If however, you accrued a minimum amount of Notoriety (10 points or so) but still weren't identified, then the paper will print a silhouette of a featureless, bald man with a "?" for a face.
  • "You Better Watch Out...": If you pay close attention to the loading screen for this level you'll notice a "?" sign and a silhouette next to the 2 targets. That's because there's an undercover Franchise agent in this level. She's in the room next to Chad as he's banging the jacuzzi girl.
• Never Trust a Trailer:
  • That scene with 47 and Mark Parchezzi, dressed to the nines and training guns on each other. It doesn't happen in the game, and when the two finally do meet, Mark is wearing a janitor's uniform for a disguise.
  • The trailer also makes it appear as if the politician Jimmy Cilley is 47's target, when the mission has 47 preventing his assassination.
• News Monopoly: With the US election a year away human cloning has become a major campaign issue in the United States. In most missions, there's a radio blaring news regarding the campaign season. The radio announcer changes as 47 travels around the country, and is replaced with a southern drawl in Mississippi.
• New Game Plus: If you repeat a mission, then your notoriety at the end will be the least you gained on any of your tries. If you replay a level to collect all the guns, and end up in a situation where you would have a higher notoriety level, your current notoriety level will NOT increase, which is definitely a good thing.
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • The theater is undergoing renovation while a play is in rehearsal? Those fiat helmets don't offer that much protection.
  • And who leaves a piano dangling like that in the middle of Mardi Gras?
  • The tutorial level features a drug lab staffed by babes in bras and panties wearing facial masks and gangbangers who wear regular clothes and no breathing protection. Justified by it being an illegal lab staffed by lowlives.
• Nonstandard Game Over: The first is in "You Better Watch Out..." when an unknown Franchise assassin disguised as one of the call girls beckons you into a VIP room. If you take the bait, she stabs 47 in the neck with a nail file. The second is in "A Dance with the Devil": the singer is actually a Franchise assassin named Eve, who will try to seduce 47 and invite him into an empty office. Should you follow her and wait for too long, she will pounce on 47's body and stab it repeatedly. Yikes. The third happens in "Requiem," if the player doesn't wake up 47 in time during the fake credits sequence, the funeral ends and his coffin is closed and then cremated.
• Noob Bridge: 47 can climb things now. And he LOVES to do it, too! He'll climb pipes and boxes at the drop of a hat! Get him too close to a ledge or a pipe and up he goes, angering every guard in sight. Truth be told, being caught climbing isn't the end of the world. They just seem to forget about you and go about their business. But you still need to be careful around climb-able objects.
• "Not So Different" Remark: The two clone assassins meet each other in the Oval Office, at which point Parchezzi tries to play on Mr. 47's sympathy by pointing out their connections to Ort-Meyer.
  47: Our similarities are irrelevant.
• Orcus on His Throne:
  • Cayne's out of action ever since an explosion left him paralyzed and hideously burned. He's not dumb enough to duke it out with the Hitman, and he keeps his identity a secret until Diana poisons 47 in the cellar. Smart plan: his only mistake was showing up at the funeral, as he couldn't resist seeing his adversary burn to ash.
  • Mark Purayah can be found pacing back and forth in his Bourbon Street lair. Despite being heavily armed, he will not exit the Big Bird building to look for 47, even if his assassins are all dead.
• Our Presidents Are Different: Tom Stewart is a staunch supporter of human cloning and the medical benefits it can provide, he wishes to make it legal in the States. Blissfully unaware of the dangers, Stewart finds himself the target of an assassination plot, and Mister 47 will be put right in the thick of it.
• Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: In Blood Money, a puddle of blood slowly forms under dead NPCs, which is a departure from previous games. However, there are also a few animals in the game you can kill, and these get exactly the same size blood puddle. Since these animals include a tiny dog and rats, these get a hilariously huge puddle of blood.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • Maynard and Eve suck at their jobs.
  • If you call Vinnie from the FBI van, he answers in his thick Cuban accent. "This is, uh... James. Hello?"
• Political Overcorrectness: Players can scan reports of a recent spate of robberies and killings by a "group" of albino hitmen. These are all variations of same clone, Mark Parchezzi III. Amusingly, a newspaper clipping will report on an "Albino-American Anti-Defamation League" protesting the government's insensitive profiling of albinos.
• Porky Pig Pronunciation: The lush who makes a pass at 47 in Vegas ("I'm unacom—? Una... I'm alone in suite 203."), as well as the priest at Margeux's wedding.
  "Th' power inveschted in me... by th' great schdate of... Mish....misschippi?"
• Production Foreshadowing: In a library cutscene, the camera briefly lingers on a copy of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, which would be much more important to the plot of Eidos' next big game in development at that time, Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
• Punch-Packing Pistol: The Magnum Ammo upgrade for the Silverballer turns it into a Hand Cannon, though not quite to the utterly ridiculous level the Ballers were in Silent Assassin.
• Punny Name:
  • Hank Leitch ("Leech") and Henrik Schmutz (schmutz means "dirt" in Yiddish).
  • The name "Purayah" is phonetically similar to the word 'pariah', meaning 'outcast'.
  • The white sedan parked outside of Amusement Park belongs to Andrew Chiseler, Esq.
  • The objective of "A New Life" is to take out Vinnie Sinistra, so be prepared to deal with his large, purple forehead and yellow power ring!
  • One of the election candidates is named "Sen. N.(o) F.(ucking) Chance"
  • Pappy is friends with one Henrick Slackjaw, who is later interviewed for the front page obituary.
• Randomly Generated Levels:
  • The mob hit at Pine Cone Rehab Facility. The target is one of three mobsters staying there, but you have to (as usual) find Agent Smith to identify just which one it is.
  • The location of Raymond's sniper nest is meant to be random, but he always starts off in the blues bar. Like in previous Hitmans, the mystery targets move around if you die or reload the level. Angelina always spawns under the piano, but her wanderings around the city are mostly random, and she is perfectly ambush-able in one of the alleys; just make sure there's no patrolling cops en route. She's not quite as accommodating as Billy Jack (the red bird) when it comes to standing near rubbish bins, though.
• Recurring Riff: Jesper Kyd's score for Blood Money features snippets, samples, and remixes of tracks from previous works he has done. Most notably, "Apocalypse" is based on a track from Scorcher, which was in turn based on "Spinner," a track from RedZone.
• Red Right Hand: The "Mark" clones produced by Alpha Xerox are Type Twos. A flaw in the cloning process causes them to lack skin pigment.
• Right-Hand Attack Dog: To keep dogs from alerting anyone nearby of 47's presence, dogs can be put to sleep in more ways than one.
  • In order to get close to Lorne, we're going to have to deal with his pooch. You can snipe Lorne easily from a distance, but his dog will lead guards to his corpse. How do we solve this? Well, did you know 47 was an Olympic sausage lobber? It's true! Drug up a sausage from the kitchen and toss it at the pooch. The dog should eat it and pass out. Now you can work in peace.
  • The First Lady and Morris have another dog nipping at their heels, so take care not to hurt them when "Justice" is in the room. Remember, dogs do count as found bodies, and we can't move them.
• Scenery Porn: This is where Hitman levels start to get dizzying.
