Ubisoft were pulling out all the stops at this year’s Eurogamer Expo: along with the astonishing 3D version of Avatar, we were treated to a sizeable chunk of Assassin’s Creed II.

As if that weren’t enough, they even roped in one last minute surprise: Sam Fisher.

We had a chat with Ubisoft’s Matt Benson (now officially on our Cool People List™, also interviewed on the site sometime soon) at the end of the first day, who told us that Ubisoft had brought along some Splinter Cell: Conviction code but weren’t really feeling a demonstration. MightyMutt, ever the suave gentleman, convinced him to bring out the bigger guns alongside the already quite sizeable guns Ubi had already rolled out on the show floor, and so the stage was set next day for a showing of Sam’s latest outing.

And what an outing it’s shaping up to be. The demo of Conviction shown to the Eurogamer masses might have been what we had already seen at E3, but it was no less, if not more, awesome to watch for ourselves as a genuine live demo in front of our very eyes.

In Conviction, Sam Fisher is on the trail of his daughter’s killers in central Europe — but the chances are we’ll see plenty of globetrotting as the game goes on. His first source in the demo we saw was cornered in a bathroom,having his face pummeled in by Fisher in the name of information. What was brilliant about this cutscene is that it was interactive: rather than just have you watch Fisher spit abuse in the face of his informant as he puts his head through a beautfully-rendered urinal, you get to do it for yourself.

When Fisher did get the info out of his new best friend, it wasn’t relayed to you in silly flashbacks. Instead, it was projected across the walls of the bathroom — names, faces, objectives are all projected along the game area as you play, meaning no bringing up a menu to see what you’re doing next.

It’s so slick that there’s not even any loading times to shake up the experience. Fisher’s contact’s face went down in a pool of blood that effectively segwayed into a red dress on a painting in a nearby art gallery. The camera swooped out, around the area, and landed behind Fisher, ready for you to immediately take control.

While this is part of a smoothy-animated, dialogue-packed cutscene, you still carry on the action rather than sit back and watch. Neat.

According to Ubisoft, each mission in Conviction is like a mini-sandbox, with multiple expansive routes to choose from depending on how you want to blow the head off of your next target. Or strangle them. Or push them off of a high balcony. Or…you get the idea.

In the case of this demo, Fisher took advantage of a massive crowd of civilians at market to create a distraction. First of all he pulled out his weapon — no, not like that — and started waving it around causing mass screaming and panic, as you do. He then followed the panicking crowd, blending in enough to avoid the security guards who ran in the opposite direction to investigate. With the guards out the way, he could sneak into the next place he needed to go.

Conviction‘s big selling point is the ability to “Mark and Execute.” Marking and Executing is simply an easy way of deciding who you’re going to kill by first Marking — using your crosshairs to line up your targets — and then Executing the action, using anything in the environment to carry out the kill, be it your gun, a lamp, or even just a nice, high-up window. You can even use this feature to grab enemies to use as a shield and carry out further executions before finishing them off.

What was brilliant was how very there the action was. Basically, it was so sickening hearing a face crunch against a wall — being forced into it by Fisher, naturally — that the entire audience groaned in respect and burst into a fit of giggles when our man catapulted a henchman out of a nearby window. The action is so intense and so down-to-earth that even watching the game in motion gets you more excited in 30 seconds than playing a ton of the games at the show managed in 10 minutes.

While it’s not the Splinter Cell we knew before, it’s a good direction for the series and showing a lot of promise. The inevitable demo and the game itself roll into stores on February 26th next year. Day one purchase for me.