Double-Zero Seven
No Time to Sneak
Credits Rolled in 2026: 6
00S (Spoilers below)
Charm and Shadows
007: First Light is a very fun game. The story is well-told, engaging, bombastic, and a bit sexy. The gameplay is fluid, sometimes intellectual, and frequently frenetic. Bond is a spy, but he relies on more than just looking around and snooping in the shadows to achieve his goals. Unless you’re me. Then the solution pretty quickly turns to fisticuffs.
The stealth is solid, built on the foundations that IO Interactive worked on in their previous Hitman games. It takes that foundation and builds out the tech of Bond to allow you to distract and eliminate guards using the Q watch. As Bond, you hack or blast devices throughout the environment to create smokescreens, electrocute, explode, or just make a whirring noise to distract people. I feel like this should work really well, but in practice I found that often times it didn’t always distract who I wanted and then I ended up being spotted. Once spotted, I would be given the option to bluff my way out of the situation, but more often than not, someone would throw a punch before I got the chance to press the bluff button to charm my way to freedom. While there were certainly sometimes guards who couldn’t be charmed in some of those instances, most of them were fully susceptible, but I guess I would get too close or something and they’d retaliate with my encroachment by swinging a haymaker at me.
Luckily the combat is pretty fun. It’s straightforward and could use more unique animations, but what’s there looks good. You can feel the weight of the swings and blocks. The parry and dodge react nicely to the incoming attacks. The interactions with the environment are also enjoyable; throwing men into bookcases, server racks, washing machines, and chucking bottles, bricks, etc. pretty much never got old. And when the enemies got to shooting and you were given the license to kill, the gunplay was a step above my experience with Hitman. Where in Hitman, if I have more than one or two enemies with guns attacking me I’m dead in a matter of seconds, the cover combat and fluid switch between my fists and a gun allowed me to usually survive these encounters. It helps too that if you can keep the local guards from calling in backup, the entire level isn’t on high alert for you, allowing you to pretend you found the dead guards that way if you’re allowed to bluff the next person to enter the room after bullets stop flying. Aside from the gameplay, the story kept me pretty well engaged.
Bond Girls
The only thing I knew about Bond before this game was that he likes his martinis shaken, not stirred, and that there’s always an attractive femme fatale. First Light follows a fairly by-the-book spy thriller, but it executes it really well. In this game there are many attractive people that Bond interacts with, a few of which he sleeps with, in fade-to-black fashion or via heavy allusions to having slept with the woman already. But a couple of these women, as I understand is expected in the franchise, are important to the overall narrative. One, Theresa Lorca, you have to rescue on a few occasions, and whom Bond is quickly stricken by.
You also get the backstory to being introduced to a martini shaken not stirred, handed to him by one of the aforementioned Bond girls, Isola Vale, that turns into a sort of adversary who helps set up what I hope will be a sequel. In this moment, James gives a cheeky comment of “isn’t that the same thing?” or something to that effect. That moment illustrates that there’s a good amount of humor in this game. It was enjoyable to listen to and helps punctuate that the writing in this game is very good with a charming protagonist in the hands of the player.
Final Light?
The enjoyable gameplay and thrilling yet predictable tropes you would expect from a Bond story, combines for an engaging and spectacular 15ish hours. Since this game began production, the rights for James Bond have changed hands to be owned by Amazon. While First Light was produced and distributed by IOI, that doesn’t mean that they’ll get to do more now that the IP has changed hands. I hope that isn’t the case though, because the foundations here are concrete. If given the chance to continue the story, there are certainly a handful of fun loose threads to follow in a sequel. IOI has clearly learned a lot from their time making Hitman games, and now that they’ve made a Bond game, I can’t imagine another studio doing it nearly as well. I hope they get the chance to iterate and evolve the formula even further in a future title, but only time will tell.
If you played 007: First Light, let me know what you thought and whether you want a sequel or if you think a different hand should take a crack at it under Amazon’s terms.