  • The Californian levels are scenic, with a misty view of redwood forest surrounding the clinic.
  • Lorne's grotto was a major selling point in the previews, and for good reason; most critics mentioned Colorado when pointing out the graphical upgrades.
  • The view from the riverboat at dusk is placid. Perfect for dunking sailors overboard.
  • The Vegas levels are teeming with lights, with extra care given to the exterior of the casino and the Vegas strip. You're treated to a detailed sunset and a heavenly chorus when riding the glass elevator into the Shark Club. Conversely, you can head downstairs and join the ravers watching the pyrotechnic show by the shark tank.
  • The White House is no slouch: see the shootout with Mark on the rain-slicked roof of the West Wing as lightning bolts rain from the sky.
  • The final mission, "Requiem," speaks for itself, even if the level is short and sweet. Drink in the seaside view as you blow Cayne's head off.
• Shark Pool:
  • Pappy will sometimes take a bucket of chum to feed to the alligators. Strangely, alligators leave 47 alone, no matter how far into the swamp water he goes.
  • A mission to Shark Club in Las Vegas features a small balcony hanging just above a massive shark tank. You have the option of rigging the pyrotechnics to set your target ablaze: after wasting precious time rolling about on the floor, she hurls herself off the balcony and into the tank, where she becomes a barbecued meal for a hungry White Pointer. If you want to hide bodies, there's also a feeding pit or two backstage. (And the more corpses you lob into the drink, the bigger that shark gets!)
• Significant Monogram: The albinos each have "M.P." as their initials, followed by a suffix such as "Jr." or "the third".
• Sissy Villain:
  • Richard is a mincing "opera fan" who adores Alvaro. He will weep openly if his paramour is killed.
  • Skip is bisexual and prefers his waiters to dress in ridiculous sailor attire. He speaks in a high-pitched swish accent and outwardly flirts with the waiters (if 47 approaches him while disguised as one).
• Slouch of Villainy: Scoop can be found reclining on a bed with his hoes, having converted an old funhouse into his lair. Ditto for Chad Junior, relaxing in a jacuzzi with some bunnies and harassing every waiter who chances by.
• Sniper Pistol: The Silverballers can be upgraded with a long slide, laser sight, low-velocity ammo (which is more accurate), and a scope. And, weirdly enough, you can still wield two of them. This is vital to defeating Mark Parchezzi if you wish to retain your SA rating, though the actual sniper rifle is still the preferred long-range weapon in most circumstances.
• Story Breadcrumbs: Much of the larger story can only be picked up on by reading the newspaper articles between levels. They contain details on the issue of human cloning, a string of mysterious assassinations by albino killers, and the death of the Vice President, all of which are linked to The Franchise.
• Super Drowning Skills: One wouldn't have thought a short fall into a few inches of water would be fatal, but now we know. As we all know, being pushed into a kiddy pool is also DEADLY.
• The Syndicate: "The Franchise" have fingers in a lot of pies across the globe. This is owing to Cayne's old connections in the intelligence community, his friends on Wall Street, and the soon-to-be President of the United States.
• Take Our Word for It: Back in Europe, there's a war going on with The Franchise which gradually rubs out everyone affiliated with The Agency. Not that we get to see any of it.
• The Computer Is a Lying Bastard: The game's tutorial mission is quite infamous for this.
  • For a game that punishes you for needless killing, the tutorial sure loves to make you participate in needless killing. A good amount of the gangsters and the target's innocent secretary are among the casualties if you follow the semi-forced path the game gives you.
  • There's a segment where 47 turns off the lights in a room, causing the gangsters inside to become panicked and unable to see 47. In every other level, turning off lights only slightly reduces NPC field of vision, and they remain calm as one of them just goes and turns the lights back on.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: 47 is borderline Out of Character in this game - the opening level is quite brutal if played as intended, he kills an innocent postal worker in a cutscene, and instead of the Hitman with a Heart from the previous entries, 47 is more interested in getting paid than saving his employer. It's odd to see, to say the least.
• Unholy Matrimony:
  • Angelina and Raymond in "A Murder of Crows".
  • If you encounter Vaana in the halls while dressed as Martinez, she will lure you to her "throne room" for some smooches. If you don't do anything, she'll get suspicious.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Downplayed. The Custom 1911 is obtainable during missions, but is the only gun in the game that can't be unlocked for 47's arsenal upon taking it out of a level. That said, it doesn't do anything a Silverballer loaded with Magnum ammo doesn't already do.
• Vanity License Plate:
  • The back license plate of the garbage truck says "BADBLOD." The license plates of the caterer's delivery vehicle says "MUNCH1."
  • "1LMN3Y" (I Love Money) is written on one of the Limousines.
  • In "Requiem," The Franchise cars you can find near the gate have the license plates 666 and IO (for IO Interactive).
• Villainous Widow's Peak: Vinnie Sinistra sports one, as does the female assassin at Lorne's Christmas bash.
• Villain with Good Publicity:
  • Fernando served as a colonel in Chile's intelligence service during the rule of Augusto Pinochet. During or after his service, he began drug trafficking under the guise of wine-making. Even though Agent 47 was told to kill Manuel to "make it look like a drug hit," he still gets a glowing obituary column. Next to the article about Fernando's death, the player can read a human interest story about the villagers mourning his death. Though some consider him a very talented winemaker, others say he made some of the worst wine in Chile.
  • And the Big Bad, Alexander Cayne himself. From the sound of things (in Absolution), his role in The Franchise murders is never brought to light.
  • Margeaux in the Vegas headline, "Lady Luck Spreads the Chips".
  • Skip is popularly known as the captain of the steamboat Emily, which has been winning awards since the 1990s.
• "Wanted!" Poster: As notoriety rises, guards will give you much less leeway and be alert to suspicious behavior. This is because they have an easier time recognizing who Mr. 47 is. (Civilians will also comment that they have seen you somewhere before, but this doesn't affect gameplay.) After a mission complete, you can pay to have notoriety reduced by bribing varying levels of people or purchasing a new identity. It's an interesting-if-imperfect feature which encourages you to run around like a lunatic just to capture peoples' reactions.
• Welcome to Corneria:
  • The radio newscasts on the Presidential race.
  • Even after you save the lawyer from being burned, he just screams "Help me!" on a loop. Possibly Justified in that he's blindfolded and and he's sitting on coin operated elephant kiddie ride that's playing loud music, which may drown out 47 sneaking and silently killing the thug.
  • "DON'T NOBODY SHOOT!" Even if you take a hostage in an other-wise empty room, the guard will still yell this.
• Worst News Judgement Ever:
  • The newspapers ending each level in Blood Money will always give the 72 pt. treatment to whomever 47 has just bumped off. Meanwhile, stories like the death of the United States vice president are relegated to minor blurbs. Even if you go completely apeshit and shoot 20 civilians, the media will focus entirely on a petty crook who got caught in the crossfire.
  • Averted surprisingly in the lowest difficulty level where the victim is the headline instead of the perceived sketch of the perpetrator.
  • If the First Lady is killed, she is mentioned in the newspaper story as an innocent bystander, in the wrong place at the wrong time, rather than an additional target.
• Worthy Opponent: The Albino clones have this attitude toward 47.

