Over the last week, I’ve been playing an early build of the upcoming blend of a remaster and remake of Hitman: Blood Money from Feral Interactive, Hitman: Blood Money — Reprisal. Hitman: Blood Money — Reprisal ($14.99) launches on November 30th, and I’ve been playing it on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPad Pro (2020) for an early preview. Before getting into the new iOS version of Hitman: Blood Money — Reprisal, my experience with the Hitman franchise until now has just been the new trilogy of games now titled Hitman World of Assasination. I wanted to see how Hitman: Blood Money — Reprisal felt for someone who has only played the new games. I know it is considered the best game in the series by many, but I played it first through this release. I’ve replayed the opening hours a few times to see how it looks and runs, but so far it is shaping up to be Feral Interactive’s most-impressive conversion yet.

Hitman: Blood Money debuted back in 2006, and saw an HD Remaster for PS4 and Xbox One back in 2019. It has never been re-released barring that and being playable via Xbox backwards compatibility until now. After playing the opening hours of Hitman: Blood Money — Reprisal, I went and downloaded both Hitman: Blood Money (Xbox 360) and Hitman: Blood Money HD on my Xbox Series X to see how they felt. The Xbox 360 version is super-dated as expected, but Hitman: Blood Money HD felt quite good. Neither are as nice to play as Hitman: Blood Money — Reprisal though. The quality of life features, multiple control options, high frame rate support, and more add up to make this feel like the definitive version of Hitman: Blood Money just like how Feral Interactive’s Alien: Isolation is the best version of that game.

If you’ve already played Hitman: Blood Money, the opening hours of Hitman: Blood Money — Reprisal feel like an enhanced remaster. The dialogue is in, visuals enhanced, frame rate improved, and it looks as it should with full screen support on both iPhone 15 Pro and iPad Pro (2020 11" model). The quality of life changes are optional as well. You can toggle stuff like auto reload, instinct mode (from the new games), the minimap, simplified strangle, and more here. You can also use the original aiming instead of the enhanced one for Hitman: Blood Money — Reprisal or toggle highlighting of objects you can interact with.

I mentioned how Hitman: Blood Money — Reprisal felt modern, and that’s thanks to the controls. With the quality of life toggles on and using a controller like my DualSense (which has the game display correct button prompts), it feels like a new Hitman experience. The touch controls were what I was curious about the most though. You can customize the size and placement, and even adjust how the camera moves with speed options.

When it comes to graphics, I’ll go into more details about this in a future article, but it has battery saver, graphics priority, and performance priority options on my iPad Pro, and an additional performance+ option iPhone 15 Pro. I stuck with performance on both, but did try performance+ on iPhone 15 Pro which was a nice addition to run at above 60fps. A preset override option lets you tweak things manually as well. When comparing Reprisal to the old versions on console, it feels like the HD remaster has better texture filtering and anti-aliasing, but barring those areas, this new iOS version I’ve been playing is superb. I’ll have more to say with some comparisons in the near future.

While Feral Interactive does superb conversions, one aspect that I always think is worth highlighting, is how well the iCloud save support is in the developer’s releases. Almost every game I play that mentions cloud saves is rarely as reliable as these conversions. Hitman: Blood Money — Reprisal even right now syncs correctly between my devices.

While I’ll save my full thoughts for my Hitman: Blood Money — Reprisal iOS review closer to launch, it is shaping up to be special, and one heck of an amazing enhanced remaster. I almost hope Feral Interactive ends up bringing this to more platforms because the PC and Xbox versions of the game just feel lacking in comparison now. If you’d like to play it at launch, you can pre-order Hitman: Blood Money — Reprisal on the App Store for iOS here and pre-register for it on Google Play for Android here. It is priced at $14.99 on mobile.