A return to form for the bald master of infiltration

"I'd like to place an order" is the first significant piece of dialogue in this new Hitman game. You are Agent 47, the trouble-fixer who sorts out the kind of problems not covered by your local council. You are a hitman, funnily enough, using stealth, binoculars, stolen clothes and special strangling wires to silently hack away at the necks of your victims. Oh, and in a first for the Hitman series, you're now in America.

You're out to get the 'Swing King' in your first mission, a bad man responsible for a string of health and safety infringements - that lead to a few unfortunate deaths. The f-word then makes an appearance, as does Agent 47's serious manner, manly walk and no-nonsense attitude toward causing death. And it's hard. This is a grown-up game for people who want to think about how to get from A to B. But first, you've got to decide how much you want to suffer while playing it.

The difficulty setting you pick at the start of each mission really makes a difference to how you play Hitman: Blood Money. A huge difference. For research purposes only, you understand, we set the game to Rookie - the easiest setting - and had a go. It's pretty damn pointless. Guards you're supposed to sneak by in a stealthy fashion simply ignore you, with Agent 47 able to stroll past them in broad daylight without them even breaking their clichéd gangsta conversations.

If you start shooting they die with one hit, then you can run away and hide until everyone else forgets about the murders they've just witnessed and goes about their normal business after a few minutes. So don't play it on Rookie. That's like buying a Porsche and only driving it in reverse.

Up the difficulty a notch to Normal and they'll bust your arse into bite-size chunks even if you're holding down the left trigger and trying to sneak. It's suddenly ten times harder and like a proper Hitman game. Only the elderly and infirm should bother with Rookie. On top of this comes Expert and Pro settings, each of which further enhances the challenge and brains of your enemies.

Blood Money also ups the toughness by including its new Notoriety system. Notoriety works by charting how aware the enemies are of you and your work. Leave more of a trail and get spotted and your Notoriety grows, making the bad guys more aware of your presence. Each mission has several different end sequences depending on how you got through it, with bigger cash rewards coming your way if you manage to keep yourself off the front page and remain mysterious.

So you need to work on staying hidden. And that's the greatest appeal of the Hitman games. Sneaking around enemies while wearing a lab uniform, security guard costume or doctor outfit is something you don't often get to do. It works here and it's a laugh. You're worried about getting caught at every turn, you're walking slowly through buildings past people with big guns, hoping no one busts you. In every level. It's great.

If you do get busted, the resulting events depend on your difficulty setting. On Rookie, guards will gradually reset themselves, taking up their original positions or maybe hanging around a slightly different area and paying a bit more attention to what's happening. The thing is, it's not game over as soon as you're spotted. Play it on something above Rookie, mind, and you're up Trouble Creek without an excuse.

You soon get to understand Hitman's hierarchy system and start automatically seeking out a better uniform to help you keep hidden and stop enemies noticing the bald killer in their midst. It happens in most missions. Nicking superior uniforms from dead guys lets you walk into the next area, better clothes mean you're safe to stroll through the next set of brainier guards and so on. It's a Hitman game, and that's what you do.

But it's kind of hard to know how to play Hitman: Blood Money. On Rookie, you can play it like an FPS - especially if you click the right stick to whack the camera into FPS viewpoint. On the harder levels, it becomes a painful exercise in extreme stealth that makes Splinter Cell look like Dance Dance Revolution.

In fact, it's possible to play Hitman: Blood Money like Rainbow Six if you're busting through it on Rookie. Each location has a set number of enemies, and if you manage to off them all and hide, you're free to wait around until the alert status goes back down to normal and move onto the next sector. Cheesy, yes, but possible if you're impatient.

Pressing the shoot button when you're close to someone strips their weapon away from them and lets Agent 47 turn it against them, but if you're playing on anything other than Rookie difficulty you'll be gunned down promptly if you let things progress to that level of personal violence.

What's impressive is the freedom you're given. The levels really do let you approach them in many different ways. Some locations don't even give you the slightest clue about how to progress, you're simply dumped down in a massive, interweaving maze of corridors, outbuildings and pathways, then left to work it out for yourself.

Loudly through the front door with the shotgun, quietly round the back with the sniper rifle or painfully slowly through the bushes using your coin to distract guards and throttling people silently with the wire - this game actually lives up to its promise of letting you choose your own way of playing.

That's the most impressive thing about Blood Money. Playing on a challenging difficulty setting makes it impossible to run and gun your way through, so you must think, plan, die and start again, then steal trousers and impersonate officers if you want to play it properly.

Like most Xbox games these days, it's pretty flawlessly presented and looks damn nice throughout. The variety of locations helps, with Agent 47 taking in more glamorous places than your average Bond movie. America's big, different round every corner and Blood Money never repeats Hitman: Contracts' mistake of repeating levels. You're always given a new place to explore - and exploring is much easier this time thanks to a much more flexible Agent 47.

He's been working on his motor skills, coming with less of the option-selecting and more of an action theme. You don’t have to select 'jump' or 'climb' from a menu, he just does it. Walk up to a box and he climbs it, without needing to be told. Pipes are automatically grabbed, boxes clambered over, and 47 has more fist-based moves to get him out of trouble when ammo's low.

It's easier to play, but that's not to say it's been dumbed down. It's just less of a chore to move him around. You're also allowed more save positions when playing the game on easier difficulty settings, which is nice of it, although you can't revisit a level you got halfway through. Quit and you're starting back from the beginning, even if you're being a wuss and playing on Rookie.

A lot of people were disappointed with the last Hitman game. This one's better. Not by much, but it's more user-friendly, has had a slight visual upgrade and the plot and game settings are a big improvement over the lacklustre Contracts. A new weapon upgrade system and the Notoriety theme that encourages stealthy play boosts the likelihood of you replaying levels, too, as does the genius inclusion on Xbox Live scoreboards.

But it's still you sneaking about with a bald head while trying very, very hard not to get spotted by the wrong people. Happily, you're getting a fresher, more varied selection of missions that erases the memories of the half-assed Hitman: Contracts and proves that Agent 47 is still one of Xbox's darkest and coolest heroes.

1. Easier to control than ever, thanks to a simpler game engine that does most of the positioning work for you.
2. New first-person perspective gives you a better view of the action - and helps this appeal to stuck-in-their-ways gamers.
3. The American setting gives you loads of new mission locations - and none have been recycled from previous games.
4. The difficulty settings really make a difference to how you play the game. Rookie for newcomers, loads more for experienced hitmen.

1. Could still be mistaken for a minor mission upgrade pack to the previous Hitman titles...

More of the same but tweaked and jazzed up, Blood Money's quite a return to form for the stealth franchise.