I did a mission in Hitman Contacts yesterday that genuinely left me impressed. I had to kill an asshole that had access to a nuke on a ship. Problem was that a SWAT team was also going after him at the same time and while my contract read that he was to be killed the SWAT team had all the intentions in the world of bringing him in alive.
So, I ended up putting a GPS tracker on the car holding the nuke so that when the bomb arrives onto the boat that this jerk was on I would know where to find it. Once i was on the boat, i located the nuke and disarmed it.
Now, as I was arriving to the boat this dude had announced to everyone that if anyone shoots him he'll set off the detonator and nuke us all to hell and back. So I had already accounted for that issue with the bomb having been disabled. I killed some SWAT duders who got in my way and stole their gear and I finally approached him. Pulled out my silenced pistol, popped him in his head. But now, i had to get the hell out of there and I was surrounded by enemies everywhere. So I tried something that I thought for sure wouldn't work for a relatively older stealth game: I grabbed the detonator off of my target and held it in my hand for all to see. I figured, I was the only person on the boat that knew the bomb had been defused, if i walk around with this thing in my hand people should back off.
And sure enough, everyone freaked out when they saw I had the detonator in my hand and let me walk right on by, all the way to my escape.
So yeah, even though i end up going rambo 70% of the time in this game, the moments where you could leverage the things around you to outsmart the game are really well done.