Missions

Baltimore: "Death of a Showman"

A few years prior, a ferris wheel at the Southland Amusement Park in Baltimore, Maryland collapsed, killing 36 people. The park's owner, Joseph "Swing King" Clarence, was sued for negligence, but was acquitted of all charges. The father of a teenager killed in the accident hires 47 to eliminate Clarence, whose bankruptcy has led him to allow a local gang to use the decrepit park as a drug lab, with the condition of showing Clarence a photo of the client's son before killing him.

---

• Amusement Park of Doom: The Southland Amusement Park is a decrepit wasteland which was owned by Joseph "Swing King" Clarence prior to a lawsuit against him. The once-booming park was declared unsafe after a ferris wheel collapsed and caused dozens of deaths. The subsequent lawsuits forced the park—and Swing King—into bankruptcy. After the closure, Swing King was approached by Scoop (or maybe vice-versa) and agreed to use the grounds to manufacture drugs under the assumption that Scoop would cut him in on the profits. Unfortunately, Swing King was mistaken, and Scoop chose not to cut him in, resulting in the park falling into even greater disrepair.
• Batman Cold Open: This mission has nothing to do with the story at large, instead serving as a tutorial and a pretext for showing off the new game engine. Cayne's narration doesn't even start until the level ends.
• Best Served Cold: The grieving father who phones The Agency in the prologue. "I would, uh, like to place an order..."
• Bloody Handprint: Outside of the amusement park gate is a set of bloody footprints leading up to an abandoned car. This comes just as Diana warns you that drug traffickers have been making their presence felt in this neighborhood.
• Cluster F-Bomb: "Death of a Showman" is the most profane mission in Blood Money.
• Falling Chandelier of Doom: Scoop's bed is placed right underneath one, and the game tasks you with placing a mine on the chandelier's winch.
• Ferris Wheel of Doom: The ferris wheel at Southland came apart and killed forty people due to gross negligence. Two of Scoop's henchmen are using the remains of the wheel as a sniper tower — a grim testament to the park owner.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: The tutorial. The newspaper Parchezzi's reading in the post-mission cutscene always has Silent Assassin as 47's title regardless of which rating the player actually got, and this despite the fact that following the in-game prompts will completely disqualify you from getting Silent Assassin. While it is possible to finish the mission with a SA rating, it's noticeably more difficult than in later missions since it's based around killing numerous non-targets to introduce you to the gameplay mechanics.
• Gangbangers: In the act of killing Swing King, 47 also liquidates Scoop, most of his gang, and a chemist.
• Gold Digger: While pleading for his life, Swing King claims that 'everything I ever did, I did for love!' He probably showered his young wife with goodies while skimping on the routine maintenance of his park. Additionally, the entire reason he's let Scoop set up shop in his park is because he was promised enough drug money to pay off his (now mid-divorce) wife.
• I Lied: In order to stave off bankruptcy, Swing Kent rents out his park to Scoop, the leader of a crack cocaine ring. Being an asshole, Scoop refuses to either vacate or pay the Swing King the past due rent.
• The Last Thing You Ever See: The first mission has 47 showing a photograph of a star HS athlete to his target, Joesph Clarence, informing him that his client wants this to be the last thing Clarence sees before he dies.
• No-Gear Level: There's no pre-mission weapon selection screen for this mission, so presumably 47 is waiting for his custom guns to be shipped over to him.
• Out-of-Character Moment: 47 slaughtering Scoop's gang versus sneaking past them.
• Put Their Heads Together: Inside the Amusement Park, after you sabotage the lights, look to the right while sneaking through the drug lab. Two of Scoop's hoes will run around and then headbutt each other in the darkness.
• R-Rated Opening: While the rest of the game isn't exactly sunshine and rainbows, the first level is noticeably more edgy than what follows - the tutorial makes you murder numerous non-targets, including the target's innocent secretary/niece^note While some deaths can be avoided, the level isn't really designed for that and a Pacifist Run requires exploiting the game mechanics; at least the secretary can be spared by knocking her out instead of straight-up murdering her, the gang has a (likely kidnapped) Bound and Gagged NPC facing torture and the nearby gas canister implies an even worse fate, there are numerous barely-dressed women working on the drug operation, and the target is easily the most sympathetic in the game. Overall, the level stands out as surprisingly bleak among the others, where you're at least given more freedom over people's lives and the targets tend to deserve what's coming to them.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Scoop politely kills his henchman after the latter confesses to allowing an intruder (47) into the park. "I'm afraid you'll have to be a lesson in personal responsibility."
• Spinning Paper: The Swing King's rise and fall is being chronicled on a bulletin board by 47's client...
• Stalker Shrine: ...a vengeful father who wants him brought to justice.
• Uncle Tomfoolery: The Steppin Fetchit accents you hear from the various gang members. It comes as a shock when Scoop talks in a normal voice.
• Voice Clip Song: In the room with the two card playing gangsters, there is a boombox playing a song which is made up of entirely of quotes from this level.
• Where da White Women At?: Swing King's niece, Carol Anne, keeps neglecting her duties to go flirt with a hoodlum standing guard outside the office, much to her uncle's annoyance.
• You Have Failed Me: The hood who threatens 47 at the theme park gates ("Whachoo lookin at, cracker?") gets gunned down by Scoop for allowing an intruder into the area.

Chile: "A Vintage Year"

47 heads to the Colchagua Valley, Chile to eliminate Don Fernando Delgado, a former colonel in Pinochet's regime currently running a cocaine ring out of his vineyard. To make the assassination appear to be a drug-related hit, 47 must also take out Delgado's son, Manuel.

---

• Artistic License – Geography: The Delgado's vineyard, which is described to be outside of Santiago, is surrounded by a rainforest with a massive waterfall. Santiago doesn't actually have any rainforests, being a subtropical region with arid weather.
• Explosive Barrels: At one point during the mission, Manuel takes the agent downstairs to the drug lab. The blue canisters will explode if you shoot them or lay a bomb, but it's not a practical method for killing him.
• Getting High on Their Own Supply: Manuel has developed an addiction to his own cocaine and will occasionally go into a room to take some. One of the easiest ways of killing him involves poisoning the coke.
• Photo Op with the Dog: Rex Stanton, the washed up action star, is on hand to endorse the Don's new wine label. His presence has attracted a number of news crews and tourists, which provides 47 excellent cover to sneak into the winery.

Paris: "Curtains Down"

47 is sent to an opera house in Paris to eliminate renowned opera actor Alvaro D'Alvade, who secretly runs a child prostitution ring in Europe, alongside his friend and biggest customer, disgraced US ambassador Richard Delahunt. D'Alvade is currently rehearsing Tosca with Delahunt in the audience, providing an opportunity for 47 to assassinate both.

