007 First Light review: you can finally put the N64 away, the next great Bond game’s here

James Bond, like his cinematic fellows Aliens and Lord of the Rings, is a property that seems a slam dunk for videogames until you actually play the games and realise that at least half of them are abominable. It should be so easy – Aston Martin, tuxedo, pistol, one liners, gadget watch, heavy accents of indeterminate origin – and yet for every GoldenEye there are three 007 Legends.

That’s important to keep in mind as Io Interactive’s playable origin story of the world’s most conspicuous secret agent arrives, because it’s the first time we’ve seen Ian Fleming’s character at such a young age. More than simply a chance to bomb around in a DBS Vantage (and, preposterously, a weaponised Valhalla), it’s a rare opportunity for us to get to know a timeless character a bit better, and an equally rare chance for Io’s writers to add some fresh context and complexity to him. Please don’t be rubbish, please don’t be rubbish…

It’s not rubbish. It’s a rather masterful piece of game-making and storytelling, actually. One that knows when to emulate the movies and send you headlong into big, dumb fun, and when it’s time to calm things down and place young James in a more grounded setting. The missions zip along at a pace that feels like a playable Bond movie, but they do still allow you the occasional moment of reflection. It’s that pacing, along with the immaculate mechanics of its semi-stealthy action adventure gameplay, that discern this baby-faced Bond from his more forgettable ancestors.

The setup: like all helicopters that appear in cutscenes at the start of videogame missions, the one you’re on is about to be shot down, leaving you stranded and surrounded by mercenaries on a chilly Icelandic night. Contacted by MI6 via your earpiece, you’re guided to retrieve a [classified] because it [classified] and if it fell into the wrong hands the whole world would be utterly [classified]. And just like that, the shivering, injured airman becomes a secret agent.

The opening hour might have you questioning whether this feels sufficiently Bond-y, mind you. Triple-A is a genre unto itself in modern gaming, which means that whether you’re Nathan Drake, Lara Croft or MI6’s fussiest martini drinker, once the production values are ratcheted up high enough you find yourself doing largely similar things. Climbing and jumping around on rock formations with handily colour-coded lips which indicate which bits are climbable. Hiding from eastern European guards behind waist-high cover. Squeezing through tight passageways that disguise loading screens. You know the sort of thing.

But this does make sense, in context. Bond’s not yet equipped with the gadgets that define his viewer-friendly approach to espionage. The opening might feel a bit broadly defined and familiar, but that works in First Light’s favour in the long run.

Because within two (particularly wonderful) hours, you’ve been recruited, trained up, given a field test and deployed into action. The gameplay changes as James does, from borderline generic action to a slick, gadget-heavy style with social stealth elements. You become Bond.

There are new ideas in here that really show Io’s talents. Where most games frogmarch you through a tutorial of the controls, this one turns it into a training montage. You learn all the inputs, all the things Bond can do in the world, but in a sequence of tight, choppy vignettes within a Maltese training facility.

Later, First Light puts a new spin on another triple-A-as-a-genre staple: the ‘focus mode’ camera where time slows, everyone becomes silhouetted and you can see through walls. It’s first introduced during a field test, sprung on Bond and his fellow graduates as they celebrate passing basic training with a night out, and it might feel tired to be wandering another crowded space tracking down colour-coded silhouettes if Bond didn’t also have tech gadgetry up his sleeve to mess with his targets when he finds them.

Over ten missions, which trot you across the globe’s most glamorous and clandestine locations, you learn the rhythms of being Bond: a staple diet of sneaking, balletic fisticuffs when spotted, haring around in a pleasing selection of British automotive machinery and brazenly strolling around while hidden in crowds in order to disrupt one technical doohickey with another. For your part, you can unlock and equip gadgets before each mission to match your preferred playstyle, although this is certainly no immersive sim so keep your 0451 keypad codes to yourself and just enjoy the expertly scripted linearity.

Because along that narrow path, there are bar fights, tense infiltrations into secret labs, the obligatory visits to Q’s lab to prod at prototypes that aren’t field-ready, luxury hotel stays and the aforementioned Valhalla and its machine guns. How refreshing it feels to be playing a game that isn’t trying to trap you in its thrall for eternity so that you keep buying battle passes and collecting skins. Io has plans to add more TacSim missions as post-launch content, but the release product isn’t diluted by filler.

Tonally it’s a matter of taste. There are moments where the modernity feels jarring, like hearing Moneypenny call our hero a b*ll**d, or watching him stroll around a Vietnamese hotel dressed ready for a Reiss summer sale photoshoot.

But you only have to go back and actually watch the 1970s cinematic material to be reminded that, yes, this IP absolutely does need to be modernised and there are challenges to that task which a Daniel Craig pout alone can’t solve. Patrick Gibson in the lead role finds the right balance between suave Bond-to-be and incredulous rookie, and his rapport with Kiera Lester’s Moneypenney and Priyanga Burford’s M in particular help the script to land as fresh and acerbic as intended, rather than hammy or overly beholden to the cinematic source material.

We can’t let you leave without shouting about how fantastic this game looks. How fantastic? So fantastic that we stopped to move the camera around James’ leather jacket for about 30 seconds in a lift. Leather has simply never looked this leathery before. At macro or micro scale, First Light’s world is teeming with detail and world-enriching mise-en-scene, and although they might seem like small touches when you’re shoving a mercenary into them, driving a DBS over them or blowing them up, they go a long way towards convincing your monkey brain that this is your personal 007 flick.

That’s a lot of very strong component parts, isn’t it? Consider this your mission briefing, then: go and play it.