{"id":8400,"date":"2026-05-29T01:50:39","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T01:50:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/29\/007-first-light-review\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T01:50:39","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T01:50:39","slug":"007-first-light-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/29\/007-first-light-review\/","title":{"rendered":"007 First Light Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Like the man himself, a James Bond game should ooze style and swagger. There\u2019s no point in a timid tie-in with neither the balls nor ability to bring the Bond fantasy to life, and I\u2019ve never particularly wanted one that simply gaffer tapes all the loudest bits of Call of Duty together and stuffs them into a tuxedo. What I\u2019ve wanted is a Bond game that\u2019s confident and charismatic; one that both ebbs patiently and peaks violently as it segues between social stealth, dangerous infiltrations, gadget-driven shenanigans, and destructive, never-tell-me-the-odds action. What I\u2019ve wanted is a Bond game like 007 First Light \u2013 and what we got is the best Bond game I\u2019ve ever played.<\/p>\n

First Light\u2019s greatest success is just how impressively developer IO Interactive has executed on its mission to create something it can call its own within a very established universe. What we get is something that\u2019s unmistakably Bond \u2013 and respectfully adjacent to everything that has come before it \u2013 but confidently occupies its own space as a uniquely separate take. <\/p>\n

That is, it never seems like a situation akin to 2001\u2019s 007: Agent Under Fire \u2013 which felt like the series was in a holding pattern before EA cut another cheque for Pierce Brosnan. No, this is a fastidiously assembled world of its very own \u2013 inspired in all the key ways by the work of creator Ian Fleming and the expectations bred by the films, but tailored for IO\u2019s take on the series like a bespoke suit. First Light has its own M, its own Q, and its own Bond \u2013 and, after playing it, I wouldn\u2019t have it any other way.<\/p>\n

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007 First Light screenshots<\/h3>\n

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First Light doesn\u2019t rush this world building, patiently moving through Bond\u2019s first encounter with MI6 as a Royal Navy aircrewman in the wrong place at the right time, to his initial double-0 training, and onto his transformative first field mission that sets up the core story to come. In another developer\u2019s hands all of this may have been smooshed into a single opening tutorial, or partially handwaved off in a cutscene. Not so in First Light, which unfolds much more like a prestige TV series than a film. While I\u2019ll stress vehemently that this is absolutely the last thing I\u2019d want from current screen rights owner Amazon when it comes to Bond\u2019s live-action future, for First Light\u2019s purposes it works splendidly. It feels perfectly suited to sit back and play, say, a chapter at a time. There are 17 overall, and it took me around 18 hours to reach the end without rushing too much. The writing is excellent, blending a world of serious consequences with a steady supply of on-brand one-liners. The music is impeccable, too; a masterclass of restraint that sensibly limits the use of Bond\u2019s iconic musical stinger to major moments, meaning I got chills each time it occurred.<\/p>\n

The chapters are lengthy and rich with peripheral detail to explore, and this significantly bolsters First Light\u2019s ability to build a world I can feel properly immersed in. The pace of both the action and the story is excellent, crescendoing brilliantly in its final act as the stakes explode (along with everything else) and IO takes a moment to fulfill one last Bond fantasy I\u2019d feared it may have forgotten.<\/p>\n

This world has been thoughtfully and convincingly fleshed out.\u201c<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

While I always felt properly propelled along, I have enjoyed the fact that \u2013 beyond a few time sensitive sequences and chases \u2013 First Light is more than happy to let you linger and absorb the detail. This is great as, since the world around Bond has been so thoughtfully and convincingly fleshed out, I found it largely impossible to blitz through. Whether it\u2019s Bond\u2019s London apartment, or the bustling MI6 headquarters packed with staffers, the iconic secret agent is seated in a believable world that doesn\u2019t fall to pieces the second you try to scrutinize it. As a Bond fan, it\u2019s delightfully immersive, and Easter eggs abound. You try moving through Q-Lab without pressing every button. Q\u2019s helpless lackeys aren\u2019t going to temporarily blind themselves, after all.<\/p>\n

Perhaps above everything, I just adore the attention to detail \u2013 from the big-picture consideration of giving Bond the long, vertical scar on his right cheek the character boasted in his literary origins, to tiny embellishments like the scratched rims and ziptied trim on the busted-up, 2006 Aston Martin that acts as a test mule at MI6\u2019s Malta-based training camp. If you don\u2019t walk around and ogle it like I did, this car only spends about a minute or two on screen during the chapter. Yet the fact that IO saw fit to weather, damage, and field repair it like a teenager\u2019s taped-up, track-day drift toy speaks volumes about where the studio set the bar for the level of authenticity it wanted to capture here \u2013 and I love that. Aston Martin is here with multiple models, as is Jaguar, Land Rover, and Triumph, and that\u2019s meaningful. It doesn\u2019t feel cynical; Bond is a British institution, and First Light surrounds him with others.<\/p>\n

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First Light is in rare air in this regard; it\u2019s a licensed game built with an obsessive desire to faithfully bring an existing property to life. As its own take, it\u2019s on a slightly <\/em>different track to famously brilliant movie tie-ins like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, The Warriors, or even RoboCop: Rogue City \u2013 but IO\u2019s commitment is the same. There are too many seamlessly embedded references to moments from various Bond films to argue that the movies aren\u2019t at the bedrock of what the studio has built here.<\/p>\n