---

• All Part of the Show:
  • In Tosca, Cavaradossi attempts to fake his death and flee the country with Tosca, which fails when the executioner's fake gun is exchanged for a real one. As Cavaradossi dies, Tosca exclaims "What an actor!" before hurrying to Cavaradossi's body and discovering in shock that he is really dead. The incredible irony is that if the player chooses to replace the fake gun with the real one, the events unfold like a story within a story, with Alvaro as Cavaradossi and Richard as Tosca. In "Curtains Down," if you find a nice spot and wait until dress rehearsal, you will be in perfect position to snipe the tenor during his death scene. Do so when the executioner fires his gun, and the sound will be masked. Alternatively, Diana provides you a fake WWI pistol to swap with the prop one, and Alvaro will be shot in the heart and perish without anyone thinking to help him (and Richard even giving him a standing ovation).
  • Just to show you how much attention to detail is given: when you switch the prop gun for the real thing, the actor playing the executioner will say (in French) something to the effect of "Wow, this thing feels so real, Good thing it's not."
• Anachronic Order: The opera mission in Blood Money is the same mission which went wrong for 47 in Contracts, acting as the impetus for that game's story.
• Artistic License – Law: France doesn't allow civilians to carry guns into a public place, especially automatic ones. Getting caught carrying weapons by the guard frisking you for guns would have harsher consequences than simply having to surrender them.
• At the Opera Tonight: For the purposes of "Curtains Down," 47 doesn't get to attend a show in-progress, but rather one which is still in rehearsal. One of your targets is playing the lead in Tosca. The other is watching with interest from a VIP box.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: Some signs in the Paris Opera in "Curtains Down" are bilingual, but "stage" (as in, where the play is played) as been translated as "e'tape" (with the apostrophe presumably standing in for "é"). The correct word for a theater stage in French is "scène," while "étape" can mean "stage" (in the sense of "phase" or "step"). This is rather surprising as the NPCs in the level speak rather good French.
• Cacophony Cover Up: It is possible to fire a gun and shoot Delahunt at the exact same time the actor fires the fake gun.
• Easy Level Trick: Swapping the actor's prop gun for the real one is the easiest way to get rid of D'Alvade. It also lures Delahunt out of his box, providing an opportunity to crush him under the chandelier.
• Falling Chandelier of Doom: The easiest way of killing Delahunt is by rigging the chandelier with a mine and detonating it when he runs over to D'Alvade's corpse, in which he'll trip and lie underneath the chandelier.
• Fanservice: In the northern part of the building, you can stumble into the women's dressing room. They scream and run around, but nobody comes to investigate, and the suspicion meter doesn't move at all.
• Not-So-Fake Prop Weapon: Diana supplies you with an antique pistol which happens to be a live weapon; it can be retrieved from the cloakroom by talking to the attendant. If you swap it for the fake one, one of the actors will kill Alvaro for you.
• Once More, with Clarity: In the previous game, 47 was hired to kill the famous tenor, Alvaro D'Alvade and the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican, Richard Delahunt, in an opera house during a stage rehearsal of Tosca. "Curtains Down" shows the mission as it really happened.
• Pædo Hunt: Avaro is strongly rumored to be in a pedophile ring targeting children of both sexes. US ambassador Richard Delahunt is his biggest fan and implied lover, and in secret Alvaro is the best customer of Delahunt's child prostitution ring.
• Retcon: In Hitman: Contracts Alvaro was listed as "Philippe Berceuse". Blood Money was released later and overruled the previous game in continuity.
• Spear Carrier: The actors go to their private rooms to rehearse during breaks. You can even steal the actor's uniform, hit your mark, and perform the execution yourself. It's cute how the actor playing the executioner takes his 'role' so seriously.
• Transparent Closet: Richard and Alvaro aren't fooling anybody. Even the cloakroom attendant knows what's up.
• Worst. Whatever. Ever!: You can dress as an Opera security guard and make the tourists follow you around, just like a tour guide. Sooner or later, an American man comments about how this is the "Worst tour guide ever!"

California: "Flatline"

Days prior, Agent Carlton Smith had been sent to the Pine Cone Rehabilitation Clinic in Northern California to identify three mobsters, one of whom is due to turn state's witness. Smith has not been heard from in days, apparently being kept drunk to prevent him from escaping. As the clinic only discharges dead patients, Diana provides 47 with an experimental serum that will put Smith into a death-like state and allow him to be discharged. 47 must also identify the identity of the mobster and eliminate him and potentially two other mobsters.

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• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: The three mobsters have three stashes of booze hidden around the clinic that they will go to drink from time to time, all of which can be poisoned.
• Ass Shove: The little stone angels on the outdoor pool are urinating into it. Carmine regularly sneaks out here for a tipple. Like the others, you can kill him by poisoning his drink, which happens to be hiding in the ass crack of one of these statues. 47 literally sticks a needle in its ass.
• Bad to the Last Drop: Orderlies can occasionally be heard complaining about the quality of the coffee machines. Poisoning their cups with sedative will make them assume it's been cleaned out before falling down.
• Bedlam House: While pleasant from the outside, the Pine Cone clinic contains a basement reserved for troublesome patients or patients who can't be cured, since the clinic only discharges people if they're clean or dead. The clinic is also a safehouse for mobsters laying low, who have resorted to drinking.
• Bodybag Trick: 47 uses a fake death drug on CIA agent Smith to get him out of a clinic, smuggled in a body bag.
• Cyanide Pill: 47 uses it to get Agent Smith out of the rehabilitation center where he's being held due to the fact that the clinic will only release patients who are "sober or dead," and the clinic has specifically been keeping Smith drugged to keep from having to release him. Once Agent Smith is in his deathlike state, he's wheeled to an unguarded morgue where Agent 47 can revive him using the antidote. This is the only instance of the fake-death serum in game play, though, and it can only be used on Agent Smith.
• Irony: Pine Cone's strict diet program and lack of activities within the center have resulted in the three mobsters becoming alcoholics.
• Luxury Prison Suite: The public, above ground, facility is used by mafia leaders a private resort while they undergo a court mandated stint in rehab.
• Wrongfully Committed: After 47 takes out some targets in the public facility, he goes down in to the secret, underground, draconian asylum where he has to sneak out Agent Smith, who was captured while gathering intelligence by Mark Parchezzi III, who was posing as a doctor, and ordered him placed in isolation, where the orderlies routinely give him powerful psychoactive medication and perform rigorous physical therapies to treat his "delusions."

California: "A New Life"

47 is sent to a gated community within Del Mar, San Diego, to eliminate former Cuban crime lord Vinnie Sinistra. Sinistra is due to testify against his former partners next month, and is being kept under witness protection. 47 must also collect a piece of microfilm containing the evidence.

