James Bond is no stranger to video games, but has only lived up to the prestige of his films once with GoldenEye 64, a game beloved for its pioneering first-person-shooter design, generation-defining multiplayer, and absurdly good soundtrack.
Although the Bond games that followed it never received the same level of acclaim, they still enjoyed some success. In a medium fixated on coming up with new ways to make firing guns and employing gadgets fun, it's no surprise that Bond games sustained interest through multiple eras. The fantasy of being a secret agent--James Bond in particular--is enduring, and the wish-fulfillment opportunities video games present are unmatched.
GoldenEye 64 aside, Bond games haven't been where innovations happen in the spy game genre. However, the effectiveness with which they realize the fantasy of being a globe-trotting, gun-toting, silver-tongued cop in a tuxedo has often offered good markers of how the action genre's design and tastes around it have evolved. After 2004's Everything or Nothing, however, Bond games became mediocre tie-ins, nostalgia bait, or both.
That's why the announcement of 007 First Light felt so monumental. Sure, it was exciting to see Bond back in games, but it was the involvement of IO Interactive that was most meaningful to me. The developer's Hitman games, which star a globe-trotting, gun-toting, silver-tongued, lab-grown cop in a tuxedo, who also happens to have a codename ending in seven, are Bond in all but name.
It's rare for a pairing this exciting to actually materialize but, somehow, it has. IO Interactive, which is, in my opinion, the undisputed master of modern video game secret agenting, has the keys to the world's most iconic secret agent. With that in mind, the question I had before going hands-on with First Light wasn't whether video games have enough new ideas to make a Bond game interesting, but instead how IO Interactive was going to do Bond with the abundance of interesting ideas and innovations it has. The answer, it turns out, is with a good deal of restraint.
The core principles and defining characteristics of James Bond map so naturally onto the open-world, hunt-and-kill design of World of Assasination that doing Hitman-but-with-Bond seems like the obvious and winning strategy. However, while playing the First Light campaign, it became clear that IO is instead trying to marry the cinematic storytelling and presentation of Bond with the sandbox of Hitman. Without careful implementation, those two objectives could undermine each other, as that movie-like feel requires taking control away from the player to some degree to narrow the focus. And yet, a good secret agent game requires a certain amount of agency.
What I played of First Light is quintessential IO Interactive and, at various points, Hitman. Based on the three missions I completed, though, it's more of a blend of old Hitman and new. IO's approach seems to be to take players through linear sections that funnel into sandboxes and then back, on loop. This ensures players are getting both the movie-like explosive action and set-pieces, but also the thinking-on-your-feet style of problem-solving that is authentic to 007 as a character and leverages IO's Hitman design principles. It's not Hitman-but-with-Bond but rather Hitman-and-Uncharted-but-with-Bond, even if that is being a bit reductive.
Both pieces of the puzzle, as well as how they fit together, are on display in First Light's opening mission, which begins the story of a young James Bond in spectacular fashion. At this point in his career, James is in the British Royal Naval Reserve but gets mixed up in an against-all-odds mission that will put him on MI6's radar. The chopper he's in with some fellow troops is unexpectedly brought down and Bond emerges from the wreckage surrounded by enemies on the hunt for him. MI6 contacts him and takes control of the mission, directing James to head to a nearby camp where their people have been holed up doing ... something. Suffice to say, it was on a need-to-know basis, and James didn't need to know.
As James, I dashed behind cover, avoiding the search parties investigating the crash site, picking my moments to slip from one sticky, waist-high obstruction to the next until I was out of immediate danger. From there, I had to hop small gaps, clamber up walls, and shimmy across ledges in the mountainous outskirts of the encampment.
Again, it's fairly common stuff, but this guided path effectively built an immediate sense of adventure and tension by orchestrating the action. It was also a good opportunity to get a feel for what kind of person this new and original take on a young James Bond is. Unsurprisingly, he's roguishly charming--engaging with some playful banter with the handler directing him in his ear; he isn't approaching the situation with the care it perhaps warrant, given that it quickly becomes clear that there is a dangerous nerve agent at play and a whole bunch of innocent hostages to factor in.
