10 Video Games So Great They Ruined The Series

2. Hitman: Blood Money

No offence to the oddly episodic latest outing for the barcoded assassin, which seems okay from what's been released of it so far, but the series has been going through a bit of an identity crisis since Blood Money.

It's easy to see why. Blood Money was the result of three games' worth of steady progress leading up to it, which over time improved the level designs to feel more open, added in increasingly colourful ways of killing your target, and fixed those weird foldable ragdoll physics on bodies.

The result was the aforementioned game, which nailed the Hitman formula to perfection. Levels range from the vast Mardi Gras to an intimate sunny suburbia level where you have to take out a former Mafia hitman, and there weren't too many pretences to story that you had to worry about. It was all about the cool, clinical killings, then reading those newspaper stories after each mission - which reflected your actions perfectly.

The subsequent Absolution made the terrible mistake of being too linear and story-led, while Hitman (2016) is still finding its footing after a decent (but nothing more) first episode, though at this rate it's got a long way to go to match the excellent Blood Money.