Spoiler-light. I'm keeping plot specifics out of this so nobody gets anything spoiled going in.
007 First Light is a good game. From the jump it felt like playing a Bond movie, and that feeling never really left.
The immediate thing to know is this is IO Interactive, so if you're familiar with the World of Assassination Hitman games, you'll feel right at home here. On the action side, you're looking at set pieces and third-person shooting closer to something like Uncharted. If that's your thing, you're going to be at home here too, because you get all of that with a little Bond sauce on top.
I was worried I'd have trouble adjusting to this version of Bond since the face isn't one I'm familiar with, but no, it works. It works. The voice is by Patrick Gibson, who you might know from Shadow and Bone or The OA, and whose most recent work is playing young Dexter in Dexter: Original Sin. His voice fits the Bond character so well, great voice acting, it feels right at home. Once you get going, the face just becomes Bond. You stop thinking of him as a new person because it genuinely feels like a Bond character doing what he has to do.
The game gives you a ton of customization in how you approach combat, it goes from gadget-based to hand-to-hand to gunplay to environmental takedowns to pure improvisation depending on the situation and how you want to handle it. The world is fun, the characters are all there, the money, the women, the violence, the cookie-cutter villains, the great locations. It's all there and it's strong. You're moving through spots like Iceland, London, Malta, Vietnam, Slovakia, Mauritania, and even the Antarctic, and each one has its own flavor.
There are stretches of this game that genuinely give off Splinter Cell vibes, which honestly was a welcome surprise. Stealth-action has been sorely missing lately. Hitman has kind of been carrying that genre solo, and this is a different flavor of it that scratches the same itch.
This game is set at the very start of the timeline, when you first meet James Bond. In this story he's just a military guy who gets mixed into a situation, comes out the other side, and gets recruited by MI6. From there you go through a tutorial, and normally that word makes me groan, but this was one of the more unique tutorials I've played, because it actually makes narrative sense. You're learning to become this person in real time, and it lands as more than just a mechanics dump.
This is also where you meet the cast, the other 00s in his recruiting class, and the game does a genuinely good job making you connect with them. There's a character named Greenway who comes off as a hard-ass on all the 00s, Bond in particular. But as the game goes on, he becomes a bigger and bigger presence, and there's more to him than the hard exterior he leads with.
After training you start moving through the world for real, and if you're a fan of the Bond aesthetic, you're going to feel at home, the nightclubs, the way you move through and handle situations. Once you're out of the training wheels and into the actual meat of the story, without spoiling anything, it gets very now in tone. Even though this is technically a Bond origin story, it's set in 2026, so the world it's commenting on is very much the current one. Eventually you get your gadgets, your watch, your pen, all the toys. It is very much the world of 007.
The music deserves its own callout. There's an original Bond track by Lana Del Rey, and while I wouldn't call it the best Bond song ever, it feels very Bond, it fits. The little stingers and musical cues throughout the game land really well too, there's a lot of payoff in the score that any Bond fan is going to appreciate.
It's not a perfect game, and I can nitpick. There's a convenience factor at play, big open areas where you can crouch in tall grass and enemies just won't see you even when they're basically right in front of you. You also get buildings that conveniently have human-sized vents you can pop open from ground level. There's a handful of little things like that. I won't dwell on it too much though, because at the end of the day it's just a fun game, and I'm not chasing hardcore realism unless that's clearly the point of the game, which it isn't here.
The controls took some getting used to as well. Running is mapped to R1, which felt a little wonky at first, and the control scheme in general has a learning curve. It's not a deal-breaker at all, I did get used to it eventually, but it's worth flagging going in so you're not caught off guard the way I was.
I did run into some crashes here and there, including one during the climax. The game was very generous with where it saves though, so I didn't lose any meaningful progress.
I played on Normal and put about 16 hours into it casually. This is a great marriage of Uncharted, Hitman, and Bond. It's very much a Bond world, a Bond game, full of Bond-isms. You get little Easter eggs throughout that show the origin of things he says and does in the movies, which is a really cool touch. The ending lands like a classic Bond film, very British, very Bond, ready to head into his next mission.
There's also solid replay value. After finishing it I went back and saw how many challenges exist per chapter to tackle things differently, and the game actually tracks them for you with a little counter showing what you've done and what's left. I don't know yet if I'll fully 100% it, but the replayability is genuinely there, and it's easy to jump back into a specific chapter and try a different approach.
This isn't just a really good game, it's a good Bond story. I loved the Daniel Craig era, I've watched all the Pierce Brosnan movies, and I've seen a number of the Sean Connery and Roger Moore ones too, so I have a real feel for this character. This is a great Bond story. It feels unique and modern, and it's a strong entry point for people who want to get into Bond.
Easy recommend. 007 First Light is a good time.