He is unmistakably James Bond, but an unpolished version of who we know he will become. The Bond we know isn't exactly a clean operator, but there's a precise and calculated quality to the mischief he causes. In First Light, however, he feels brasher, choosing to act fast and roll with the punches as best he can. After being told to get to a safe extraction point, James instead opts to find and rescue the hostages against the advice of his handler. Here is where things open up a bit more, as the camp is made up of a number of buildings and tents, with armed mercenaries patrolling. The player has a small degree of freedom in figuring out where the hostages are held and with the added requirement of staying hidden, there was some great hide-and-seek stealthing that, at times, reminded me of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes.
While First Light doesn't offer the same kind of mechanical depth at this stage as Ground Zeroes, it does have the same kind of high-stakes tension in a tight environment--one where you're not totally sure if you're about to walk into a room or turn a corner into the barrel of an enemy's rifle. After freeing two groups of hostages, James orchestrates a camp-wide explosion that serves as a sign for the captives to make a run for safety, while also causing enough of a hubbub to cover his own exfiltration, which turns into a high-octane chase on foot, where bullets are narrowly dodged and a few very unlucky mercenaries meet their end at the hands of a buggy exploding in their face.
It's a strong start to the game but, more than that, it was a good taste of First Light's overall format: that linear-to-open funnel that I mentioned earlier. In the same way that you can recognize that every mission Bond undertakes in movies and books is scripted yet still feel that unrelenting tension while watching Bond's brand of chaos unfold, this mission successfully walked the line between guiding with an invisible hand and offering just enough room to move to ensure things don't feel on-rails.
If that mission was akin to an Uncharted or, more appropriately, Hitman: Absolution, the second mission introduced some of the freedom and flexibility that brings Hitman: Blood Money to mind. The mission took me and James to Malta where, amidst the pristine blue of the Mediterranean Sea, the dilapidated remains of limestone buildings have been repurposed to serve as an M16 assault course for assessing 00-agents in training. Think Fort Boyard but with less Melinda Messenger and more Lennie James (Snatch, Fear the Walking Dead).
The Advanced Training test requires James to reach a flag positioned at the top of a building. To get to it, I needed to weave between obstacles, avoid enemies, and use whatever tools were available to me to get the job done. It is a test of lateral thinking, as another prospective 00-agent told me, and to help my efforts, I was introduced to a nifty little gadget: a watch. Like all items created by Q-Labs, the watch is enabled with extra features that, in gameplay, translate to being able to manipulate the environments and thus, the enemies within them.
I started by using the watch to interface with a lock and open a gate. When I walked through, a familiar rule popped up on screen: "Being spotted in a trespassing area leads to confrontation and combat encounters." This multi-stage alert system carries over from various Hitman games and, as in those games, creates a set of boundaries for players to operate in. When outside of trespassing areas, Bond, like Agent 47 before him, can wander around relatively freely, sticking his nose into corners and crevices to find safe spots, overhear conversations, seek out leads, and generally gather information used to achieve his objective. Once you're spotted crossing those boundaries, however, the jig is up and you'll have to deal with the consequences.
However, there's a really interesting twist on this format that is particularly clever in the way it brings in an iconic part of being James Bond while also gently encouraging players to adopt a specific style of play. It's a very small tweak that has a pretty big impact: License to Kill.
By default, the missions I played began in a neutral state, where James hadn't aroused suspicions and was free to wander. Although it's by no means a requirement, the game generally wants you to try to remain inconspicuous by being stealthy. However, when someone doesn't like the look of what they are seeing, there's a natural transition to a confrontational state. In Hitman, your choices are to either go on the offense, which escalates things dramatically, or try to leg it, hide, and hope that no one follows. Agent 47 has a bunch of ways to do this: He can hide inside objects like lockers, put on disguises, or break line of sight in other ways, like hanging off ledges. James isn't a big disguise guy, but he is a smooth talker, so players have the option to bluff their way out of a situation.
