One of their gazes lingered a bit too long. You can activate "spy vision" to see who is paying too much attention to you: the world turns grayscale and characters glow in neon yellow or red depending on how suspicious they are of you. Hang out too long near a "red" and he eventually sounds the alarm. The detective nearest me was glowing yellow, but as I moved away he slowly returned his attention to the conversation he was having.

After ducking inside the captain's office and snapping his neck before he could rise from his chair, I took a moment to look at what he'd hung on his walls. It was striking evidence of a cop's life: diplomas and certificates, an Academy graduation photo, a family, a group of young officers in 50's era uniforms smiling at the camera... the room had been carefully invested with the personality of a character who never spoke more than a line before being killed.

There are genre conventions to which Death to Spies must adhere, of course. For one thing, this police station had more places to store corpses than the city morgue. Every office had a handsome, dead-body sized armoire. Furthermore, the right clothing is an impenetrable cloaking device and an all-access pass. After killing the captain, I came out wearing his uniform and was immediately welcomed wherever I went despite the fact that the captain was suddenly a different man. To get to the interrogation room, however, another credulity-straining wardrobe change was required. I had to disguise myself as an FBI agent.

One of the feds took a break from interrogation to head for the bathroom, stalked by an ominous and shifty police captain. No sooner had he stepped into a stall than I had joined him and, after a spectacularly awkward moment as I tried to trigger "silent takedown" option by grinding against him from behind, dispatched him. Then I took his clothes as a disguise, and left him hidden in the stall. Nobody seemed troubled by a pair of feet and a hand sticking out from beneath the door. My new disguise, which got me past all the FBI agents in the interrogation area, was a shoulder holster and a brown fedora. Nobody noticed that I was wearing a colleague's clothes. I walked right up to the target and shot him between the eyes.

In retrospect, doing it in front of a two-way mirror was probably a poor idea, as the agents and cops began descending on the room and I tried to shoot my way out of the police station. Here was the weakest part of the demo. Stealth games, for whatever reason, rarely seem to have satisfactory shooter mechanics. My character impassively traded fire with enemies, absorbing shots while unhurriedly aiming for headshots. Police officers stood in the middle of rooms and hallways, blasting away without a thought for self-preservation, waiting for one of us to die. In this too, shades of Hitman.

This was, however, a very early version of the game. According the PR person who helped me with the demo, the game is barely an alpha and this was the only playable level. Hopefully NPC behavior and AI will be much better by release, because Death to Spies 3 has tremendous potential. With its beautifully realized world and classic stealth elements, it already looks like a winner.