007 First Light Review: The Best Bond Game Ever Made Is Best When You Get Caught

The worry was obvious the moment this was announced. IO Interactive has spent well over a decade building one very specific thing — enormous social sandboxes where you circle a target, learn a routine, and eventually kill someone with a chandelier. James Bond is a bald assassin's opposite in almost every way that matters. He is loud, he is charming, he gets recognised, and he is frequently in a fight he did not plan.

So the reasonable prediction was Hitman with a nicer suit. That is not what this is. First Light borrows IO's level design instincts and then spends the rest of its runtime building something the Hitman games have never had, which is a proper melee combat system with real physicality in it. And the strange, brilliant result is that this is a stealth game that gets better when the stealth fails.

It is also an origin story, which is usually a warning sign, and here it is not. This is the second most popular game of the year with players for a reason. It understands that being Bond is not a set of skills but a way of behaving when things have already gone wrong.

It is more than an hour before you go on a proper mission. There is training, there is recruitment, there is a montage. A lot of people are going to bounce off that, and if you want to be shooting inside five minutes you should know it going in.

We think it is the right call. First Light is trying to show you a Bond who is not finished yet, and that only works if the game is willing to spend time on him before he has the gadgets and the confidence. The version of Bond you get here is cocky rather than composed, and you can see the iron discipline of the older character starting to form underneath rather than arriving fully assembled. Patrick Gibson plays him as clever, a little reckless and constantly amused by himself, and the quips land, which is genuinely difficult to pull off in 2026 without becoming insufferable.

The game also keeps stopping between missions for quieter scenes. Moving into a shared flat with other new agents. A night out. Dropping your boss at a London pub. None of it is gameplay in any meaningful sense and all of it is doing real work, because by the time the back half of the story starts pulling people apart you actually know who these people are. Very few action games bother with this any more.

Here is the thing nobody expected from an IO Interactive game. The stealth is very good. The fighting is better.

On paper the melee is basic. Yellow means parry, red means dodge, and the punches themselves are simple and would get repetitive on their own. What makes it sing is that almost everything in the room is a weapon and almost every enemy is an object. You can grab a man and shove him across a table. You can throw him down a vent shaft or into a server rack and watch it finish the job. You can pick up a bottle, a snooker ball, a brick, a dropped pistol, and throw any of them. You can shoot a gun out of someone's hands and catch it out of the air.

Ammunition is deliberately scarce, so you are never allowed to settle into being a shooter. You empty a pistol, throw it at someone's head, take three men apart with your hands, pick up whatever the last one dropped, and repeat. It is improvisational in a way that very few big-budget action games manage, and after fifteen hours we were still not bored of it. Getting caught stopped feeling like failure about three missions in and started feeling like permission.

The driving is the biggest miss. Not the truck sequences, which are loud, destructive and exactly right — the sports car sections. Handling is floaty and arcade-ish in a year that also gave us Forza Horizon 6, and the fantasy of properly throwing an Aston Martin around never quite arrives. There is not much driving in the game overall, which softens it, but it is the one part that clearly needed another pass.

There is also one level that is padded. You will know it when you reach it, because everything around it is sharper. And the game joins a long, baffling tradition of big third-person action games that build excellent boss encounters and then whiff the final one. We liked the ending. The fight in front of it was the least interesting thing in fifteen hours.

Smaller things add up too. The gadget icons are genuinely poorly designed and take hours to learn, which is a real accessibility problem rather than a nitpick. There are more quick-time events than anyone asked for. The takedown input is an odd two-button combination. There is a lot of yellow paint telling you where to climb. And the camera gets confused in tight corridors, which is unfortunate in a game that wants you to fight in them.

First Light is fifteen to twenty hours long and it costs full price, which has generated the usual argument. We think the argument is tired. This is a linear, story-led game with no filler in it except one level, and comparing it to a two-hundred-hour open world on a cost-per-hour basis is comparing two completely different things. Crimson Desert is enormous and Crimson Desert is also a mess. Length is not quality and it never was.

There is more here than the story anyway. Missions genuinely support being replayed a different way, though not to the extent Hitman does — you get a solid handful of approaches per level rather than dozens. More interesting is TAC-SIM, a separate challenge mode that drops you into combat and stealth scenarios with modifiers, scores you, and pays out points towards weapons, gadget upgrades and outfits. It has its own hub area. It is much better than a bolted-on extra has any right to be, and since the combat is the most replayable part of the game, it is aimed at exactly the right thing.

If IO supports it even a fraction as well as it supported Hitman, this becomes something people are still playing in two years. Driving challenges are already teased in the menu, which is either encouraging or slightly funny given that driving is the weakest part of the game.