First Light\u2019s pace also allows us to marinate with these new riffs on the characters for a lot longer, which helps immensely. There\u2019s no doubt that coming out of the gate with such a young version of Bond was a risk. Irish actor Patrick Gibson\u2019s portrayal of a Bond in his late 20s \u2013 and brand new to the world of international espionage \u2013 is not initially the one we know. He\u2019s an archetypal hotshot, cocky and inexperienced. He\u2019s a successfully suave ladies man already, but encumbered with a little too much misplaced confidence elsewhere. However, this gives Gibson\u2019s Bond room to grow as he becomes a product of all the new role models he\u2019s suddenly found himself surrounded by. <\/p>\n

These include Q (whose patient and more fatherly attitude makes sense in this context, because it now leaves room for him to potentially become a little more hilariously exasperated as Bond continues to break or lose everything he ever gives him) and Bond\u2019s training mentor John Greenway (ably portrayed by British actor Lennie James in a similarly strong performance). The upshot here is that the Bond we get by the end is the patriotic, heroic, and appropriately horny man of mystery we\u2019re very familiar with, but watching him get there was something we\u2019d never seen before.<\/p>\n

First Light typically looks quite fabulous, from its crowded clubs to its wide-open natural spaces.\u201c<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

With IO Interactive being the home of the Hitman series since its inception way back in the year 2000, First Light admittedly shares some very obvious DNA with its bald-and-barcoded stablemate. Running on the studio\u2019s in-house engine, the look and feel are immediately familiar to me as a veteran player of the Hitman series. For the most part, this is a strength; Bond feels weighty and grounded as he smoothly moves, climbs, and vaults around, and First Light typically looks quite fabulous, from its crowded clubs to its wide-open natural spaces. Playing on a standard PS5, there were occasions where I found myself staring at a texture that seemed far murkier than it ought to be at such close proximity, but it\u2019s otherwise sharp and packed with fine, granular detail.<\/p>\n

The sandbox nature of Hitman\u2019s level design is also here to a certain extent, albeit in the more managed fashion of 2012\u2019s Hitman: Absolution. That is, First Light stitches together open areas that have multiple approaches with linear sequences you need to play the way the developers dictate. <\/p>\n

There are levels here with large, crowded areas akin to those like the Paris fashion show in 2016\u2019s Hitman, or the German nightclub in 2021\u2019s Hitman 3, while other sections are a little more adjacent to something like the Uncharted series. The latter sequences are occasionally guilty of limitations that look a little silly in practice \u2013 like Bond\u2019s inability to clamber up a small, rocky slope or duck under a waist-high booby-trap string. However, this is the kind of seam you can typically pick at in even the best third-person shooters in the business.<\/p>\n

First Light also repurposes a lot of Hitman\u2019s distraction-based sneaking. For instance, you can still turn on loud items and such to lure guards from their posts \u2013 only in this case it\u2019s something Bond can do from afar thanks to the embrace of gadgets. Gadgets are obviously a core component of the 007 fantasy, and First Light features an array of them (my favourites are the laser and the missile pen). The only thing that gives me pause is IO\u2019s solution to restrain their use. Gadgets are a consumable, so there\u2019s a requirement to shuffle around and gather up battery power from loose phones, and replenish your chemical supply by scooping up gobs of hand sanitizer. The fact that there\u2019s always so much of this stuff laying around means gathering it is just an arbitrary task, which arguably could\u2019ve been easily replaced by a cooldown timer.<\/p>\n

At any rate, I should note that this isn\u2019t simply Agent 47 by way of His Majesty\u2019s Secret Service, and there are a bunch of bespoke tweaks here that imbue First Light with its own, very distinctly Bond-branded flourishes. His abilities as a brawler put 47\u2019s to shame, and there\u2019s a layered system of dodges, counters, and satisfyingly devastating environment attacks. Melee combat is perhaps a little clunky at times, particularly when Bond finds himself swarmed, but it is nonetheless a major distinction from the Hitman series.<\/p>\n

First Light is also far more suited for run-and-gun shooting. I initially found the shooting a little clumsy \u2013 and did find myself wondering about the worth of a mechanic that allows Bond to toss an empty gun right at the face of the nearest goon. Eventually, however, I almost started to relish running out of ammo, hurling an SMG like an oversized shuriken into some hapless bloke\u2019s head and snatching his own weapon. The times I got it right, which increased the more accustomed to the action I got, were incredibly satisfying.<\/p>\n

For clarity, there are also parts of the Hitman formula that haven\u2019t crossed over into First Light\u2019s universe. Disguises, for instance, are limited to only when they\u2019re scripted necessities for the story, and Bond can\u2019t hide or drag the bodies of guards he\u2019s knocked out \u2013 which does leave the stealth feeling a little archaic in 2026. I\u2019ll certainly concede that the idea of James Bond collecting a big pile of corpses doesn\u2019t pass the sniff test, but it would\u2019ve been nice to be able to at least yank a knocked-out bad guy behind cover in order to allow me to remain undetected a little longer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like the man himself, a James Bond game should ooze style and swagger. There\u2019s no point in a timid tie-in with neither the balls nor ability to bring the Bond fantasy to life, and I\u2019ve never particularly wanted one that simply gaffer tapes all the loudest bits of Call of Duty together and stuffs them<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8401,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[619,1942],"class_list":{"0":"post-8400","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-console-gaming","8":"tag-light","9":"tag-review"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}