There’s always a lot to live up to with a new James Bond game. The shadow of Goldeneye hangs heavy over all Bond games and has for a good three decades now. Very few games live up to the books or movies and doing the character justice in any media format has become more and more challenging. That didn’t stop developer and publisher IO Interactive from taking on the challenge however! As the makers of the famed Hitman franchise, they were uniquely poised to take on the challenges of the 007 IP and as a result we now have 007 First Light!
First Light is the origin story of James Bond, from his introduction to MI6 through his training as a 00, and into eternal fame as one of the greatest secret agents of all time. This is a single player narrative experience and the entire game plays out like a movie. Bond of course needs no introduction, nor do most of the key supporting characters like Q, M, and Moneypenny. However, the story also takes place in current day with a whole new supporting cast created explicitly for 007 First Light. You’ll be joined on your adventure by former 00 Agent Greenway as well as new 00 candidates Cressida, Monroe, and others. This is a fully realized world with plenty of interaction and plot, so it’s hard to talk about anything without giving away the story, but we’ll take a look at a few key things.
After the introduction (and it’s excellent), you’ll end up working with MI6. Shocking, right? But Bond isn’t the spy we all know and love yet. Instead he has to prove himself to everyone and the entire first part of the game is part story and part tutorial. The approach that IO Interactive took here is somewhat unique, with tutorial and plot mixed together into almost a montage that builds your familiarity with the cast as it teaches you the fairly complex controls of the game. It all feels seamless however and you never end up bored or too frustrated. As you play, you’ll see how cleverly IO has integrated character development throughout the game in order to create growth for Bond to the agent you’re likely already familiar with. Suddenly and almost organically, you’ll end up transitioning from training to assignments and it’s so smooth it’ll leave you blinking for a moment before moving on.
There are several main components to gameplay that you’ll have to learn and master in 007 First Light. Naturally, there are story and investigative modes that are reminiscent of the Arkham series. Bond is a spy after all and gathering intel is key to success. Unlike the Batman games however, you won’t be searching long and hard for the clues (because that’s boring) and you’ll instead do cursory exams of items and then move on with the story. There are a handful of dialogue options here and there as well and you’ll get to choose a bit of how Bond reacts to situations but by-and-large this is a set narrative experience. While that might sound boring, each story section offers you a variety of options and approaches to problem solving that allow you to choose your own path to the goal, resulting in a mini-sandbox experience in each area. Yes, you have to advance the story, but how you do it is up to you and there are a number of ways to solve each problem, creating a certain amount of choice that will appeal to most players. Restricting choice in a game where you play a spy makes no sense after all…
Built into these sections of the game are what amount to a variety of mini-games cleverly concealed within the plot. While you’re completing your tasks, you have the option to participate in various activities from shooting ranges to Tacsim (we’ll get to that later), Fight Club style combat, fetch quests, and more. Very few of these choices are mandatory and you can easily get by in these portions of the game by picking and choosing your approach to the situation to best fit your personal skills and what you find most fun. These explorations lead directly to other components of the game as well and just like everything else, the transitions are seamless. Often, you’ll end up trespassing or infiltrating an area and moving on to the next portion of the game, hand-to-hand combat. There’s a fair degree of stealth here that Hitman players will be familiar with. Taking the path of least resistance in 007 is often the best way to go because fighting hand to hand is challenging and enemies don’t hesitate to swarm and gang up on you, usually overwhelming and killing you.
Instead, you can play with all of Qs fancy gadgets: watches, lasers, poison darts, stun grenades and plenty more end up in your repertoire as the game proceeds, though you can only have a few different options per mission and those choices fundamentally change how you can approach the action. Each time you pick your loadout, Q’s team will give you a rundown of what you might encounter but you can still choose whatever you want. Combat consists of a combination of stealth attacks with these weapons, subterfuge through distraction, and sneaky takedowns. If you get seen, it’s time for hand-to-hand but you can also use some items in the environment to give yourself a fighting chance. The game prompts you with visual cues and button reminders during hand to hand, which is fast, frantic, and full of enemies that you’ll often have to fight 2-on-1, 3-on-1, or even occasionally 4-on-1. Bond controls incredibly well during combat but if you start to scramble for buttons and mash rather than remembering your basic moves, you’ll be taken down fast. You don’t have a health bar, which is amazing, but you can still be taken down…enough hits flash the screen red until you manage to avoid hits and your health returns to normal the moment combat is concluded.
Occasionally story or stealth modes turn into gunplay as well, the next type of action you’ll face. You can’t just shoot everyone in 007 First Light. That’s partly because you’re trying to sneak about and be a spy and partly because the noise would attract the attention of every bad guy in the vicinity and they’re all armed. Sometimes there’s no choice but to go in guns blazing however. What you’ll rapidly find out is that the enemies are fast, fairly smart, and coordinated and you’ll end up dead every time. That doesn’t seem great for a burgeoning secret agent, so you’ll have to learn some of the tricks the game has in store to survive (and your Q gadgets). You’ve got extremely limited ammo so every shot needs to count, but to do that you’ll have to focus.
Focusing requires a press of the L3 button and time slows down, allowing you to pull off accurate shots in a fraction of a second. There’s a short cooldown before you can use it again, but in many cases, this is the only way to survive a high-octane gun battle with multiple opponents. Running out of ammo is clever too…steal it from an enemy. Running up to them, you can literally throw your gun at armed opponents, knocking them down and forcing them to drop their weapon, which you can pick up and use against them. This is some Jason Bourne style action that’s incredibly gratifying. If you don’t master the focus and attack techniques in gunplay however, you simply will not be able to proceed at all, so make sure you’re using every tool and ability in your bag of tricks!