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• Artistic License – Law: Vinnie's house is being guarded and surveilled by the FBI, rather than the US Marshals.
• Bland-Name Product: It's possible to slip a pair of drugged donuts to some FBI agents in order to steal their uniforms. The fauxnuts are from "Delicious Donuts", using the characteristic color scheme and font of Dunkin' Donuts.
• Cheating with the Milkman: Mrs. Sinistra is constantly cheating on her husband, a fact 47 can easily exploit in order to seize the microfilm she's been entrusted with; should he disguise himself as the poolboy or clown, she'll promptly lead him away to her room for a quick tryst - giving him the perfect opportunity to steal the microfilm when she finally passes out.
• Donut Mess with a Cop: 47 can knock out the FBI agents in the car by tricking them into eating donuts laced with a sedative.
• Hard-Drinking Party Girl: Vinnie's wife staggers back and forth between bottles that are strategically placed in the house. One is out by the barbecue and is extremely difficult to poison undetected. The other is on the kitchen counter. Slip some sedative or poison in either and she's down for the count.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: The microfilm is on the necklace worn by Vinnie's wife.
• Hide Your Children: 47 is carrying out a hit on a mobster in witness relocation during a child's birthday party. The clown is there, the caterer is there, but the children are nowhere to be found. Presumably, 47 would refuse to fire upon them even if they were there.
• Lethal Joke Item: If you can manage to lockpick the vet clinic without any guff from the neighbor lady, go inside and pocket the tranq darts. Mind the lady when you exit, and head around the back of Vinnie's to the tree fort. Grabbing the air rifle will automatically load it with the tranquillizer darts and can also shoot out security cameras.
• Man on Fire: Sabotaging the barbeque grill with some lighter fluid, it will explode when Vinnie's wife comes to use it, she'll catch fire, run around for a while, and eventually fall into the pool as charred corpse.
• Medium Awareness: 47 could always run in his suit and Oxfords. A jogger in the suburb will compliment his stride, but warns he'll wreck his feet wearing those shoes.
• Monster Clown: Corky the Clown (real name Max Feister) is an alcoholic clown hired to entertain Vinnie's son at his birthday. He can be Mugged for Disguise to gain access to the house.
• Nosy Neighbor: You can (and will) be harassed by a woman with pruning shears if you go near the vet clinic.
• Panty Thief: In the Sinistra house, there's an FBI agent patrolling the upstairs rooms. When he enters the room belong to Vinnie's daughter, he immediately grabs a pair of red panties from the dresser and starts to smell it. Great pick of bodyguards! If you lift some solvent from the Vet's office, you can pour it on the girl's panties, which will knock out this idiot.
• Really Gets Around: Vinnie's wife is the weak link here. She can be seen flirting around with various staff, including the birthday clown [!], the caterer, and the Pool Cleaner. ("The pool isn't the only thing I need serviced.") If you need to bypass a checkpoint, she'll even tell the Feds to leave you alone. ("Don't worry, he's clean—'til I get him alone, anyway.") Eventually, the mistress of the house will pass out in the upstairs bedroom; this is a good opportunity to get the microfilm.
• Stepford Suburbia: Vinnie lives inside a giant house in the gated community of Del Mar, located in southern California. Scratch the surface, though, and the American dream isn't exactly working out for Vinnie: his wife is getting hammered on wine while hitting on pool boys, the feds are upstairs sniffing his daughter's panties, and Vinnie is too terrified to leave his bodyguard's side for even a second, and his family are fed up of the constant surveillance.
• Tranquilizer Dart:
  • The air rifle found in this level is able to be loaded with these.
  • If you get into the treehouse with the air rifle and tranqs, you can shoot the wife as she walks past the pool (it counts as an accident too.). She will fall in and drown, allowing you to retrieve the film from her corpse. Just knocking her out with the tranq gun isn't an option; someone will wake her up before you get there. If that's not enough, you can shoot out the glass ceiling in here (either from inside or out in the treehouse) and it will fall on her, with fatal results.
• Treehouse of Fun: There is a goofy treehouse with a pirate flag in a neighbor's backyard, presumably for her son to enjoy.
• Van in Black: The "Lauritz and Co." van parked outside the vet clinic. Drugging the donuts with sedatives and giving them to the agents is the easiest way to get their disguise.
• With Catlike Tread: If you climb the drainpipe to the left of the house and climb through the window into the birthday boy's room, you step on a squeaky toy. Just like in comedies.
• Witness Protection: "Into the suburbs for this one: You have to kill a state's witness who is under federal protection and steal back the hard evidence (some microfilm) which could implicate his cohorts back in Cuba. Don't be fooled by the low number of guards in Del Mar; if you cause a racket, more FBI agents with MP7s will swoop into the neighborhood as backup.

New Orleans: "A Murder of Crows"

The American Secretary of the Interior, Jimmy Cilley, is being targeted at a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans, by a gang of assassins called The Crows. 47 must protect Cilley by eliminating the assassins - Clone Mark Purayah II and his two associates, former Olympic biathlete Raymond Kulinsky, and Kulinsky's wife Angelica Mason.

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• Apathetic Citizens: The teeming mass of partygoers choking the streets don't notice or care if 47 is running around having gun battles with cops and thugs dressed as giant birds. They don't even count as living witnesses afterwards.
• Conspicuously Selective Perception: 47 is trying to kill three hitmen who are attempting to assassinate the governor. These hitmen are dressed in bizarre bird costumes and carrying rather large weapons, yet the cops completely fail to react if they spot these gun-toting birds chasing an apparently unarmed 47 through the streets.
• Enemy Chatter: Once the payment briefcase is delivered, the Crows will begin to update each other via walkie-talkies. If this is your first playthrough, you can glean Raymond's position by listening in on either Mark or Angelina. Since Raymond doesn't appear on the map, this is the quickest way to get a fix on his position. Unfortunately the setup is undone by the fact that Raymond always spawns in the Blues Club on the first go, Angelina always stands under the piano at the start, and Mark never budges from the big bird building.
• Intimate Telecommunications: Husband and wife assassins Angelina Mason and Raymond Kulinsky are fond of exchanging such communications in their talkie-walkies.
• It's Always Mardi Gras in New Orleans: The mission takes place on October 25, 2004. However, Mardi Gras is always celebrated the day before Ash Wednesday, which itself is forty days before Easter. This means Mardis Gras season usually starts during either January, February or March. The New Orleans level in Blood Money centers around preventing an assassination during a Mardi Gras parade — all fine and dandy, except that the mission takes place in late October (to be fair, Bourbon Street often does look like that in late October, but for entirely different reasons). In addition, there isn't just one "Mardi Gras Parade." There's over 40.
• Moment Killer: To get into Raymond's loft, you may need to bypass a waiter and girl necking in the stairwell. You can either turn off the light and distract the make-out couple while you pick the lock, wait for them to leave, or you can climb in from the outside. The latter options are recommended, as the make-out couple can be quite a pain.
• Newspaper-Thin Disguise: Hiding behind a restaurant menu, 47 watches the hand-off in New Orleans.
• Piano Drop: This is the only way to kill Angelina in an accident. In the west-most courtyard, there's a piano suspended in midair for no reason whatsoever. Eventually, Angelina will stand under it and you can blow up the winch and give her a headache. If you have the walkie talkie, she'll even announce when she's in place. This kill may complicate things a bit if she's completely covered by the piano, since you won't be able to collect her gear.
• Right Hand Versus Left Hand: "The Murder of Crows." 47 is there to protect the Interior Secretary from assassins. So are the bodyguards & police officers. But they don't know that's why 47 is there, and they'll kill him stone-cold dead if they see him with a weapon or catch him sneaking around a restricted area.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: If you kill Raymond, take his outfit, and approach Angelina, she will immediately discover that her lover has been murdered and start firing at 47. After a while, she will then go onto the Interior Secretary's float and eliminate him.
• Stealth Pun: Raymond and Angelica are a very happy couple dressed up as crows. They're "lovebirds."
• Timed Mission: Mark is there to collect a briefcase full of diamonds that is payment for the execution order on Jimmy Cilley. The successful delivery of the suitcase is tantamount to The Crows' success. If 47 intercepts the payment before it's delivered, 47 has unlimited time to take out his three targets without having to worry about Mark giving the kill order, and 47 can exit with the payment briefcase in his possession to add a bonus to his payment for the mission.
• Too Dumb to Live: Angelica occasionally stands underneath a suspended piano, providing the perfect opportunity to cause a Piano Drop.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: The teeming mass of party-goers choking the streets don't notice or care if 47 is running around having gun battles with cops and thugs dressed as giant birds. They don't even count as living witnesses afterwards (or dead ones).
  • This is because they're "ghost people" with no real AI and very little health, otherwise the game would have been unable to run on the original Xbox, the PS2 or the PCs of the time.

