Still a good game but not enough to surpass Silent Assassin. Dark atmosphere is perfect but end levels are not enough.
When you begin the campaign, you have the option to play Normal, Expert or Professional, which determines the number of saves you are allowed to make per level. If you complete a level with a Silent Assassin rating (basically no bodies found and no alerted guards) you will then unlock a new weapon. The screen will display a Life meter (how much damage you have taken), Suspicion meter (shows how well you are fooling the guards with your disguise), Weapon and Ammo indicator, and also you control a pop-up to a map showing where guards and cameras are located as well as points of interest (some info will be missing depending on the difficulty setting).
The first cut-scene shows 47 opening a door to some crappy hotel room, stumbling and bleeding from a gut-shot to finally lie on a table and then lose consciousness. You then proceed through twelve missions, each from past events of 47's life. The first mission begins from where you left off after killing your creator, Dr. Orthmeyer, which might be confusing for those who didn't play the first game; basically you begin in an underground laboratory full of crazies and work your way back to the ground and upper levels of an asylum, avoiding and killing guards along the way. 47's dream-fever then takes you to a slaughter-factory where you must find a client's missing daughter and kill the owner, the Meat King. This is one of the better levels in the game in that it shows a very graphic party, rooms full of costumed guests among butchered animal parts, depicting the dark elements of people's nature who believe they are above the law. The Meat King level seems to contain the most options to finding disguises and ways to eliminate your targets. The next mission shows you sneaking onto a cargo plane bound for a military base in some frozen outreach of Russia where you must assassinate Fabian Fuchs who is going to meet a submarine commander to buy a dirty bomb. This level gives you a few options to accomplish your hits although it seemed a bit too linear. Then the dream-fever brings you to a mansion in England where you have been hired to kill Lord Beldingford who has kidnapped the son of your client. You will have some freedom to explore the grounds and a barn-complex, while eliminating henchmen who all seem to carry double-barrel shotguns, and then have a few ways to enter the mansion (as well as several options to accomplish your hits, one very noisy way is to throw a gas-can down a chimney into a fireplace and killing a number of the enemy, although it doesn't render you the Silent Assassin rating). The Lord Beldingford mission overall was pretty good and took some time to accomplish. The next mission is like a prelude to the rebooted missions from the first Hitman game that will also be seen later. You will have to infiltrate a biker gang somewhere near Rotterdam, Netherlands and eliminate Rutgert Van Leuven who holds some embarrassing photos of your client. The biker gang level is worth playing as there are many interesting ways to kill bikers (one way was crushing one with a car, another by electrocution), and also there were still a variety of ways to gain disguises and assassinate your target.
Now to the mixed reactions of the game. When you get to the sixth mission, things will look somewhat familiar if you had already played Codename 47. You will have to assassinate Boris Deruzhka who is aboard a ship in Rotterdam harbor. What makes this level different, though, is that you are arriving on scene with the local police already involved and there are many more options to enter warehouses to find disguises to sneak close to your target, or simply snipe him from a distance once you find the right position. The reboot of Rotterdam in Contracts was good but seemed a bit short, whereas in Codename 47 it was much more difficult and required some care when traversing between warehouses so as not to alert guards in the many towers dotted along the streets. The next mission is to eliminate Franz and Fritz Fuchs in a highly secure hotel and retrieve a chemical bomb (also rebooted from the first game). I found the mission to play nearly the same as before except that there were added rooms to the hotel to allow you to access different paths to your targets. Then missions eight through eleven are reboots of the Triad wars in the first game where you perform several hits on negotiators to get the Red Dragon and Blue Lotus clans to distrust each other so that eventually you find and eliminate the Red Dragon boss, Lee Hong. The good points to several of the rebooted missions are that AI is better, gun battles are more satisfying and there are certainly many more ways to go about assassinating your targets. The bad points are that a few of these missions seem very short and are too easy compared to the first game, and if you have already played Codename 47 then playing several of these levels again on Contracts, even with several more killing options added, may not be satisfying enough. The final level brings you out of the flashback sequence, and 47 has been patched up from the gut-shot he took from the beginning of the game. But now he is trapped in a hotel room with a SWAT team waiting on the streets and outside his door. You will have to make a last stand or find a way to retreat, running between hotel rooms, and kill anyone standing in your way and find a way to escape. Before the end you have one last target to eliminate, Inspector Albert Fournier, who was responsible for shooting you.
Contracts is a good game but certainly not best in series. For those who never played Codename 47, then Contracts might be a better game. Because you will use trademark Hitman weapons (fiber wire, Silverballer guns, W2000 and Dragunov sniper rifles), the fighting is still very good. There are also a variety of other weapons to quench your bloodthirst like the MP5 and MP9 submachine guns, SPAS shotgun, M4 and AK47 assault rifles and M60 machine gun, and many other types of handgun, sniper rifle, shotgun, SMG, and special items like knockout syringes, remote bombs, nightvision goggles and different poisons. It was a little disappointing that there were few if any bosses who gave you much of a challenge (Silent Assassin, the prior Hitman game, did a better job giving you more difficult maps and targets who could fight back). Even with my wish that Contracts was more challenging and had more new levels instead of rebooting missions from the first game, it still has a few new interesting characters, can contain many fun shootouts if you don't want to be as stealthy, the graphics and physics of opponents being flung back from powerful calibers still holds true, and the music is very cool. All in all, it still stands out as being a good experience, just not as good as Silent Assassin.