Interestingly enough, once you do master all the skills Bond has, the game becomes remarkably easy and feels almost too structured. At first, the enemies seem coordinated and accurate, but after you focus attack and find their spawn points, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. In fact, by the middle of the game, it’s easy to take out 20+ enemies without breaking a sweat and you can snipe them off to your heart’s content without the slightest bit of risk because they’re not programmed to actually chase you down if they can’t see you. Picking off one draws the next and then you can pick them off. You’ll get the occasional grenade thrown at you, but they’re easy to dodge and you can just drop back to hiding. Enemies also fail to notice their missing comrades unless their body is left directly in their line of sight, so thinning out the herd with stealth is laughably easy. That’s all fine though because the henchmen are never the main focus of a Bond story and taking them all out with ease is exactly what should be happening.
Driving is the final type of gameplay in First Light because what 007 experience would be complete without a car chase or three? Initially, driving is a bit awkward, but the actual areas you use it in levels are much less challenging than the initial course you learn how to drive on. What’s odd about the driving in First Light is that it takes a noticeable backseat to the rest of the gameplay. Driving is well-designed but feels almost shoehorned in, used mostly for transitions between scenes and only rarely as a primary action sequences, with the result being that the few times you are participating in active car chases and pursuits, they feel frantic and chaotic. The driving controls are fairly straightforward, but the tags for where to go often show up at the last minute or are difficult to catch at high speed, which ends up making you either get stuck or fail a section and have to restart. While it would have been fun to have some additional driving options, it makes sense in the context of the linear story to keep these portions of the game limited to preserve the story flow.
As you’ve probably noticed by now, 007 First Light looks absolutely gorgeous. The visuals are spectacular, the background detail is over the top, and even the HUD is well-designed and easy to use. The sole exception to that is the face mapping. Bond in particular looks almost cartoonish in one scene and then nearly realistic in the next and lip synchs are…ok. Most of the characters look a bit less real than they could, with the occasional more detailed mapping such as Greenway. This inconsistency leads to a slight step back to reality in what otherwise would be an utterly immersive experience. The cars, the water, the enemies, even the backgrounds all look utterly spectacular and almost everywhere you look, the characters seem real. That also applies to the sound in First Light as the voice acting is tremendous and entirely outshines the visuals of the characters. Voice actors gave it their all here and the spectacular sound effects and classic 007 music tie everything together in an audiovisual smorgasbord that it’s impossible not to love. If you’re paying really close attention, there’s one more visual that is neat too. IO programmed the LEDs in the Dualsense controller to match the game so you get color matched controller lights depending on what’s happening in the game. It’s a novelty, but it’s definitely a cool one!
Not everything is wonderful in the world of Bond however. 007 First Light has a number of small problems that end up making it less than perfect. Occasionally there are clipping errors which result in you being unable to pick up weapons you’ve dropped, create visual problems, and generally end up distracting. They’re not often, but it happens enough to make note of it. That’s not particularly surprising in a game as complex as this one with as many moving parts and interaction points as there are here. Missions also tended to get stuck in loops and one sub-mission we played had Bond being harped at by Moneypenny to get closer to a character we were literally right next to because the game thought we were in the mission but the mission wasn’t actually active. It took a while to figure out how to get away and come back in order to reset the mission, which then completed easily with the NPC in the wrong spot.
Tacsim was also a problem. This is a single player game with no multiplayer. It shouldn’t even require an internet connection aside from patch downloads. We’ve accepted that activations are a thing now (even though it’s outrageous) but 007 First Light takes that one step further. There’s a section in Qs division called Tacsim that allows you to practice various stages to hone your combat. There’s a leaderboard and whatnot too apparently. Remember we said allows ‘you’. If you don’t pay for Plus or Gold on their respective consoles, you can’t access the Tacsim portion of the game. Again, this is a single player game. You can’t play part of it without paying for online services…at all. As a result we were unable to play the Tacsim portion of the game for review and it remained locked behind a yellow wall in the Q lab for the duration of the game. Sure, this is probably likely the result of implementing an online leaderboard, but it’s a ridiculous fail in terms of accessibility to the game.
Where our playthrough really ran into noticeable trouble was background loading though. On the PS5, we had multiple instances of the game freeze at random during background loading, even when there was no significant action on the screen. You’d select an item, jump across an empty space, or walk into a room and the game would just freeze. No controller response, nothing. This happened at least 4 times during our playthrough and each time, Bond would be frozen on screen and the loading icon appeared in the lower right hand corner. Each time the controller locked out entirely, the load never finished, and we were forced to use the home button to go to the main PS5 menu, close the game, and re-open it. Once reloaded, the same area would play smoothly with no visible load time, implying that this was an issue with background load buffering. Fortunately, it’s a rare issue but it’s incredibly irritating when you’re midway through a level and have to start at the last save point after reloading the game.
Here’s the thing. 007 First Light is ridiculously fun. Yes, it has some flaws. No, it’s not perfect. But it’s a damned good game with a story and script that keeps up with the expectations of both long-time Bond fans and those new to the franchise as well. Not only are we treated to the origins of Bond as a 00 agent for MI6, but there’s a ton of compelling character development and some very fun gameplay to go along with it. The hours fly by as you wind your way through the twists and turns of the story and by the time the credits roll, this will be a game that sticks with you. 007 First Light refreshes the Bond franchise for a new generation and does it with style! That’s a difficult task and IO Interactive absolutely nails it. If you were worried about this one, don’t be as it’s definitely a must-play experience.
This review was based on a digital copy of 007 First Light provided by the publisher. It was played on a PS5 using a 1080p 55” Sony TV and on the Playstation Portal where it played equally well. 007 First Light is also available for Xbox Series S/X and PC on Steam and Epic and is forthcoming for Switch 2 with no release date yet.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.