Colorado: "You Better Watch Out"

US Senator Chad Bingham is being blackmailed by pornography tycoon Lorne de Haviland, who has footage of Bingham's son Chad Bingham Jr. killing a girl during a rough sexual tryst. Not wanting the scandal to cost Bingham his re-election campaign, 47 is sent to a party in de Haviland's mansion in the Rocky Mountains to eliminate both Bingham Jr. and de Haviland, and to retrieve the tape.

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• An Ass-Kicking Christmas: 47 is sent to take out Bingham Jr. and de Haviland during the latter's Christmas party. You can even dress as Santa and climb a chimney to snipe de Haviland.
• Bad Santa: 47 gets an opportunity to be a Bad Santa himself. It's not a bad costume at all: Santa has access to any room except for the film studio, but you have to nick it off the body of a drunk performer, first.
• Casting Couch: While at the mansion, talk to the photographer in the VIP lounge. In a nerdy voice, he grins, "These babes are out of my league—until I pick up a camera!" Well, you can fill in the blanks. He should know better than to boast about such things to a hitman. Swipe his VIP pass and clothing, and Lorne's models will be most accommodating toward you. "Nothing has to interfere between me and your camera...Nothing." or "I'll let you take special pictures of me". It's great being a photographer.
• Caught on Tape: Chad accidentally killed a prostitute during an attempt at rough sex, which de Haviland had filmed in its entirety. Fearing that the tape could jeopardize his father's election campaign, 47 must retrieve the tape and eliminate Chad.
• Copy Protection: In cracked versions of Hitman: Blood Money, the mission has a glitch which causes the game to crash whenever the player throws or drops anything, or stops dragging a corpse. The cause of the glitch is unknown, but since it only occurs in cracked copies of the game, it's possible that it was purposefully included as an anti-piracy measure.
• Honey Trap: The person marked with a question mark in the loading screen is the prostitute in the grotto who leads 47 into a room, where she will attempt to stab him with a nail file.
• Mister Muffykins: de Haviland is constantly followed around by a yappy terrier. Sedating it with a laced sausage is one of the easiest ways of eliminating him, as the dog counts as a witness.
• Nothing Nice About Sugar and Spice: A woman wearing a Sexy Santa Dress can kill 47 if he doesn't take care of her beforehand.
• Sexy Santa Dress: The porn king is throwing a party at his mountain villa during the holiday season. You can guess what the women are wearing. Or not wearing as the case may be ("Bet you wouldn't mind unwrapping me under the tree"). Some of the ladies are sporting platinum hair dye.

Mississippi: "Death on the Mississippi"

47 is sent to wipe out six members of the Gator Gang, a drug distributing group operating on a steamboat in the Mississippi River, as well as the gang's leader and ship captain Skip Muldoon. He must also collect incriminating photos located in Muldoon's safe.

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• Carrying a Cake: Hijacking the delivery of a cake is a great way to ambush Skip. Along the way to its destination, the cake can be dropped (with an audible splat), used to smuggle guns, poisoned, or rigged to explode — and Skip will still happily gorge himself on it.
• Casanova Wannabe: In the hallway with all the guest rooms on the steamship, you will find one of the Gators chatting up a woman. If you pester them, they will duck into a side room for a minute. When the Gator remarks on the moonlight, the guest quips "Keep it in your pants, Romeo" and ditches him. You can sneak in and wire him once she leaves, but sometimes the body is found when his lady friend returns.
• Death by Gluttony: Skip's cake can be poisoned or have a mine placed in it.
• Please Shoot the Messenger: In a Mississippi cutscene, The Agency has some sort of code which instructs 47 to kill postmen who bring them a letter marked with it.
• Railing Kill: A few of the Gators occasionally take smoke breaks on the ship's railings, allowing for accident kills. Bodies can also be dumped over them.
• Ship Level: Thankfully there are a lot of railings to push people off (including the engine room), and a few good disguises lying around the place: sailors, waiters, pursers, and party guests.

Mississippi: "Till Death Do Us Part"

Following Skip Muldoon's assassination, 47 must eliminate Blue Claws leader Pappy LeBlanc and Muldoon's son Hank Leitch "Buddy" Muldoon. Buddy has married Pappy's daughter Margeaux LeBlanc and is holding a private ceremony at the LeBlanc's plantation house. The client also requests that Margeaux is kept alive.

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• Altar Diplomacy: Pappy's daughter, Margeaux, is all set to marry her cousin, rival gang leader Hank Leitch. To his credit, Pappy did not approve of her marrying Hank. Once the wedding starts, Pappy will remain in his room watching TV and won't come out unless disturbed.
• Buried Alive: You can push Pappy into his brother's grave as he's paying his respects. Or you can hit him from behind with the shovel, with the same result.
• Developer's Foresight: Devs anticipated that people might disguise themselves as a priest during a wedding, so naturally, there's a bonus cutscene where 47 can tie the knot for the target.
• Elopement: In the end-level newspaper, it's revealed that Margeaux and Hank were secretly married a week or so before before the ceremony you just attended. She inherits all of the money regardless of whether or not you allowed the ceremony to take place. Smart girl.
• Firing in the Air a Lot: The rest of the wedding participants will just shoot up into the air whenever they're collectively happy. Yeeee-haw!
• Make the Dog Testify: The LeBlancs' dog, "General Lee," counts as a witness.
• Malaproper: During the wedding ceremony, the Priest blunders through his speech.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: After Pappy visits his brother's grave, he'll stroll over to the dock and feed chicken wings to the gators. Hey, that looks like fun! 47 would love to feed the gators too, but he doesn't have any chicken...
• Schmuck Bait:
  • Once everybody is in place outside the gazebo, if you have the Bible and stand behind the pulpit, you will be able to perform the wedding ceremony. When it's over, everybody will soon turn their backs on you. Now here's where it gets weird. As much as this seems like an open invite to shoot Hank in the head, when 47 tries this, everybody magically figures out what he's up to and opens fire. On a priest, no less! Savages. The only way to pull this off is to sneak up from behind and wire him. Then immediately put the wire away and run.
  • If you choose to snipe Hank during the ceremony, don't do it from the top floor attic, otherwise the guards and the guests will magically know where the shot came from and attack. You can still escape punishment if you're clever (and quick), but the best bet is to maneuver 47 into the greenhouse and strike from there.
• Shotgun Wedding: In addition to the elephant rifle upstairs, all of the guests surrounding 47 are carrying firearms, which can be daunting. The guards are also toting shotguns for cliché reasons.
• Slobs Versus Snobs: Margeaux's mansion. Aside from avoiding some snide comments, the guest suit is no better than 47's own. ("Geese man, it's a wedding not a funeral.")
• Southern Gothic: The LeBlanc house.
• Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace: When the ceremony finally starts, you can snipe Hank in the wedding pavilion from a safe vantage point, just before the priest announces them man and wife.
• Wedding Smashers: No matter how silent the rifle, or which direction people are facing, they all seem to instantly figure out you're the shooter, even if you wait until the celebratory phase when all the guests fire their six-shooters into the air.

