First and foremost I have to mention the visuals of the game. As to be expected given the six year gap between Blood Money and Absolution they have gone leaps and bounds over what we've seen in any of the previous games. That is definitely a selling point here for me as I am a sucker for seeing the fine details of his assassinations. Oh and I guess we'll throw in the spectacular level of detail in the environments including very fine manipulation of objects in the world. In the demo I was shown everything down to the smallest bead on a bead curtain was taken into account.

Shuffling along, now while I hate trying to compare games with each other, I have to admit that the stealth sections of the game look like they handle just like in Arkham City/Asylum . This goes beyond the "instinct mode" that works similar to the "detective mode," but it goes into the risk reward of staying as stealthy as possible to meet your objectives. In particular I was shown a portion of a mission where 47 had to kill a guy linked to a kidnapping. He followed him into his store were the target's girlfriend was also hanging around. While there was the option to murder both of them from the beginning, I was shown option 'B' which led to distracting the girlfriend and then silently killing the target upstairs after learning so information that would have taken more snooping around to find out. Yet another instance of giving us all multiple ways to play the game.

From there the demonstrator went on to show how the new "blending mode" fits into the game. While we've seen this a bit in the demos and trailers before what was interesting to note is that it is more circumstantial than we know. In the demo 47 needed to sneak past a bunch of cops in the area. So he donned a handy-man's clothes to move about them "unnoticed." What was interesting though is that if at any point you ran into another handy-man NPCs in the area there was a great chance of them "outing" you because they obviously would know who works with them. As for the cops, they would stay unknowing unless you did something out of the ordinary for the "role" you should be. It was not really show-able in the demo given the location, but in this case if you made 47 do something a handy-man wouldn't normally do in front of the cops, they would move to investigate. Talk about playing a dude who's pretending to be another dude.

Lastly, I think this was probably the coolest part of the demo was the "set up" assassinations. Near the end of the demo 47 was walking up to the location of the final "hit." In the yard were about 10 of the guy's friends/goons at a BBQ. The demonstrator then said that you could go about sneaking in or running and gunning it. Then he said, if you are smooth enough to get a surprise kill, which he was, you can then set up a cinematic type assassination for all in the area as long as you have ammo and the stamina to do so. In this case, he stabbed one guy in the back by surprise and then everything went in super slow motion where he was able to "mark" targets in the area. Once he finished everything sped back up and 47 went into a cinematic style where he moved around the yard killing all of the targets. It seriously looked like something scripted by the developers but is something that we can all do in game. It was even skip-able for those people who don't want to watch the amazing dance of gun play.

If I wasn't sold already on Hitman: Absolution this demo would have surly done the job. The game play looks like generic third person, but in the good way as in the above mentioned similarities. Keep an eye out for it on the PS3, XBox and PC on November 20^th 2012.