In a later mission, there was a moment where I crashed through a door and into a room, alerting a nearby guard, who spun around to look at me. I immediately hit the bluff button and, without missing a beat, James launched into a breathless query about whether the guard had seen a woman running through the area, presenting himself as someone on the security team presumably pursuing a threat. The guard, somewhat confused, gingerly answered the question, and before anything else could happen, I was out of there, having completely diffused the situation. This is a key part of James's skillset that, thanks to excellent acting and delivery, embodies the charm, humor, and holy-crap-how-did-that-work nature that is essentially James Bond's superpower. On the few occasions that I used the strategy, it always put a smile on my face and relief on my spiked heartrate.
Of course, there are situations where bluffing isn't available to you or it simply does not work. In these moments, there's a decided shift in what the game allows and generally wants you to do, though, again, it is not compulsory. When the enemy shows intent to kill you, a message pops up at the top of the screen informing the player they are now "licensed to kill." From that point on, you're free to use firearms and employ lethal force. What I really appreciated was the way James's whole demeanor changes, going from a suave stealth operative to a reckless agent of death and destruction. Instead of opening doors like normal, you explode through them by front-kicking them open; some obstacles can similarly be kicked over and pushed around to give yourself moving cover; there's a time-slowing feature that lets you wield firearms with pinpoint accuracy and, if you get close enough, you can club targets over the head with the guns in brutal fashion.
The environments, often littered with things that can give you the edge, become part of your rampage. You can shoot a fire extinguisher to confuse enemies or give yourself cover, grab a small object off a nearby table and throw it at an enemy instantly and with pinpoint precision (you don't have to aim, like in Hitman), before rushing down the dazed enemy to shoulder check them into a wall and then slide into cover next to a doorway. There are so many little flourishes that had me giggling with glee when I saw them. One of them involved sprinting through a room, after noticing I had run out of bullets just as an enemy emerged from behind cover, launching my gun to hit the unsuspecting lad in the head. I sprinted towards him, noticing that he dropped his weapon, hit the button to pick it up and, seamlessly, James flicked the gun up and into his hand without breaking stride, and I threw myself into cover. It was one of those moments that feels so cool that you want to look around to see if anyone saw it happen.
The watch also comes to use in combat, as it has a function that lets James blind enemies by firing a laser into their eyes, stunning them and leaving them at your mercy. You can also fire a little poison dart to make targets feel unwell that, in combat, creates an opening to attack, and outside of combat has the versatility to perhaps open a guarded pathway or move someone into a different area that is more advantageous to your schemes.
The recent Hitman games have similar systems, but there's a level of fluidity to the way it all plays out in First Light that is unlike anything Agent 47 has been capable of. Although I am someone who primarily plays stealth when given the option--yes, I will habitually restart from checkpoints the moment I'm spotted--I found myself uninclined to play with my usual rigid clean-hands/ghost style and instead relished the opportunity to get my hands dirty. It felt so dynamic and exhilarating to go from slow and methodical to everything-is-on-fire and watch all the mechanical gears fire up and come together in such a smooth way.
One particularly impressive differentiating factor from Hitman is the way the melee combat works. Whereas I'd describe Agent 47's melee skills as functional at best, Bond's combat is far more robust. Though it's cliche to evoke the Batman: Arkham series as a point of comparison, it is undoubtedly the foundation on which IO Interactive has built the combat. The attack and counter flow of it is similarly smooth, but it's the way James moves between attacking enemies and implementing combos in his assaults, to using the environment in a way that feels satisfyingly improvisational. It makes the game's action feel utterly transcendent--so much so that it sometimes feels as if I'm embodying John Wick or Rama from The Raid: Redemption rather than Bond.
During one encounter at James's home, I was set upon by assassins and had to fight my way through my quaint little flat and out onto the rooftops. What the claustrophobic kitchen space wasn't able to provide in room to move, it overdelivered on things to chuck at my would-be assassin--and chuck I did. I can't even remember what the objects were, just that I repeatedly hit the button and sent a barrage of innocuous junk crashing into the enemy, before closing the gap, grabbing him by the head, and slamming it against the wall. It looked and felt awesome.
