Given that an Assassin is a whirling ball of knifey death, that situation is easily remedied.

Brutishly slaying your way through to your target is an option, but where's the class in that?

Assassins are awesome, and not just because they have two asses. We're talking about guys whose job is to create corpses, preferably from raw materials that aren't aware of their imminent corpsification. Game developers obviously know how awesome they are, because in the next four months no less than three notable assassination-based games coming out, followed by another dose next year. That might sound like too much of a good thing, but looking at them side by side it becomes apparent that, like skinning cats, when it comes to the fine art of killing dudes there's a wide range of options for execution. Stealth, disguise, acrobatics, or a combination of all three are the most popular options when it comes to making people who deserve it not alive anymore. Here's a look at how you'll be silently murdering in the near future.Connor Kenway, AKA Ratonhnhake:tonAcrobatics + Sharp Things EverywhereWrist-mounted blades, bow and arrow, flintlock pistols, throwing knives, rope darts, and Assassin-symbol Tomahawk hatchet.LowNovember 23, 2012There's a reason Spider-Man likes to hang out on ceilings: nobody ever looks up. Desmond Miles and his ancestors are members of an ancient clan of assassins who figured this out a long time ago. They're all perfectly capable of employing disguise and misdirection, mostly by putting their hands together and walking a little bit slower (which in my experience isn't all that useful in getting past a bouncer). What this family does best is leap along rooftops (and now in AC3, trees) as easily as most of us walk down the street, then drop on the unsuspecting target from above like a ball of deadly bird shit. This technique generally results in a lot of witnesses, but given that an Assassin is a whirling ball of knifey death, that situation is easily remedied.Rather than spending a lifetime studying the art of running on tall things while looking cool, Desmond has been able to pick up the relevant skills through repeated exposure to his ancestors genetic memories, and he doesn't seem to care if there's a tiny Morbo in our heads shouting "GENETICS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY." Disguise and hiding in the shadows are all fine and dandy, but the assassins of Assassin's Creed will kill your ass with ultra-violent ballet. Who's going to criticize that with a technologically anachronistic retractable blade stuck through their throat? Nobody, that's who.Agent 47Master of DisguiseGarrote wire, silenced pistol, dual Silverballer pistols, literally everything around him.HighNovember 20, 2012At a glance, the bald guy in a mook suit doesn't exactly scream "subtle." Agent 47, however, is at the top of the list when your purpose isn't to kill a lot of people so much as kill precisely the right one while arranging for plausible deniability, an absence of witnesses, and preferably without even wasting a bullet. Though his hand-to-hand killing powers have been enhanced in Absolution, he's still not by any stretch an acrobat, given that he seems to be completely incapable of jumping and apparently thinks that climbing on things that aren't ladders is beneath his dignity. What he can do, through the agency of the player, is think.Sure, he could get the job done by running in with guns blazing, but for a professional that's essentially identical to standing up at a party, ringing your glass like you're about to make a speech, and then taking an enormous, thunderously loud crap in your pants. His MO is more about chloroforming a cook while he's on his smoke break, stealing his clothes and leaving him to sleep it off in a dumpster, and then spiking the target's meal with something that makes their heart explode. Or sabotage their grill to explode in their face. Or drop a chandelier on their head. Whatever looks like an accident is almost always the best course of action. Backflipping all over the place is for fancy idiots, and shadows are the refuge of the incompetent -- 47 is about brains, disguise, and killing rich assholes while other rich assholes pay him for it. Oh, and the occasional crazy drug trip, but that's just a bonus.Corvo AtanoMagic DeathBlades, crossbow, telekinesis, possession.MediumOctober 9, 2012Disgraced assassin Corvo Atano is a jack of all trades, but stands out in our backstabbing club for his mastery of magic. Sure, he's good with a sword, has some fancy gadgets, and is pretty handy with one of those archaic guns that take forever to load and make a huge racket. Meanwhile, all that seems pretty bog standard beside the ability to stop time, teleport, possess animals and weak-minded humans, or summon up a horde of plague rats.It's a little early to be sure of the hype surrounding Dishonored, but what we played at E3 earned it our Game of Show award , and we do know is its pedigree: its lead designer is Harvey Smith, one of the guys behind both the original Thief and Deus Ex. And if there's one thing Deus Ex does legendarily well, it's providing a wealth of options when it comes to accomplishing goals. Corvo's methods will probably vary widely in the hands of different players, especially when presented with such a huge box of toys to get the job done. (Including, notably, the option tokill his target.) Of course, brutishly slaying your way through to your target is an option, but where's the class in that? I'd much rather just summon rats all over the place and possess a single one. Find me now, idiots.Killing people isn't necessarily these guys' main job, but they're really good at it. For the assassin class of 2013 (or later), their victims mostly just happen to be in their way. Here's what's coming up:There's not much to go on for the fourth Thief besides that logo, but from past installments we know that Garrett isn't so much an assassin as, well, a thief. But he sure can end up leaving a lot of bodies in his wake. Given that his primary occupation is taking other people's stuff, and that people in possession of said stuff tend to become obstacles to that end, it really isn't much surprise that a lot of those people end up dead or unconscious by the end of the day via trick arrows fired from the shadows.Sam Fisher isn'tan assassin, but many of America's problems end up getting solved by Sam snapping the neck of a very bad man. Or, you know, dozens of them. This Blacklist trailer implies there may be more action than usual this time, but it wouldn't be a Splinter Cell game without Sam peering out of the darkness with his green-eyed night vision goggles and waiting for the moment to strike.We don't know a ton about it yet, but based on the E3 unveiling, Aiden Pearce definitely trying to kill certain people. His power over the fully networked city of the future lets him use it as a weapon -- in the demo he hacks in and flips a traffic light from red to green to catch his target in a car crash before cleaning up with the old-fashioned guns-blazing approach. Not exactly subtle in this case, but definitely a unique approach.Star Wars 1313 is about a bounty hunter exploring the depths of Coruscant's thousands of sub-levels. The only thing separating bounty hunters from assassins is that sometimes bounty hunters are paid to bring their targets in alive. Sometimes. But until someone specifically tells us "No disintegrations!" we won't give our scoundrel targets the chance to shoot first.On that same bent, Bethesda's bounty hunter game is about amnesiac human Killian Samuels making a living on an alien world by hunting down criminals like a combination of Harrison Ford's characters from Star Wars and Blade Runner. Unfortunately it's hit some trouble and may never actually happen (Bethesda currently insists it hasn't been canned, just delayed), but if it does it looks like a blast.: It's looking like a particularly murder-y Holiday season 2012. Who's your favorite assassin, and, perhaps most importantly, who would win in a fight?