'We wanted to pick one of the levels to show how cinematic we can be, but in this case it also implies that the gameplay gets a little more linear,' continues Elverdam. It has this kind of personalised expression flavour - who do you kill and with which weapon? It's stuff you can tell your friends about.' While the aforementioned demo was quite linear - focusing on a stretch of Absolution in which Agent 47 is pursued by the Chicago police - for the most part the finished game won't stray too far from the classic Hitman mission structure. 'We call them improvised weapons and they're a very big part of what we wanted in the game. 'There's quite a lot of stuff in the environment that you can look for if you want to,' explains gameplay director Christian Elverdam. One kill during the game's E3 demo saw Agent 47 pulling a power cord out of the wall and using it as a garrote another he was stalking through a hippie's apartment and taking down an assailant with enough hits from the bong to make Cypress Hill dizzy.

Hitman Absolution is set to offer even more ways to dispose of your prey than ever before in the series, whether it be using cover-based takedowns such as dangling from a ledge and dragging a target to his doom by his ankles, or turning environmental objects into bespoke weapons, Jason Bourne-style. So it's a good thing that Agent 47 is finally coming back. There hasn't been any real creativity or deviousness to the killing - no sneaking poison into someone's drink, no pushing someone down some stairs to make it look like an accident, and certainly no disguising yourself as a stoney-faced Santa Claus at a Christmas party and firing a bullet into the underside of a glass bottom Jacuzzi full of drunk and horny revelers. Yet while the Assassin's Creed games have been perfectly fine in their own right, the actual process of assassination within those games has been disappointingly routine and inflexible, almost always eventuating with the same hidden blade stab to the chest before legging it in broad daylight.

When IO Interactive took a break from its Hitman franchise after 2006's Blood Money, many gamers assumed that Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed would pick up where Agent 47 left off in terms of providing a satisfying simulation of being a cold-blooded killer.

Demo hitman absolution ps3