007 First Light
"A license to thrill, not to improvise"
About
007 First Light is a third-person action-adventure that chronicles the origins of James Bond. Players take on the role of a young and untested recruit navigating MI6's demanding training program. The game follows Bond as he hones his skills in combat, stealth, and espionage. It is a linear, single-player experience focused on telling a cinematic story about how the agent earned his famous number.
Verdict
IO Interactive delivers a sharp and stylish origin story for the world's most famous spy. 007 First Light excels as a cinematic action game, with a compelling narrative and satisfying combat that perfectly capture the Bond fantasy. However, anyone expecting the sprawling, systemic sandboxes of the developer's Hitman series will be disappointed by the game's strict linearity and limited replay value. It's a thrilling ride, but one that stays firmly on the rails.
You'll like it if …
- +You want a linear, cinematic story in the vein of the Uncharted series.
- +You're a James Bond fan looking for a well-produced and faithful origin story.
You'll dislike it if …
- −You expect the open-ended sandbox design of IO Interactive's Hitman series.
- −Restrictive levels and a lack of replayability are deal-breakers.
Breakdown
- +Hand-to-hand and gun combat feel satisfying and responsive.
- +Gadgets like the Q-Watch add a distinct espionage flavor to encounters.
- −Movement is heavily restricted, with invisible walls and arbitrary obstacles creating a constricting, linear feel.
- −Core controls can feel overly simplistic, lacking the depth expected from a top-tier action game.
- +Missions allow for multiple approaches to objectives, including non-lethal options like bluffing or faking surrender.
- −The disguise system feels underutilized, a notable step back from the developer's previous work.
- −Limited gadget selection and a lack of meaningful progression undermine the origin story premise.
- −The linear structure offers little incentive for repeat playthroughs once the story is finished.
- +Delivers a compelling and personal origin story for James Bond, showing his journey to becoming a 00 agent.
- +Captures the classic Bond atmosphere with sharp dialogue and high-stakes cinematic setpieces.
- −The plot relies on genre tropes and contains some noticeable inconsistencies.
- −Key emotional moments can feel rushed or jarringly dismissed by the script.
- +Visually stunning, with cinematic art direction that shines on high-end hardware.
- +Path tracing, when it works, creates a highly immersive and atmospheric world.
- −Performance is inconsistent, with widespread reports of CPU bottlenecks, stuttering, and crashes.
- −Enabling path tracing often results in significant frame drops, even on powerful PCs.
- −Missing support for modern upscaling technologies like FSR 4.1.1 on some GPUs and XeSS for Intel cards.
- +The core experience runs serviceably for many players on standard settings.
- −Lacks a field-of-view (FOV) slider, a basic feature for modern first-person and third-person PC games.
- −Players report a variety of bugs, from camera issues and missed inputs to progression-halting soft-locks.
- −Controller settings can be unreliable, sometimes requiring repeated adjustments to function correctly.
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