The Batman influences don't just stop with the combat. One boss fight, the details of which I'll avoid for the sake of spoilers, was a straight-up James Bond version of the often lauded Mr. Freeze fight. With an enemy stalking me through a dark warehouse, I crouched and walked around, under, through, and behind objects like shelves, statues, large crates, and more, luring the enemy within range of environmental hazards I triggered using my watch. They either blinded him or otherwise incapacitated him long enough for me to put a brief but brutal beatdown on him, before escaping into the shadows. First Light not only does the Mr. Freeze fight, but does it well.
All of these various gameplay mechanics and features came together for the final of the three missions I played, which takes the openness and intricate construction of a Hitman: World of Assassination mission and elevates it with all the twists and tweaks IO Interactive has implemented for Bond. The mission involved infiltrating a gala for Webb Industries' 125th Anniversary, and it was IO doing what it does best by constructing a dense space that serves as a sandbox where players can choose how they want to approach their objectives. Each objective is made up of multiple smaller pathways to completion, discovered by finding clues in the environment, chasing leads, and creating opportunities, accommodating it all with a flexible and reactive world that adjusts and adapts to your behaviour.
Gallery
I snuck my way into the gala, a sore thumb wearing a casual jacket and pants wandering in the midst of the beauty and glitz of upper-class society, by stealing an invite from a rich rube who wasn't paying attention. My goal was to locate a specific person and, to do that, I talked to a bartender and got a drink, chatted up a rather forward woman, overheard a PR person waiting for a reporter to give them an exclusive with access to a special area of the location, talked to a guard annoyed that a colleague was missing, posed as the head of security to trick said guard into leaving his post, poisoned a waiter to get a passcode from a tablet, and found a camera so I could pose as a photographer. And this wasn't all part of a single chain. They were pieces of different ways I could have done things, some of which connected together, others which I didn't see through, but left excited to try when I next get to play the game.
That is all to say that, based on what I played, 007 First Light is shaping up to be a phenomenal IO Interactive game through and through. It takes everything the developer has learned from many years of creating, refining, iterating, and evolving Hitman games, and puts the pieces that make the most sense together to create a James Bond game that could end up being one of the best games of the year, and also the best James Bond game ever created. 007 First Light could be the culmination of IO Interactive's vision for modern sandbox action games, as well as a spectacular payoff for a 16-year audition to make a James Bond game.
Source
Although the Bond games that followed it never received the same level of acclaim, they still enjoyed some success. In a medium fixated on coming up with new ways to make firing guns and employing gadgets fun, it's no surprise that Bond games sustained interest through multiple eras. The fantasy of being a secret agent--James Bond in particular--is enduring, and the wish-fulfillment opportunities video games present are unmatched.
GoldenEye 64 aside, Bond games haven't been where innovations happen in the spy game genre. However, the effectiveness with which they realize the fantasy of being a globe-trotting, gun-toting, silver-tongued cop in a tuxedo has often offered good markers of how the action genre's design and tastes around it have evolved. After 2004's Everything or Nothing, however, Bond games became mediocre tie-ins, nostalgia bait, or both.
That's why the announcement of 007 First Light felt so monumental. Sure, it was exciting to see Bond back in games, but it was the involvement of IO Interactive that was most meaningful to me. The developer's Hitman games, which star a globe-trotting, gun-toting, silver-tongued, lab-grown cop in a tuxedo, who also happens to have a codename ending in seven, are Bond in all but name.
It's rare for a pairing this exciting to actually materialize but, somehow, it has. IO Interactive, which is, in my opinion, the undisputed master of modern video game secret agenting, has the keys to the world's most iconic secret agent. With that in mind, the question I had before going hands-on with First Light wasn't whether video games have enough new ideas to make a Bond game interesting, but instead how IO Interactive was going to do Bond with the abundance of interesting ideas and innovations it has. The answer, it turns out, is with a good deal of restraint.
The core principles and defining characteristics of James Bond map so naturally onto the open-world, hunt-and-kill design of World of Assasination that doing Hitman-but-with-Bond seems like the obvious and winning strategy. However, while playing the First Light campaign, it became clear that IO is instead trying to marry the cinematic storytelling and presentation of Bond with the sandbox of Hitman. Without careful implementation, those two objectives could undermine each other, as that movie-like feel requires taking control away from the player to some degree to narrow the focus. And yet, a good secret agent game requires a certain amount of agency.