Las Vegas: "A House of Cards"

47 is sent to the luxurious Shamal Casino in Las Vegas to eliminate three targets - South African white supremacist Henrik Schmutz, who is about to trade DNA material to pharmaceutical CEO Sheikh Mohammed Bin Faisal Al-Khalifa and his chief scientist, Tariq Abdul Lateef.

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• Cacophony Cover Up: This is one way to take out Bin Faisal. After taking out Schmutz and Latiff, and hiding their bodies, one tactic to use is to follow the drunken woman who tries seduce 47 into her room. After she passes out, go the floor where Bin Faisal's body guards are stationed, pull the fire alarm, which will cause the hotel guests, including said body guards, to run out of their rooms. During the confusion, 47 can run into Bin Faisal's room, send him a text message to go the alley behind the casino, run out the room before the guards come back and suspect something, go back to the drunk woman's bedroom, close the front door, pull out the silenced WA200, snipe Al Faisal, and exit the premises.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: It is entirely possible to meet Bin Faisal without being disguised as Schmutz so long as 47 has Schmutz's briefcase with him.
• Strip Poker: If you do some sneaking around on the outside ledges, you can see a room where a bunch of guys and a showgirl are playing strip poker. Unfortunately, it's quite evident that one of the guys is the big loser, as the showgirl has a huge pile of chips in front of her.
• Viva Las Vegas!: Tonight there's more to lose than just your money. Behind closed doors a transaction between white supremacist Hendrik Schmutz and Sheikh Mohammed will take place.

Las Vegas: "A Dance With the Devil"

As part of his final ICA assignment, 47 infiltrates a masquerade party at the nearby Shark Club. He must take out Romanian arms dealer Vaana Ketlyn and rogue CIA agent Anthony Martinez. The Franchise has also sent two assassins whom 47 must also eliminate.

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• Assassin Outclassin': The Franchise has sent two assassins, Maynard John and Eve, to deal with 47. Eve will attempt to lure 47 into the Heaven Club's office, while John will request a duel in a soundproof chamber. While they have increased health, neither of them are that difficult to defeat. Falling for Eve's trap causes a cutscene where Eve repeatedly stabs 47.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: Maynard John calls 47 an "experiment with genetic TinkerToys" (referring to the popular toy brand)... which is translated as him saying that 47 is a product of a genetic engineering corporation called TinkerToys.
• Boss in Mook's Clothing: This level has three hidden boss encounters. They generally trigger if the target is confronted under very specific circumstances, causing them to gain enhanced health and unique attacks not seen anywhere else in the game. The fourth target in the mission (the CIA agent) also has enhanced health but otherwise behaves like a normal NPC.
• Cover Identity Anomaly: If 47 obtains a disguise from Agent Martinez and goes to rendezvous with Vaana, she will lead 47 to a private room in which she asks 47 to remove his mask. She'll eventually see through the disguise and eviscerate him with her cane sword.
• Cute, but Cacophonic: There is a beautiful and Stripperific singer in an angel costume, who has an absolutely horrible voice and sings every single note off-key. As it turns out, it's Eve, who murdered the original singer in an attempt to get to 47.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: The basement is this, with walls being made out of skeletal remains, the bouncers wearing demon masks, a giant red shark pool, and various rooms for BDSM activity.
• Hollywood Tone-Deaf: Eve disguises herself as The Chanteuse of the Heaven Party and will start off performing an off-key rendition of Swan Lee's "Tomorrow Never Dies."
• Honey Trap: After her performance, Eve will ask 47 to follow her to the office, where she will attempt to assassinate him.
• Inopportune Impersonation Failure: After assassinating crooked CIA agent Anthony Martinez, 47 can steal his distinctive golden devil costume. This immediately gives 47 free access to all areas in the level, as Martinez is the lover of Vaana Ketlyn, the hostess of the Hell party and the second target of the level. However, if Vaana happens to encounter 47 in public before he can kill her, she'll usher him into a private room for some one-on-one time... and much like Bjarkhov, 47's refusal to doff his mask immediately gets her suspicions up, prompting her to draw a Sword Cane and go on the offensive.
• Kill It with Fire: One of the ways of eliminating Vaana Ketlyn is by rigging her pyrotechnics display. When set alight, she will then fall into the shark pool and get eaten.
• Lethal Chef: Despite being disguised as a bartender, Maynard John clearly has no experience in mixing drinks. something some of the partygoers discuss. One guest can be found vomiting his guts out because of how bad the drinks were.
• Masquerade Ball: The Shark Club is split between two halves: The "Heaven" side on the top floor, and the "Hell" side in the basement.
• Shark Pool: The Hell party has a shark pool that civilians can be fed to, resulting in the shark eating them and increasing in size. Rigging Vaana's pyrotechnics show results in her falling into the pool.
• Themed Party: The mission is set during a "Heaven and Hell"-themed party in the Shark Club. The top floor has the "Heaven" party which is decorated to look like Fluffy Cloud Heaven with angel costumes, while the basement has the "Hell" party, decorated to look like Fire and Brimstone Hell and with the guests wearing devil masks.
• White Mask of Doom: A wearable disguise in the Shark Club ("Heaven" side) is a white tux and a Volito mask with a scar-type thingy over his right eye. Coincidentally this costume is a dead-ringer for Elite, the upper-crust hitman from the Punisher series.

Washington DC: "Amendment XXV"

After finishing his final assignment, 47 is encountered by Agent Smith in his getaway van, who informs him that the President of the United States, Tom Stewart, is about to be assassinated. The man behind the assassination is the acting Vice President, Daniel Morris, who is co-operating with Franchise assassin and clone Mark Parchezzi III to eliminate Stewart. 47 must infiltrate the White House and take out both Morris and Parchezzi.

