007 First Light Review - A true James Bond experience
by GamertechAUpublished on
Save the world as baby Bond and explode all the things
Gifted by a viewer (thankfully, cause the base game is 100 freaking dollarydoos), 007 First Light is a damn fine cinematic story exploring how James 'earned the number' and became 007.
The story, the acting, the environment is all top quality and the effort that went into them shows. They all combined to make the game almost an interactive Bond movie. I could easily see the story brought to the big screen and it's obvious there's Bond fans on the dev team.
While brought to us by IO Interactive, don't expect this to be anything like Hitman: WoA. There are some familiar features such as the mission challenge system, but the gameplay leans more towards Uncharted or the newer Tomb Raiders.
Being 2026, there is of course the ever-present Deluxe edition available for purchase, but in this case it's purely cosmetics for the added TacSim mode, and no actual campaign content is locked behind it.
While I loved the game, there are a few issues however, one in particular is extremely noticeable throughout the game, so lets get into it.
Plot
Aircrewman Bond, James Bond of the UK armed forces is deployed to a remote science outpost after contact was lost. Their choppers encounter some fatal resistance and Bond is washed ashore alone.
Turns out the outpost was a top secret MI6 operation that's been taken over by unknown adversaries. With some anonymous governmental oversight, Bond must bring order to the chaos and maybe even get his foot in the door of the newly restarted 00 program.
Learn the trade, explore new locales, meet some friendly women and don't forget to stop a modern, existential threat to MI6 itself.
While it helps to have knowledge of the Bond universe beforehand, it's not required to experience the game. The many references are well-explained during the playthrough.
Gameplay
007 features fairly linear maps that Bond must find his way through to progress the story. There's often multiple paths you can take to get where you're going including both stealth and pew-pew options, but the end goal's always the same.
Progression often involves a fair bit of platforming. Climbing or dropping down platforms, shimmying across ledges etc. If you've played Uncharted/Tomb Raider, you know the mechanic inside and out.
There are some issues with platforming, mainly resulting by it being highly situational. When shimmying along, there's specific places that let you drop down. The game often prevents you from dropping down to flat ground if you're not supposed to be story-wise. Which is not ideal when I need to drop and take out the guy that's filling Bond's spine with lead. You also generally can't fall off platforms and can't jump at all unless at a ledge with a destination in sight. It does limit mobility a bit.
As can be expected, there are often a large number of enemies in between you and your mission. While Bond comes equipped with a licence to kill, he can only use it when the enemy intends to kill him first. If they're just looking to lay some hurt, then Bond cannot use lethal force and must use his fists or a customisable array of Q gadgets and the environment to disable them. Bond is kind of a smart-ass, so expect that to happen a lot.
There are guns absolutely everywhere in combat zones. You can carry one pistol and one rifle type weapon at a time and swap freely between them as needed. There's very little ammunition to find though. Even headshotting every single shot, ammo ran out frequently. Professional mercenaries run up and get taken out without them firing a shot, yet only have 6 bullets in their 30 round assault rifle. Even if there's a surplus in an area, you can also only carry one spare magazine.
The terrain design pushes you to keep on the move in combat, take advantage of environmental hazards and swap weapons frequently to keep supplied. Enemies will ambush you from all sides and vertically and flank around. Though the AI is easy to cheese. They'll cower behind cover until you reload or unsight and immediately re-aim upon which they'll helpfully put their heads in the crosshairs.
Your primary gadgets will be the Q-Lens which overlays the HUD on your vision and identifies useful environmental objects and the Q-Watch, which allows you to hack and control electronics to disable or distract enemies and to open paths for progression.
While there's no hidden tombs to find here, you can discover a fair amount of collectables hidden throughout each level. Sometimes tucked in semi-secret corners or sitting on a desk in plain sight (but easy to miss).
One big pet hate that is unfortunately present throughout the game is taking away control from the player and it happens fairly regularly. Opening an area-trigger door in a combat situation causes Bond to put away his gun and begin an animation of opening the door, stepping through and closing it all the while staring at the bad guys with guns on the other side that aren't happy to see him.
There's also a large number of occasions where the game takes over the camera and points it in a not-ideal direction while preventing control of Bond to react to what's happening. While these occasions are intended so don't endanger your run, it noticeably interrupts the smoothness of the gameplay.
There was also one really big disappointment in the game. I specifically avoid spoilers in these reviews, but with the lead-up in game and IOI's fan-powered adherence to the Bond universe, it is a pretty significant omission. You don't get the car.
While there are a few driving scenes throughout the game with well-developed handling, the game strongly teasing Q's shiny multiple times and many, MANY product placements of a couple of series-staple car manufacturers. Yea, you don't get it. Which sucks. The amount of detail that went into the game, it's honestly surprising. I can only guess that the budget didn't stretch far enough to finish it in time for the story.
At the time of writing there does look to be a future update coming where you can drive Q's baby through what looks to be an obstacle course in the TacSim game mode, but that's it.
Tech
Off the bat, the game is well optimised and runs pretty smoothly. Kind of surprising in 2026, but they honestly did well in this regard. For all the detail, the game also only takes up 53GiB. While still relatively beefy, it's a lot better than most big games released nowadays.
The environment and audio design is cinematic quality and a lot of dev time went into getting it right. The cast also filled their roles spectacularly with great direction.
A big downfall with the graphics however is the default UE5 Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) filter is locked on and makes the game a blurry mess unless you enable some form of upscaling to partially counter it, ie. FSR or DLSS.
To be clear, with a decent PC you don't need upscaling for performance reasons. It's purely to counter the terrible TAA blur.
While DLSS is the newest bleeding edge, the FSR implementation is a fairly old and long-since replaced version, and is also directly embedded into the game code rather than the recommended dll file which prevents users from easily upgrading it themselves. For whatever reason, Intel's XeSS isn't present in the game.
I did experience a couple of crashes during Moneypenny's briefings before a mission on the 1.0.1 version. The game looks to be loading the next area during the cutscene for a seamless movie-like transition and something's going wrong there. Reloading the game and running through the cutscene again works fine, as the data's already cached. These crashes were apparently fixed in the 1.0.2 update.
Aside from the crashes specifically in the briefings, the game was extremely stable.
Recommendation
The big thing here is the price to hours ratio. AU$100/US$70 for ~15 hours of (admittedly stellar) campaign is a fair bit of an ask, especially in 2026. Between the actors, the Amazon-owned Bond IP and the cars, I'd say they had a lot of expensive licences to cover in the making of 007 First Light.
The experience is excellent and the devs and actors put a lot of work into it, but I can't really justify buying it at full price. I strongly recommend getting the game, but waiting for further patches and perhaps a sale wouldn't go astray.