What I played of First Light is quintessential IO Interactive and, at various points, Hitman. Based on the three missions I completed, though, it's more of a blend of old Hitman and new. IO's approach seems to be to take players through linear sections that funnel into sandboxes and then back, on loop. This ensures players are getting both the movie-like explosive action and set-pieces, but also the thinking-on-your-feet style of problem-solving that is authentic to 007 as a character and leverages IO's Hitman design principles. It's not Hitman-but-with-Bond but rather Hitman-and-Uncharted-but-with-Bond, even if that is being a bit reductive.
Both pieces of the puzzle, as well as how they fit together, are on display in First Light's opening mission, which begins the story of a young James Bond in spectacular fashion. At this point in his career, James is in the British Royal Naval Reserve but gets mixed up in an against-all-odds mission that will put him on MI6's radar. The chopper he's in with some fellow troops is unexpectedly brought down and Bond emerges from the wreckage surrounded by enemies on the hunt for him. MI6 contacts him and takes control of the mission, directing James to head to a nearby camp where their people have been holed up doing ... something. Suffice to say, it was on a need-to-know basis, and James didn't need to know.
As James, I dashed behind cover, avoiding the search parties investigating the crash site, picking my moments to slip from one sticky, waist-high obstruction to the next until I was out of immediate danger. From there, I had to hop small gaps, clamber up walls, and shimmy across ledges in the mountainous outskirts of the encampment.
Again, it's fairly common stuff, but this guided path effectively built an immediate sense of adventure and tension by orchestrating the action. It was also a good opportunity to get a feel for what kind of person this new and original take on a young James Bond is. Unsurprisingly, he's roguishly charming--engaging with some playful banter with the handler directing him in his ear; he isn't approaching the situation with the care it perhaps warrant, given that it quickly becomes clear that there is a dangerous nerve agent at play and a whole bunch of innocent hostages to factor in.
He is unmistakably James Bond, but an unpolished version of who we know he will become. The Bond we know isn't exactly a clean operator, but there's a precise and calculated quality to the mischief he causes. In First Light, however, he feels brasher, choosing to act fast and roll with the punches as best he can. After being told to get to a safe extraction point, James instead opts to find and rescue the hostages against the advice of his handler. Here is where things open up a bit more, as the camp is made up of a number of buildings and tents, with armed mercenaries patrolling. The player has a small degree of freedom in figuring out where the hostages are held and with the added requirement of staying hidden, there was some great hide-and-seek stealthing that, at times, reminded me of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes.
While First Light doesn't offer the same kind of mechanical depth at this stage as Ground Zeroes, it does have the same kind of high-stakes tension in a tight environment--one where you're not totally sure if you're about to walk into a room or turn a corner into the barrel of an enemy's rifle. After freeing two groups of hostages, James orchestrates a camp-wide explosion that serves as a sign for the captives to make a run for safety, while also causing enough of a hubbub to cover his own exfiltration, which turns into a high-octane chase on foot, where bullets are narrowly dodged and a few very unlucky mercenaries meet their end at the hands of a buggy exploding in their face.
It's a strong start to the game but, more than that, it was a good taste of First Light's overall format: that linear-to-open funnel that I mentioned earlier. In the same way that you can recognize that every mission Bond undertakes in movies and books is scripted yet still feel that unrelenting tension while watching Bond's brand of chaos unfold, this mission successfully walked the line between guiding with an invisible hand and offering just enough room to move to ensure things don't feel on-rails.
If that mission was akin to an Uncharted or, more appropriately, Hitman: Absolution, the second mission introduced some of the freedom and flexibility that brings Hitman: Blood Money to mind. The mission took me and James to Malta where, amidst the pristine blue of the Mediterranean Sea, the dilapidated remains of limestone buildings have been repurposed to serve as an M16 assault course for assessing 00-agents in training. Think Fort Boyard but with less Melinda Messenger and more Lennie James (Snatch, Fear the Walking Dead).
