General Tips

Most of the game's basic mechanics are explained in the tutorial, so we're not going to discuss every little thing here. We'll just give you a few of the oddities that we've noticed while playing the game.

The Ranking and Reward Systems

The inner workings of the ranking and reward systems are a bit mysterious, even to someone who's been doing nothing but playing the game for a couple of weeks. We can say a bit about the way you'll be ranked when you finish a level, however, if you'd like to hear about it.

Rankings

When you complete a level, you'll be rewarded a rating title and bonus cash, depending on how well you performed your objectives. Although you can definitely approach each mission with a bloodthirsty vengeance, killing civilians and instigating mass slaughters on the populace of a level, the game discourages this kind of behavior by giving you less cash. On the flipside, if you manage to scoot through a level like a shadow, killing only your targets and escaping unseen, then you'll get more cash to spend on upgrades.

The smallest amount of money you can get as a Ranking Bonus is zero dollars, which is your reward for getting a body count in the dozens and leaving plenty of witnesses to your activities. (Oddly enough, if you manage to kill everyone in a level, you actually get a token $1,000 reward.) The highest amount you can get is $150,000 dollars, awarded for the coveted and difficult to obtain Silent Assassin ranking, which can apparently only be obtained if you kill only your specific targets (i.e. no bystanders or guards) in a minimum amount of time. Most of the time your ceiling will be $100,000 for the Hitman and Professional rankings.

In general, if you want to obtain high rankings, and thus obtain more money at the end of each level, you're going to need to keep your bodycount as low as possible, and definitely make sure not to be caught killing large numbers of people. Setting off a bomb that kills a dozen people is going to reduce your ranking, sure, but opening fire with an M4 and killing those same dozen people will reduce your score even further.

If all goes well, you won’t have any noise or violence attributed to you at the end of a mission.

Note also that two of the primary aspects of your ranking are noise and violence. While a little violence is obviously going to be necessary to complete your mission, unneeded violence on people who aren't assigned as specific targets will reduce your ranking. Noise is self-evident: firing shotguns or high-powered assault rifles will get you noticed, which in turn will probably require you to use more violence to extricate yourself from the situation. Bombs are particularly notorious here, since they'll often cause a lot of noise, raise a lot of attention, and likely cause a bit of collateral damage. Still, sometimes they're the best way to finish off a target, so don't let the fear of a low ranking stop you from dropping da bomb.

For the most part, we've written our walkthrough below with the intent of getting as high a ranking as possible on each mission. Some of the strategies below will net you a Silent Assassin ranking (specifically the ones for Till Death Do Us Part and A House of Cards), while others will get you somewhat lesser rankings. If you think you have a better strategy than what we offer, feel free to drop us a line via the Feedback link in the table of contents.