007 First Light Review: Earning the Number
IO Interactive's young James Bond origin story is a gorgeous, gadget-packed spy adventure. It's not a masterpiece, but it's a really good chocolate chip cookie.
This was one of the most hyped games of the year for all three of us. Ryan loves the Uncharted, Tomb Raider and Metal Gear school of cinematic action-stealth. Ace loves IO Interactive's Hitman games. Josh drafted it in our game of the year draft, and when it launched in the middle of our Lego Batman playthrough, he dropped Batman on the spot. (Ace, who had never seen a Bond movie, tried to watch one first. They're not on any streaming service except Amazon's, which, coincidentally, publishes the game.)
All three of us beat it, so we're giving you the spoiler-free breakdown.
A heck of an opening
You're not a spy yet. Young James Bond is an airman whose plane goes down, leaving him the only survivor on an island crawling with armed guards and a disaster in the making. You can hear him shivering in the rain as you sneak along the beach. It's gorgeous and tense, and it teaches you stealth, traversal and combat on the fly. Ryan got Hellblade vibes from the opening. Ace got Tomb Raider reboot déjà vu.
Then comes a training montage as MI6 tries to catch Bond up with the recruits who started six months before him, and it's a really fun way to introduce every system.
Combat: just fine
Sometimes it was very responsive and worked exactly how I wanted, and other times I got the tar beaten out of me.
Close-quarters combat is grounded, closer to "Arkham light" than true Arkham. The animations are great: bull-rushing a guy into a wall, slamming his head into it, or throwing him into an open electrical panel. But there's no proper lock-on, so you'll fight the camera sometimes. Play with a controller.
Gunplay is serviceable, with very strong aim assist. Ace's go-to: throw your empty gun at the next guy, rush him and take his. The strange part is there's no ammo anywhere. The only way to reload is to pick up another gun. "I'm freaking James Bond. I can't pack a magazine?" (Ryan would like everyone to know it's a magazine, not a clip.) Some firefights throw so many enemies at you, and let you soak so many bullets, that Ryan just sprinted past 30 guys to an elevator.
The gadgets and the stealth
This is where First Light shines. Your Q-Watch scans the environment, fires tranquilizer darts and cuts locks with a laser, and the gadgets you unlock let you make things happen instead of waiting for them. Hack a copier, wait for a guard to check it, then grab him. Use the dart to make someone sick so they leave the room you need to search. Blind someone with the laser and walk right past. Kick a laundry cart into a guy. You build your loadout before each mission, aggressive or sneaky.
The ability to approach every stealth situation in all these different ways is what really set it up for me.
The stealth is "social stealth" and pretty forgiving. Enemy awareness is short-range, and if you get caught somewhere you shouldn't be, you can spend Instinct to bluff your way out ("my bad, just checking things out") and then blindside them. If you can knock someone out quietly, the game tells you the situation is contained. Josh, who doesn't love pure stealth games, thinks it's balanced just right with the action.
Ace's one surprise is how little Hitman made it in. There's no knocking someone out and stealing their outfit; the closest you get is grabbing a coat or the laundry guy's hat.
Story and pacing
Bond works, and that's what matters. Patrick Gibson (Henry from Kingdom Come: Deliverance) is great as young Bond, Lenny James is excellent as his mentor Greenway, and yes, Lenny Kravitz is in it. The locations are stunning. Josh had never wanted to go to Vietnam until this game.
The pacing does drag in places. More than once we thought it was ending and got another hour of "go talk to these three people."
It's like stretching your essay for class because you're 300 words short.
Ace also wanted more progression, like a skill tree to upgrade gadgets, and found that most intel-gathering boils down to finding the eavesdropping spot.
The VGP take
Ryan, an origin-story guy through and through, loved watching Bond grow into the agent, and he broke into the 9s with a 9.1. Josh gave it an 8.8:
It's like a chocolate chip cookie. Sometimes you get that one that's earth-shatteringly good. That wasn't First Light for me, but it was still a really good chocolate chip cookie.
Ace gave it a "very solid" 8.6. All three say it's worth $70. It runs about 20 hours, with extra challenge missions if you want more, and it's well optimized and beautiful from start to finish. It's not game of the year, but it's a strong recommendation, and we hope IO keeps this series going.