The Advanced Training test requires James to reach a flag positioned at the top of a building. To get to it, I needed to weave between obstacles, avoid enemies, and use whatever tools were available to me to get the job done. It is a test of lateral thinking, as another prospective 00-agent told me, and to help my efforts, I was introduced to a nifty little gadget: a watch. Like all items created by Q-Labs, the watch is enabled with extra features that, in gameplay, translate to being able to manipulate the environments and thus, the enemies within them.
I started by using the watch to interface with a lock and open a gate. When I walked through, a familiar rule popped up on screen: "Being spotted in a trespassing area leads to confrontation and combat encounters." This multi-stage alert system carries over from various Hitman games and, as in those games, creates a set of boundaries for players to operate in. When outside of trespassing areas, Bond, like Agent 47 before him, can wander around relatively freely, sticking his nose into corners and crevices to find safe spots, overhear conversations, seek out leads, and generally gather information used to achieve his objective. Once you're spotted crossing those boundaries, however, the jig is up and you'll have to deal with the consequences.
However, there's a really interesting twist on this format that is particularly clever in the way it brings in an iconic part of being James Bond while also gently encouraging players to adopt a specific style of play. It's a very small tweak that has a pretty big impact: License to Kill.
By default, the missions I played began in a neutral state, where James hadn't aroused suspicions and was free to wander. Although it's by no means a requirement, the game generally wants you to try to remain inconspicuous by being stealthy. However, when someone doesn't like the look of what they are seeing, there's a natural transition to a confrontational state. In Hitman, your choices are to either go on the offense, which escalates things dramatically, or try to leg it, hide, and hope that no one follows. Agent 47 has a bunch of ways to do this: He can hide inside objects like lockers, put on disguises, or break line of sight in other ways, like hanging off ledges. James isn't a big disguise guy, but he is a smooth talker, so players have the option to bluff their way out of a situation.
In a later mission, there was a moment where I crashed through a door and into a room, alerting a nearby guard, who spun around to look at me. I immediately hit the bluff button and, without missing a beat, James launched into a breathless query about whether the guard had seen a woman running through the area, presenting himself as someone on the security team presumably pursuing a threat. The guard, somewhat confused, gingerly answered the question, and before anything else could happen, I was out of there, having completely diffused the situation. This is a key part of James's skillset that, thanks to excellent acting and delivery, embodies the charm, humor, and holy-crap-how-did-that-work nature that is essentially James Bond's superpower. On the few occasions that I used the strategy, it always put a smile on my face and relief on my spiked heartrate.
Of course, there are situations where bluffing isn't available to you or it simply does not work. In these moments, there's a decided shift in what the game allows and generally wants you to do, though, again, it is not compulsory. When the enemy shows intent to kill you, a message pops up at the top of the screen informing the player they are now "licensed to kill." From that point on, you're free to use firearms and employ lethal force. What I really appreciated was the way James's whole demeanor changes, going from a suave stealth operative to a reckless agent of death and destruction. Instead of opening doors like normal, you explode through them by front-kicking them open; some obstacles can similarly be kicked over and pushed around to give yourself moving cover; there's a time-slowing feature that lets you wield firearms with pinpoint accuracy and, if you get close enough, you can club targets over the head with the guns in brutal fashion.
The environments, often littered with things that can give you the edge, become part of your rampage. You can shoot a fire extinguisher to confuse enemies or give yourself cover, grab a small object off a nearby table and throw it at an enemy instantly and with pinpoint precision (you don't have to aim, like in Hitman), before rushing down the dazed enemy to shoulder check them into a wall and then slide into cover next to a doorway. There are so many little flourishes that had me giggling with glee when I saw them. One of them involved sprinting through a room, after noticing I had run out of bullets just as an enemy emerged from behind cover, launching my gun to hit the unsuspecting lad in the head. I sprinted towards him, noticing that he dropped his weapon, hit the button to pick it up and, seamlessly, James flicked the gun up and into his hand without breaking stride, and I threw myself into cover. It was one of those moments that feels so cool that you want to look around to see if anyone saw it happen.
The watch also comes to use in combat, as it has a function that lets James blind enemies by firing a laser into their eyes, stunning them and leaving them at your mercy. You can also fire a little poison dart to make targets feel unwell that, in combat, creates an opening to attack, and outside of combat has the versatility to perhaps open a guarded pathway or move someone into a different area that is more advantageous to your schemes.
