General Tips

Rewards

In addition to your rankings, you also earn extra cash rewards based on your performance during the level. The factors include:

Objectives:Completing your objectives gets you money. Duh. This is going to be the biggest factor in your cash reward, outstripping even your ranking, so if you really manage to screw up a mission, but still complete it, then you should still be able to draw in a bit of cashola after each mission. Some missions have optional objectives that will net you extra cash. The rewards here are large enough to make it difficult to not earn money, no matter how many penalties you incur.

Your cash reward depends on a number of factors.

Damage Control:The more civilians you kill and the more witnesses there are to your acts, the more hush money the Agency has to pay to cover your tracks. This can only be a penalty; you start off with a blank slate, but then slowly bleed money away as you cause more mayhem. With enough damage done and enough people killed, this can eventually evolve into a hundred thousand dollar penalty or more, but if you cover your tracks fairly well, it should be a minor hit.

Custom Weapons Retrieval:If you leave behind one of your custom weapons in a mission, then the Agency will charge you five thousand dollars to retrieve it. This will be multiplied per weapon, so if you leave three weapons behind (and that’s the maximum number of weapons you can bring into a specific mission), you’ll be out fifteen thou. It’s a small hit, but it adds up over time. If you restrict yourself to the Silverballer and the Tactical SMG, then you shouldn’t have a problem here, since both are concealable.

Suit Retrieval:Either there’s something special about your suit, or they’re just really expensive to have replaced. If you exit a mission wearing anything other than your custom-made suit, then you’ll be out five grand.

Notoriety

Hitman:Blood Money has an interesting notoriety system in play. During each mission, you have a chance to earn notoriety based on your actions. The more witnesses you leave behind, the more likely the press and police are to publish your misdeeds. The more notoriety you get (and it adds up level to level), the easier it’ll be for policemen, civilians, and guards to recognize your face. Thus, when you have a high notoriety score, you can expect the guards on a level to be much less forgiving of any odd actions on your part. If you manage to max out your notoriety, then most of the guards and policemen in any given area will simply open fire when they spot you, regardless of whether you’re holding a weapon or doing anything wrong.

Here are some keys to escaping a level with little or no notoriety.

First, leave no witnesses to your crimes. Try to commit murders out of the line of sight of anyone other than yourself and your target. If someone does happen to spot you committing a murder, kill them before they can escape and alert anyone else. If you happen to knock someone out with your fists or a sedative shot, be sure to either dump their body somewhere where it won’t be found, or shoot them in the head to finish them off. If they get woken up by another person, they’ll identify you as the assailant (unless you sedated them from behind).

The more corpses you leave in your wake, the more notoriety you’ll gain.

Second, avoid cameras and CCTV monitors. If you get caught on tape in the vicinity of a murder, regardless of whether you’re actually tape committing a crime, you’re going to attract attention. Either avoid cameras (which is difficult to do on your first time through a mission), or find the security office and steal the videotape from there to prevent anyone from checking the tapes.

If you do happen to obtain a large amount of notoriety during a game, then you’ll be able to pay for your sins, so to speak, by purchasing indulgences from the Agency. If you have a minor amount of notoriety, then a little hush money paid to the civilians at the scene of your crimes should shut them up. If you’ve been a real bad boy, then going over their heads to the police captains and officials will prevent any news about you from being disseminated. If you’ve been downright genocidal, though, you’ll need to splurge and purchase a complete identity makeover. Doing so is expensive, to the tune of 200,000 dollars, but will wipe the slate clean and allow you to resume your criminal career without a care in the world.