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• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: It's extremely unlikely the White House's security cameras would all be controlled by one security terminal and the footage would be on one single tape that could be easily stolen, but this streamlines the level.
• Battle in the Rain: Unless you go out of your way to sequence break or otherwise cheese the game, the level expects you to run after Mark Parchezzi III up to the roof between the central building and west wing of the White House to have a duel in the rain.
• Buffy Speak: Some signs inside the White House have humorous messages as easter eggs, such as the Department of Stuff.
• Corrupt Politician: Daniel Morris, who's in league with The Franchise to kill his boss (the freakin' President) and get his job which would further both his and The Franchise's agenda.
• Government Conspiracy: See "Corrupt Politician" above. Interestingly, 47 plays a more benevolent one, trying to prevent the assassination on behalf of Agent Smith who works for the CIA.
• Last Stand: Implied, Mark Parchezzi III will run for some time until he reaches the roof between the central building and the west wing, and despite having a scaffolding leading into the main building and a treillis leading down (both of which could help him escape 47) he'll just stay there behind an AC unit and fire at 47 from across the roof with his Custom 1911 (to his credit, he's scarily accurate with his handgun).
• The Internet Is for Porn: In the West Wing, there are two guards huddled around a monitor with the search bar stating "Swedish women's wrestling team website!"
• Metal Detector Checkpoint: The entrance to the White House contains one to prevent 47 from smuggling in weapons. This can be bypassed by disguising as a guard, buying the foil-covered upgrade for the briefcase, or placing a weapon into another woman's briefcase.
• Mister Muffykins: When the First Lady summons Morris to her office, she'll remind Morris to make sure Justice (her terrier) "does a number two." As she walks away, he hisses "I'll give justice a number two, alright."
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: At the very beginning of the level you can plant a gun in a tourist's suitcase, causing her to get detected by the metal detector, at which point she's immediately apprehended, arrested and taken in for questioning. If you try to carry a gun through the metal detector the guards will just open fire on you.
• Pink Means Feminine: The First Lady is hard to miss in her sharp pink suit. This is probably intended as a reference to Jacqueline Kennedy's Chanel suit worn during JFK's assassination...
• Police Are Useless: Agent Smith mentions they can't count on the FBI, the CIA or the Secret Service to stop the assassination because Daniel Morris has too much influence in these agencies, hence why he hires 47 for the job.
• Rule of Scary: It's a little odd that the White House allows tours this late at night.
• Skippable Boss: With a well-timed explosion, it's possible to take out Morris and Parchezzi in one go, thus bypassing the entire endgame sequence with the latter.
• 25th Amendment: The game referenced this several times, initially with a subplot regarding the death of the previous VP, Spaulding Burke, and the appointment of his shady replacement; then again in a mission titled, appropriately enough, "Amendment XXV," which revolved around Agent 47 preventing the assassination of the president by the newly-appointed Daniel Morris by, ironically enough, assassinating both the VP and his hired assassin before the deed was done.
• The White House: The final mission's location, with 47 taking out the corrupt U.S. Vice President and Mark Parchezzi before they can kill the President.

Unknown: "Requiem"

Tracked by The Franchise and the police, 47 is visited by Diana in his hideout, offering a way of escaping them. While distracted, Diana injects him with a syringe, seemingly killing him, and joins The Franchise. She then joins Alexander Cayne and Rick Henderson at his funeral, where 47 is due to be cremated for his bone marrow. It turns out that she has actually injected him with the same death serum he had used on Smith, which kicks in just as the funeral starts. Once awake, 47 must leave no witnesses and eliminate everyone at the funeral.

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• Action-Based Mission: Outside of the tutorial, the only instance in which combat is actually required is 47's funeral, in which he awakes from his induced coma and kills everyone present.
• Attending Your Own Funeral: The mission takes place at 47's funeral and he is actually on the alter; only he gets up and proceeds to kill all of the attendees.
• Bloodstained Glass Windows: 47 kills everyone at his own funeral which takes place in a church at an unknown location.
• Boss-Only Level: Or a stealth game variant of it. "Requiem" is unique in the Hitman franchise seeing as everyone is a target. "Redemption at Gontranno" in Hitman 2: Silent Assassin is somewhat similar, featuring only Father Vittorio as a VIP and everybody else as a target.
• Chekhov's Boomerang: The fake-death serum used in the mission "Flatline" plays a pivotal role in the epilogue. In order to destroy The Franchise, Diana uses the serum on 47 and later revives him with the antidote by applying it on her lipstick.
• Chekhov's Skill:
  • In "Death of a Showman," the game coaches you to get out your gun and hold up someone while he's relieving himself in a bathroom. Remember this method for the remainder of the game: In "Requiem," if you wag the joystick when the priest is on his left side, 47 will grab him as soon as he revives.
  • So, for that matter, is the "Last Man Standing" mechanic found in this and Hitman: Contracts. When the player has lost all health, 47 enters bullet time and has a small sliver of time to save himself. He must score at 3 headshots to escape the mode. On "Professional" mode, the parishioners won't hesitate to blow the chaplain to bits. But if you shoot the front row of guards and then enter L.M.S., 47 will have just enough time to kill everyone before he exits slo-mo. This is an effective but altogether riskier strategy, as 47 will die instantly if he gets hit again.
• Controllable Helplessness: "Requiem". If you don't wiggle the joystick to wake up before the credits end, 47's coffin is dragged underground for the cremation. Game over.
• Credits Gag: The credits that roll over 47's funeral service are fake.
• Darkest Hour: The dramatic conclusion to Hitman: Blood Money. 47 has been taken down by The Franchise who have now completely eradicated the Agency. Cayne has come to witness his adversary’s funeral. All hope seems lost. Little does Cayne know, he’s been deceived...
• Drugged Lipstick: Diana gives 47 the antidote to the poison she injected him with by kissing him on the lips at his funeral before leaving the church. When he wakes up, he proceeds to kill every single person there.
• Dude, She's Like in a Coma: Diana kisses 47 as he lies unconscious during his wake. It turns out that the lipstick has the antidote to counter the fake-death serum 47 was injected with.
• Faking the Dead: In "Flatline," 47 springs Smith from captivity by injecting him with a chemical to simulate death, and then applying the antidote after Smith is pronounced dead and sent to the morgue. At the end of the game, Diana seemingly 'kills' 47 and delivers his corpse to The Franchise. Actually, he's under the effect of the fake death serum.
• Fission Mailed: The final sequence involves Mr. 47's funeral after Diana betrays him. However, as the credits are rolling, the player can twiddle the thumb sticks to bring him out of his induced coma and take out everyone present. One of the main misconceptions by most first-timers is that 47 dies for real, just as Cayne said in the beginning. Look closely: Diana mixes the antidote with her lipstick, kisses him and then leaves 47's Silverballers on his chest (this level is so secret that, on the Xbox versions, an achievement is unlocked just for sitting through the entire cremation. Realizing that there is a mission in "Requiem," and then completing it, is good for a second achievement of equal value).
• It's Always Sunny at Funerals: 47's funeral takes place at a private chapel somewhere on the upper east coast with dozens of assassins in attendance. Not a bad turnout for a Romanian freak of nature. Once the sun rises, Alexander Cayne arrives with his spin team to record your death for posterity. Ultimately, though, it becomes a wake for Cayne himself (overlaps with Cue the Sun).
• Leave No Witnesses: This is the objective of "Requiem" verbatim. Mr. 47 revives in the middle of his own funeral and proceeds to kill anyone who saw him do it, including an innocent priest and a reporter.
• My Car Hates Me: Working in your favor to eliminate all the witnesses. Also, Diana has locked the church gates to prevent the reporter from escaping on foot.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: "Requiem" takes place in an idyllic, seaside cemetery with "Ave Maria" playing on a loop. Perfect for a massacre.
• Reset Button: In the epilogue, the British government agrees to reboot the Agency. The game ends with Diana on the phone with Buckingham Palace, telling them that "all our resources are online again".
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: "Requiem" is notable in the series for lacking an informed location, a considerable rarity for levels in the series. The Training Missions at the ICA Facility in the later-released World of Assassination Trilogy do this too, as does 47's safehouse in Freelancer, but those are both set in top-secret locations, rather than being unknown to 47.

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