The recent Hitman games have similar systems, but there's a level of fluidity to the way it all plays out in First Light that is unlike anything Agent 47 has been capable of. Although I am someone who primarily plays stealth when given the option--yes, I will habitually restart from checkpoints the moment I'm spotted--I found myself uninclined to play with my usual rigid clean-hands/ghost style and instead relished the opportunity to get my hands dirty. It felt so dynamic and exhilarating to go from slow and methodical to everything-is-on-fire and watch all the mechanical gears fire up and come together in such a smooth way.
One particularly impressive differentiating factor from Hitman is the way the melee combat works. Whereas I'd describe Agent 47's melee skills as functional at best, Bond's combat is far more robust. Though it's cliche to evoke the Batman: Arkham series as a point of comparison, it is undoubtedly the foundation on which IO Interactive has built the combat. The attack and counter flow of it is similarly smooth, but it's the way James moves between attacking enemies and implementing combos in his assaults, to using the environment in a way that feels satisfyingly improvisational. It makes the game's action feel utterly transcendent--so much so that it sometimes feels as if I'm embodying John Wick or Rama from The Raid: Redemption rather than Bond.
During one encounter at James's home, I was set upon by assassins and had to fight my way through my quaint little flat and out onto the rooftops. What the claustrophobic kitchen space wasn't able to provide in room to move, it overdelivered on things to chuck at my would-be assassin--and chuck I did. I can't even remember what the objects were, just that I repeatedly hit the button and sent a barrage of innocuous junk crashing into the enemy, before closing the gap, grabbing him by the head, and slamming it against the wall. It looked and felt awesome.
The Batman influences don't just stop with the combat. One boss fight, the details of which I'll avoid for the sake of spoilers, was a straight-up James Bond version of the often lauded Mr. Freeze fight. With an enemy stalking me through a dark warehouse, I crouched and walked around, under, through, and behind objects like shelves, statues, large crates, and more, luring the enemy within range of environmental hazards I triggered using my watch. They either blinded him or otherwise incapacitated him long enough for me to put a brief but brutal beatdown on him, before escaping into the shadows. First Light not only does the Mr. Freeze fight, but does it well.
All of these various gameplay mechanics and features came together for the final of the three missions I played, which takes the openness and intricate construction of a Hitman: World of Assassination mission and elevates it with all the twists and tweaks IO Interactive has implemented for Bond. The mission involved infiltrating a gala for Webb Industries' 125th Anniversary, and it was IO doing what it does best by constructing a dense space that serves as a sandbox where players can choose how they want to approach their objectives. Each objective is made up of multiple smaller pathways to completion, discovered by finding clues in the environment, chasing leads, and creating opportunities, accommodating it all with a flexible and reactive world that adjusts and adapts to your behaviour.
Gallery
I snuck my way into the gala, a sore thumb wearing a casual jacket and pants wandering in the midst of the beauty and glitz of upper-class society, by stealing an invite from a rich rube who wasn't paying attention. My goal was to locate a specific person and, to do that, I talked to a bartender and got a drink, chatted up a rather forward woman, overheard a PR person waiting for a reporter to give them an exclusive with access to a special area of the location, talked to a guard annoyed that a colleague was missing, posed as the head of security to trick said guard into leaving his post, poisoned a waiter to get a passcode from a tablet, and found a camera so I could pose as a photographer. And this wasn't all part of a single chain. They were pieces of different ways I could have done things, some of which connected together, others which I didn't see through, but left excited to try when I next get to play the game.
That is all to say that, based on what I played, 007 First Light is shaping up to be a phenomenal IO Interactive game through and through. It takes everything the developer has learned from many years of creating, refining, iterating, and evolving Hitman games, and puts the pieces that make the most sense together to create a James Bond game that could end up being one of the best games of the year, and also the best James Bond game ever created. 007 First Light could be the culmination of IO Interactive's vision for modern sandbox action games, as well as a spectacular payoff for a 16-year audition to make a James Bond game.
Source