Remember the glory days when IO Interactive dropped a new Hitman game on us like clockwork every two years? Tough to believe it's been five since we shoved a victim over a railing while disguised as Santa Claus. So of course I made a point of talking my way into a behind-closed-doors, hands-off demo of Hitman: Absolution with only an hour left before E3 2011 shut down.

This is Agent 47's O-face.

What I saw convinced me that IO's not falling back on Hitman's past...for better or worse. They've brought the franchise forward into the present (though not the future) with a slick looking game that taps all the familiar tropes in new ways. And yet, I hope the demo ran atypically of the actual game itself. Agent 47 starts out unarmed -- minus even his standard fiber-wire garrote -- and hunted through an abandoned library by a few dozen Chicago cops, none of whom have any idea what they're up against. Seriously, they keep wandering off to dark, isolated corners in order to sneak a smoke. Their last, often enough. And then the running gunfight starts.

So as yet, 47's not walking anonymously through a party on his way to poison a wedding cake and leave undetected. Instead, he's taking his cues from the more aggressive direction stealth games have taken recently. In fact, the further the demo progressed, the more I found myself picturing Splinter Cell: Conviction, and I'm not sure that felt right. Oh, I love me some Sam Fisher, but Agent 47 is -- or should be -- a different beast entirely.

You know what I'm talking about. Conviction ushered in a brand of stealth game that only stays stealthy until you're discovered...at which point it becomes a cover-based shooter where you kill everybody in the room. Unless, instead of slipping through totally unnoticed, you decide to start at Point B and pick off as many baddies as you can before someone spots you. Or maybe you start at Point C and shoot guards on sight as they innocently patrol their routes.

Hey, I can enjoy that. Sure, it bugged me a bit that 40-something Sam Fisher suddenly moved like a 25-year-old super-being after years as a more grounded character, but then, he also threw a punch like a dead cat in the first game. It took five titles for Sam to finally feel like the ultimate badass we always knew him to be.

It also made the stealthing a bit redundant. You sneaked around for fun more than for survival. I didn't miss triggering a restart the second anybody spotted me, but I also didn't feel much incentive to stay hidden or any tension when I did stick to the shadows.

If you really want to be inconspicuous, climb stuff.

Agent 47's unarmed status and the 20-to-one odds reverted that dynamic back to something more familiar to series fans, but IO still built plenty of confrontation into this particular scenario. Our bar-coded gent climbed, shimmied, jumped, and dropped through that library, systematically eliminating a few targets of opportunity while leaving others untouched. The new Instinct mode, which lights up enemies through walls a la Batman: Arkham Asylum's Detective mode and traces where they're heading next, makes it pretty easy to apply the appropriately brutal countermeasures. During a lethal choke hold on one unwary cop, 47 even whispered a truly chilling "Shhhhhhhh."

That's a button-mashing quick-time event, so you'll really get hands-on with squeezing the life out of someone. Nice touch. But while I'd swear I caught a "drag body" prompt once, our demo driver skipped that step. Too slow for today's stealth, I suppose.

Indeed, after taking the time to traverse a huge level without giving himself away (to anyone who wasn't dead a second later, anyway), Agent 47 took a cop hostage, stole his gun, and used him to hold a dozen more officers at bay. After that fell through, 47 slid from cover to cover, shooting the opposition until he made his getaway stick by dropping a chandelier to cover his tracks. Of course, that's when the helicopter gunship showed up and ripped the entire building apart just to nail one bald perp. The major's gonna hear about that one.

Then, and only then, did we get to see Agent 47 slip into disguise, bluff his way through the crime scene, and disappear into a crowded el-train platform.

Mr. Buddah is pleased by Shin ey Dome's Keanu-style karate.

No lie, Absolution looks good. As much as I love it, 2006's Hitman: Blood Money carried the distinct whiff of a cheap cross-generation console port. You'd have to scrutinize the Xbox and Xbox 360 versions side-by-side to detect any slight graphical bump to the new generation hardware, whereas Absolution looks far, far better even than IO's more recent Kane and Lynch titles. The environments crackle with dark possibilities, and that's what you want from a Hitman game.

Here's what else I want: stealth. I want to walk into a building full of people, liquidate my marks in ways that look like random accidents, and walk out the door clean. I don't want to shoot my way in or out, except maybe for fun on a replay. Your goal playing Hitman should be reaching the rank of Silent Assassin. You aim to become a ghost who kills without ever being seen or heard. Aggro-stealth has its place but less so in this particular franchise. This one always injected a certain elegance into committing murder...even if you did drop a piano on a woman dressed as a crow during Mardi Gras. You still did it quietly, behind the scenes, with no one the wiser.

We've got room for that game, too. Fingers crossed that we get it.