‘007 First Light’ game review: Excellent James Bond movie packaged in a shoddy, half-baked game
Fight mechanics and stealth are great, but you struggle to get James Bond to walk faster in the latest game by Hitman-maker IO Interactive | 3/5
IO Interactive's new James Bond game, 007 First Light, offers an exceptionally strong narrative, lauded as one of the best 007 stories with a compelling portrayal of a pre-00 Bond by Patrick Gibson, and boasts impressive level design and cleverly integrated fan service, but is severely hampered by its underdeveloped gameplay mechanics, particularly the painfully slow character traversal and inconsistent graphical fidelity which makes it feel like a PS4-era title despite its AAA budget and IP.
IO Interactive's new James Bond game, 007 First Light, offers an exceptionally strong narrative, lauded as one of the best 007 stories with a compelling portrayal of a pre-00 Bond by Patrick Gibson, and boasts impressive level design and cleverly integrated fan service, but is severely hampered by its underdeveloped gameplay mechanics, particularly the painfully slow character traversal and inconsistent graphical fidelity which makes it feel like a PS4-era title despite its AAA budget and IP.
IO Interactive's new James Bond game, 007 First Light, offers an exceptionally strong narrative, lauded as one of the best 007 stories with a compelling portrayal of a pre-00 Bond by Patrick Gibson, and boasts impressive level design and cleverly integrated fan service, but is severely hampered by its underdeveloped gameplay mechanics, particularly the painfully slow character traversal and inconsistent graphical fidelity which makes it feel like a PS4-era title despite its AAA budget and IP.
The thing with a good IP is that it can only take you so far. IO Interactive’s latest James Bond game, 007 First Light, is a shining example of how shoddy game development ruins a perfectly good story.
First Light is, concept-wise, pretty neat. It toes the Ian Fleming line and starts us on a pre-00 James Bond, the aircrewman thrust into the world of spycraft. He soon becomes one of MI6’s top recruits.
It took me just 2 weeks to platinum it on the PlayStation 5. Did I enjoy it? Yes. Was it a good gaming experience? Well, sort of.
To review this game, I have to split it into two parts: the story and the gameplay. The story is one of the best 007 stories ever to grace the screen. Patrick Gibson is excellent, and if this were a movie with a bit of sped-up gameplay and cutscenes, we would have a great Bond movie. But the gameplay made me want to throw my controller out of the window at times.
And no, it is not because it was tough to beat. In fact, it was one of the easiest Platinums I ever bagged on the PS5, and it took me just 28 hours of total gameplay. Out of this, only 18 hours went into completing the main story. I would have done it faster if my buddy Bond had moved any faster.
Traversal was one of the most hair-pulling experiences I had to face as a gamer. For a title that borrows its DNA from Last of Us Part II and Uncharted 4, it did justice with the mechanics of jumps and using the environment. But why did it have to be such a grind to just walk or run!
Bond moves like he ate 50 idlis for breakfast. He is slow, and there is barely any difference when he “runs”, if we can call it that. Every game, I set my controller to run when pressing down the L3 button. This is the first game I kept the toggle setting, so I just had to click it once. If I hadn’t, the L3 button would have caved in.
The fact that I got this game while I was doing my PS5 run of God of War Ragnarok made this experience even worse, given how fast Kratos moves.
007 First Light aspires to be an improvement on Hitman 3 and the PS5 version of Uncharted 4. Instead, its lack of overall finish and the painful 0.5x travel render it just above 2018’s Hitman 2. In the PlayStation 5, some scenes were breathtakingly 2026 on Resolution-mode, but others were of the Witcher III grade—yes, the game that released 11 years ago.
Imagine my shock that in one scene, where our boy dons a white suit, the rifle he carries goes through his attire. Talk about amateur hour, that too, for a big-budget game! Maybe, all that budget went on his face and the cutscenes.
The level designs were impressive, and at times, I was approaching it more like a movie critic than a gamer. So Eon Productions wanted a movie, and IO Interactive delivered it—the best 007 game to date. Full marks for that.
But does 007 First Light stand on its own? It doesn’t. Take away the IP and the crazy budget to render near-perfect cutscenes and set design, and what you get is a PS4-level game fit for, maybe, 2018. And it still won’t win Game of the Year, because God of War will wipe the floor with it.
That said, it was still a good experience. The story is compelling, and there is no dull moment (as long as you ignore walking and running). The stealth elements are a major upgrade on Hitman 3, and the fight mechanics are, well, interesting. You either like it or you hate it.
The Q-Watch and nifty gadgets are cleverly 007y, I mean, movie-grade 007y. The callbacks to the films, all the way to Roger Moore and Sean Connery ones, are smartly integrated—fan service to those who catch them, and not on your face.
If you are a gamer who loves movies, this is an excellent title for you. However, if I were you, I would wait for a sale, as 007 First Light is a triple-A title in IP only.
Game: 007 First Light
Developer: IO Interactive
Platform: PlayStation 5 (for the review), PC, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2
Rating: 3 out of 5 | ★★★☆☆