007 First Light Review
007 First Light is easily the best and most balanced Bond game of all time coming from someone who bought a N64 immediately after seeing Goldeneye running on a department store Kiosk.
With it’s high levels of production, compelling gameplay and engaging story, First Light doesn’t compete with other Bond games, it competes with the Bond cinematic universe. However, just like James Bond, 007 First Light has some flaws.
Even though First Light has all of the prerequisites for an enthralling Bond experience like weapons, cars, gadgets, globetrotting and geo-political espionage making it feel like a massive step forward for Bond games, it also feels like a slight step backwards from the gameplay that IOI have been become known for as it removes a lot of the freedom and improvisation that the Hitman series hung its hat on.
So how does the entire experience stack up and where does First Light rank in the pantheon of Bond games.
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007 FIRST LIGHT REVIEW
In 007 First Light, you begin the journey as James, a young crewman in the Queen’s Navy and not as the infamous Bond that you might have become familiar with over the years, because you haven’t earned the number yet. Very smartly, First Light isn’t trying to capture a specific Bond likeness or re-tell an existing storyline. Instead, First Light is a reimagined origin story that redefines what an origin story should be as you’re quickly thrown into the deep end, literally.
Within minutes, the helicopter carrying James and his fellow soldiers that’s flying over is ambushed and shot down by a missile over the frigid ocean waters. James awakens from the crash at the bottom of the ocean and miraculously makes his way to shore, only now the enemy has come to make sure there are no survivors. After narrowly escaping capture, James now finds himself in deep water once again, only this time it’s metaphorically. He finds some comms and becomes quickly immersed in the world of espionage that is well above his pay grade. Staying true to the character, James disobeys direct orders to risk everything including his life to save the innocent hostages and all this happens before the iconic Bond intro.
After you complete the prologue mission, James is recruited by the MI6 program which offers what might be one of the best tutorials ever in a game. The tutorial is given to you through a montage of James going through the 00 training program as one second you’re driving a car and the next second you’re sparring with other classmates. It works so well because tutorials and backstories typically slow down an experience, but since this is uncharted territory it passes in what feels like the blink of an eye.
Once basic training is over, you quickly learn of a rogue MI6 agent and a deep conspiracy and the recruits are thrown into the field. From here, James will be taken all around the world and each mission is approached in a very similar sandbox way to Hitman, but with a few minor changes. For starters, the game encourages you to use a stealth approach whether that be through sneaking, eavesdropping, using the negotiating skills James has, being resourceful with the environment, or using your Q-Watch, which is a Bond-ified Omega with lasers, electric charges and chemical darts. There will also be a healthy amount of puzzle platforming around that feels very Uncharted as Bond easily shimmies from edge to edge.
If it comes to it, which it will, James is also pretty adept at hand to hand combat as you can quickly incapacitate an enemy from sneaking up behind or get in a fist fight as you learn to parry and dodge specific attacks. James can also use weapons, but is only granted a license to kill once his life has been endangered.
One feature that separated First Light from other stealth games including Hitman is how each section of the sandbox is slightly sectioned off. The checkpoints are great, but being caught doesn’t immediately alert the entire map. It’s usually just the guards nearby and if you can sort them out quickly, they also wont have the ability to call for reinforcements. At the top of the screen will be a display for what type of environment you are in and it will notify you when you are trespassing in yellow or when you’re cover has been blown in red.
When cover gets blown, you have an opportunity to “contain the situation” by either eliminating all the guards with lethal or non lethal methods or even escape to the next area where the indicator will become green again. Bond isn’t a one many army and bullets will quickly run out, which means that you will constantly need to be resourceful in the field and find new weapons if you want to stay alive.
In between each mission there are some lengthy cutscenes that give the plot some depth. The story is highly engaging, complex and isn’t out of its league in a post Casino Royale world. The chapters blend seamlessly as you move from one location to the next, the performances are exquisite with a special mention for Lennie James, who serves as Bond’s mentor Greenway, and the soundtrack is phenomenal, complete with a fantastic Lana Del Ray title song.
CRITICISMS
IO interactive made their name creating huge, incredible sandboxes that allowed the player to approach each mission as they wanted. In First Light, it feels as though they removed some of the freedoms from the player. You’re limited to only having one primary weapon and one during combat, you can’t hide bodies or even move them, you can only use a few predetermined items as weapons such as bottles and there are only a handful of ways to approach each mission. Sometimes when you know what to do, the game wont let you do it until you get a certain piece of information. One time I needed a lab coat, so I went to the change rooms, but I had to overhear one of the employees say they lost their locker key card first.
The overall cadence of the game is great as you move seamlessly between major chapters, but there are a handful of missions that put too many steps between you and the objective, which can really bog down the pacing. There is one at the beginning where a suspect you are a few steps behind keeps changing outfits, so every time you get close, it moves the goalposts. Something similar happens again later when you need to keep opening up security doors as you are escorting something who can’t take the same path that James uses and it feels like there is always one more door. Another pacing issue is that a lot of the ways that you will need to complete the mission through stealth as the game wants you to requires resources, which seems very anti super-spy.
A lot of the times a mission will devolve into hand to hand combat, which is the same during the first fight as it is during the last, which is unfortunate as you’ll either need to parry or dodge. You also have unlimited stamina and no way to target a specific enemy, which can make fights with a handful of enemies less precise. The real combat issue is the camera. During hand to hand combat as it usually takes place in smaller environments with walls and pillars constantly getting in the way.
As a reimagining of an origin story with carte blanche, I think they failed to explore what makes James tick, failed to give us a deeper look into his origins before he joined the Royal Navy. Leading into the release of the game, there was a lot of talk about how James had to watch both of his parents die during a climbing expedition when he was 11 and had to survive the descent alone. This was completely unexplored during First Light.
Finally, I think Patrick Gibson who plays Bond gives a great performance, but he lacks charisma. I don’t think this is intended because charisma is something that you have or don’t and can’t learn it through training. It’s understandable that he’s a little messy, doesn’t always do the right things and lacks confidence, these are all things that will come with time, but every other version of James Bond had charisma in their own ways.
Final Thoughts and Score
The litmus test for 007 First Light is what would it be without the Bond license? What would it be without the Aston Martins, the Omega watches, Lana Del Ray intro song, and the decades of established characters?
If you stripped away the IP, what’s left underneath is a very good action-adventure, but the addition of one of the most iconic characters of all time means that 007 First Light supplants Goldeneye as the undisputed best Bond game.
007 First Light feels like one of those imaginary scenarios where you try to name a studio and the dream game they could make. There is no studio better suited to make a James Bond game at the moment, as IOI have been preparing for this moment for the last decade since they rebooted Hitman in 2016 and trading in a piano wire for a license to kill turns a dream scenario into a reality.
