{"id":235,"date":"2026-08-14T08:47:57","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T07:47:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/?p=235"},"modified":"2026-08-14T08:47:57","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T07:47:57","slug":"007-first-light-review-youth-in-revolt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/2026\/08\/14\/007-first-light-review-youth-in-revolt\/","title":{"rendered":"007 First Light Review \u2013 Youth In Revolt"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When IO Interactive was first announced as developing a James Bond game, people connected the obvious dots: James Bond inspired Hitman, the series IO is best known for, so the studio seemed like a great fit to take on a proper 007 game. But it\u2019s where those two experiences would need to be different that had me most intrigued. A 007 game can\u2019t just be a Hitman game with different hair. Thankfully, IO\u2019s first foray into the James Bond world proves the team knows this and leans into it, delivering a thrilling Bond experience worthy of the character, while also applying lessons learned from the studio\u2019s own international man of mystery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though it isn\u2019t the first to tell an original story, 007 First Light is IO\u2019s very own take on Ian Fleming\u2019s iconic spy himself. With a new leading man in Patrick Gibson, and a story that takes Bond back to the age of 26, when he\u2019s still serving in the military sans any ties to MI6, it\u2019s a natural on-ramp for people who may not be familiar with Bond or who have been waiting since 2021\u2019s No Time to Die for the next reboot. This is a fresh start, and the team makes it their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In First Light, the Bond we meet is younger than ever, and this invites a more stubborn, mistake-prone version of the character, whom I quickly found myself interested in. Recruited to MI6\u2019s soon-to-be-rebooted 00 program, Bond can\u2019t catch a break, making enemies of his fellow recruits and his irritable supervisor, John Greenway, played by The Walking Dead\u2019s Lennie James, who shines in his newfound role in the Bond universe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the movies, I loved how Daniel Craig\u2019s take on the hero often saw him receive his fair share of beatings. I strongly prefer that to an untouchable good guy who can do no wrong. That aspect of Bond feels ramped up even more in First Light, with a version of the spy who is hardly out of the figurative cradle at the intelligence agency. James Bond is a headstrong young man, and his tendency to ask for forgiveness rather than permission is both his best and worst attribute in the eyes of his superiors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before long, Bond is on assignment, using his tricks of social engineering and stealth to infiltrate a lavish hotel, where the agency believes a disgruntled ex-00 agent is plotting something. While this plot thread initially sounds a bit too much like Skyfall, it quickly finds its own path forward, eventually erasing my concerns that the 20-hour story would lean too much on things I\u2019ve already seen. It\u2019s also during this early mission that First Light starts to reveal its familial ties to Hitman, so to speak. Like IO\u2019s flagship game, you\u2019ll be dropped into a massive gala full of NPCs, some of whom are guardians of certain areas of the hotel. And like IO\u2019s bald assassin, Bond will need to trick, sneak past, or otherwise dispatch the security to get where he needs to be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the game rightly doesn\u2019t have the same level of dark humor as Hitman, many of the ways you\u2019ll move about the world feel plucked right out of it. You can distract guards, then sneak from cover to cover when they look away, shimmy across hand-holds and pipes outside the building, eavesdrop on conversations to get crucial information, and lie to people to get what you need\u2013be it a keycard, the whereabouts of a particular person, or for them to simply step aside and let you pass, which First Light gamifies as the Bluff mechanic. It won\u2019t work on everyone, but some enemies will simply take you at your word, as Bond is a charming young man good at acting like he belongs somewhere he doesn\u2019t. Once in a while, you\u2019ll even don a disguise. In these moments, First Light and Hitman share a lot in common.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hello 47\u2013err, I mean 007.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When things break down\u2013maybe your cover has been blown, or you were spotted by enemies who don\u2019t fall for your charms\u2013the game\u2019s very best attribute kicks into high gear. Combat in First Light is incredibly fun, especially the melee combat. Some of its systems are tried and true, like enemy attacks that must be blocked or dodged with good timing, but the things First Light does best are those that feel the most Bond-like. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, you can slide over surfaces to stagger enemies, kicking their guns from their hands, catching them, then shooting your foe in the leg to cause them to kneel for a quick finisher. Alternatively, you can rush them and toss them into a computer desk, where things like a monitor and keyboard fly into the air as you buy some time with a handful of other armed villains behind you. Environments are awesomely reactive. If you throw a guy into a railing, you can then toss him over it. If you throw him into an electrical board, you\u2019ll see him get zapped and take heavy damage. Weaving in and out of combos against a group of enemies looks and feels awesome, whether you\u2019re perfectly nailing every hit and dodging every attack or you\u2019re just scraping by in fist fights that feel like trying to win an eye-gouging contest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gunplay is fun too, and though I preferred to use my fists because I felt it fit the character better at times, I love how First Light\u2019s guns never have much ammo in them, demanding you frequently change what you\u2019re armed with by taking them off defeated enemies\u2013you can even chuck your gun at their heads when it\u2019s out of ammo. Combined with a slow-motion focus-aim mechanic, enemies who effectively flank you, and lots of destructibility, the end result makes for frenetic shootouts of precision headshots and creative explosions every time you\u2019ve been given the license to kill. The exciting setpieces, once starring Connery, Brosnan, Craig, and the others, are faithfully captured in First Light, but what makes them even better is how often these moments aren\u2019t scripted. They\u2019re a result of my own improvisational input, navigating a complex battlefield and using every tool at my disposal to capture the specific biorhythms of a Bond movie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Your options for stealth and social engineering are numerous in 007 First Light.