Be Excellent To Each Other

The demo takes place in Chicago. There's a citywide manhunt for Agent 47. The gameplay opens after we see 47 jump through a window in a gothic library and police come charging in on the hunt for him. Ageny 47 begins the level unarmed, but that's rarely an issue.

Blystad tells us that enemies have been developed to be not just smarter, but more complex in the way they approach a situation. "They have an intelligence spectrum to give them more emotions and sense," he says.

Agent 47 is crouched behind a second floor railing, on the floor below him cops spread out searching for him. They're talking to each other about the search, but also about other things.

"That's it boys, I want this fucking place turned upside down," the cop in charge shouts. "Find the lights, someone get me blueprints."

Using Instinct mode I can see that there's a nearby break in the railing, a place that will allow me to drop down to the maze of bookcases below. I guide Agent 47 to the drop and fall to the floor, making a noise.

Hitman Absolution Promises an Evolution in Agent 47 Kills, Skills and Personality

One of the cops notice, on the screen a semi circle appears with a subtle arrow poking out of it, showing me that someone in that direction is noticing me. It grows longer the more visible or obvious I become.

This attention meter, the tell us, allows Agent 47 to "surf on the fringes of being discovered." It's a neat way to avoid the black and white of early Hitman games that often led to a lot of trail and error replays in a level.

I pull back, and the meter drops away. Pressing a button I can push Agent 47 into cover, once locked in, he stays in cover as you move unless you pull him away from his hiding spot. This makes traversing cover in big areas and moving from cover to cover much easier.

As I make my way toward the center of the room I'm in the lights flicker and come on. The cops have discovered the fuse box and restored power. I don't have to do anything about it, but taking out the fuse box is an option. I can take out the nearby cops too or simply work around them.

There's a lot of back and forth between the cops looking for me, not just checking in, but talking to each other, like they're buddies.

I decide to take out the fuse box and slip away undetected, leaving two cops to mess around with the box as I continue my way out of the library. In one of the demos I witnessed, Agent 47 slips up behind one of the cops and chokes him to death with a power cord he found on the floor.
"If you sneak up on someone to kill them from behind we're not going to fuck it up for you."

I move around to the center of the library, where a cop is looking down into a hole. I grab a nasty looking pair of scissors and approach him from behind. Then I decide it would be interesting to see what happens if I let him see me. When he turns around I wait until he alerts everyone around us before I kill him.

This kicks out a "major bug" but it also demonstrates that I can approach this mission however I'd like, quietly, aggressively, with giant scissors, or in the case of the demo I watched, armed with a marble bust.

In the demo, Agent 47 knocks the cop into the hole with a bust and then slips back into darkness. When a second cop comes to investigate what happened to his buddy, 47 pulls him off the second floor ledge and into the hole as well.

Agent 47 breaks another cop's neck with a dropped baton, and then grabs a cop as a human shield. Now everyone sees him. He backs away toward a staircase as the cop begs for his life. At the bottom of the screen a bunch of red arrows point to all of the cops now aiming weapons at him.

Agent 47 knocks the cop out and runs to the stairs and the rest of the police open fire. Agent 47 takes out two cops with a gun, using what I found to be relatively snappy aiming.

Elverdam tells me the team went to great lengths to fix what he called the "bit finicky" mechanics of the previous games.

"If you sneak up on someone to kill them from behind we're not going to fuck it up for you," he said, meaning that they hope gameplay mechanics won't get in the way. "Blood Money felt like too easy or too sloppy, on the other games we didn't support shooting as much as we wanted to.

"We always wanted it to feel like you could handle a gun like a trained assassin."

Back in the game, 47 runs up a set of stairs, gunfire chewing up the cover around him as he moves. On the third floor he walks across a beam as it is shredded by gunfire. Turning around he shoots a chain holding a chandelier, dropping it into the cops crowded on the floor below.

Bursting through a door, 47 finds himself on the roof of a building overlooking Chicago, a helicopter slips into the scene, its spotlight cutting across the ground in front of him.

He runs across the roof, the helicopter firing on him as he makes his way into a room filled with cages and pigeons. There'a a quick cinematic moment as Agent 47 runs and jumps between building, before players are returned to gameplay with the hitman taking out a cop and putting on his uniform as a disguise.

"With disguises we wanted to make it less binary," Elverdam says. "You are allowed to walk around more freely. It feels more organic."

This freedom of choice, Blystad says, is a key part of the Hitman experience.

"Disguises and impersonations are something that have always been a key feature in the game," he said. "That has been taken to a new level in this game."