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Speaking of tools, it\u2019s funny how well a Bond story maps onto video games. Not only do you trot around the globe in a way that suits distinct missions, but Bond is always aided by Q and his Q-Lab spy gadgets. With his nearly ever-present Q-Watch, Bond can scan an area for enemies and interaction points, even through walls, using the sort of \u201cdetective vision\u201d mechanic that Arkham Asylum popularized in 2009. Bond can also hack electronics with that same watch; he can make people feel queasy and move them off their spot using a fake phone that shoots poison darts, and he can blow stuff up with a fake pen, among several other gadgets at his disposal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On many missions, you\u2019ll pick which two or more of these you want, leaving you with many answers to the same question: how to get from A to B when the space between is littered with villains. I found it hard to pick which gadgets I wanted on any mission because they all had their uses. It was very common for me to get into a mission, thankful I had a particular gadget but also longing for another I had left behind, depending on the situation. A few late-game changes to how gadgets are used also shake up this system in two distinctly different but enjoyable ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These gadgets ensure the spirit of the Bond character is alive, and the game is rich with other true-to-form touches, like a well-rounded cast of characters, such as MI6 boss M, workplace ally Moneypenny, and a memorable villain whose quest is an interesting dark reflection of Bond himself. He\u2019s also the type of bad guy who feels plucked right out of the headlines. A Bond story is essentially a superhero story, but the best of them ground themselves in reality by speaking to the social and political context in which they\u2019ve arrived, and First Light shines in this regard. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Watching the Bond movies recently for the first time, my wife jokingly wondered if the \u201cBond Girl\u201d is always going to betray him, given how often it happens. I was glad to see First Light toy with this expectation a lot during its runtime. As for 007 himself, Patrick Gibson did so well to become the hero in my mind that, while I used to think of him as the actor who plays the title role on Dexter: First Blood, by the end of the game, he\u2019d become James Bond first and foremost. It\u2019s hard to see him any other way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Several missions in First Light would feel right at home in Hitman.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Of all the boxes IO had to check to make First Light feel authentic, the only area where the team noticeably falters is driving sections. It\u2019s not really a Bond story without some car chases, and though First Light uses several different vehicles in several different ways, most of them feel like you\u2019re rather rigidly barreling down something close to a straight line. Nearly feeling on-rails, these flashy scenes of Aston Martins and speedboats still look and sound cool, but they\u2019re best for moving Bond from one shootout to another, while the driving sections themselves don\u2019t add much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another issue that stems from telling a 20-hour Bond story is that you, perhaps necessarily, lose some of the supreme pacing the best of the movies have to offer. I enjoyed seeing Bond in his MI6-provided apartment with other recruits. That felt like the sort of downtime a movie wouldn\u2019t allow for, which managed to add layers to these new versions of old characters. But there are a couple of other sections later where you\u2019re meant to solve puzzles, usually involving locked doors, and in these sections, the pacing can grind to a halt, pulling me out of the otherwise-exciting story. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a hard problem to solve, given how a game necessarily differs from a movie. One area in which the pacing doesn\u2019t suffer is First Light\u2019s secondary mode, TacSim (short for Tactical Simulation). The in-universe excuse for this challenge mode is that it\u2019s Bond\u2019s way of staying frosty, beating up virtual bad guys in virtual kitchens, villas, and military installments. What this amounts to for you is a highly replayable mode that gets right down to the game\u2019s best bits: its combat. Across many levels, you can attempt to complete dozens of challenges, which is something this studio has designed very well before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Vehicle sections look flashy, but they don\u2019t amount to much other than driving nearly in a straight line.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I like this mode out of the gate, though the rewards feel lacking for now, with some lukewarm weapon skins and outfits on offer. IO plans to support TacSim with updates, and I look forward to seeing how it evolves. But for those who wondered if this could be the equivalent of Hitman\u2019s incredible Freelancer mode, it\u2019s far from that as of now. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, IO\u2019s take on James Bond was actually more like Hitman than I expected, but that\u2019s not to say it\u2019s simply Hitman by another name. As someone who has loved that series for nearly 25 years, it\u2019s fascinating to see IO apply everything it\u2019s learned. 007 First Light wisely repurposes what works in both universes but isn\u2019t afraid to reimagine or ditch those parts that don\u2019t. Though some aspects of the game do hinder the pacing, so much else feels authentic and riveting. As Hollywood seems uncertain about where to take Bond next, IO Interactive\u2019s debut effort is supremely confident. \u201cJames Bond will return,\u201d the movies always like to say. If and when IO\u2019s Bond returns, it\u2019ll have a great first act to follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When IO Interactive was first announced as developing a James Bond game, people connected the obvious dots: James Bond inspired Hitman, the series IO is best known for, so the studio seemed like a great fit to take on a proper 007 game. But it\u2019s where those two experiences would need to be different that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":236,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":237,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions\/237"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}