‘007: First Light’ Review
Developer: IO Interactive | Platform: PS5 |
Playtime: 16:05 | Platinum: 21:25
Has there been a good James Bond game? The old heads would tell you that Goldeneye on N64 was great but how much is nostalgia? If you asked my pal Sean, he’d say that he really enjoyed 007 Legends on the Wii. There’s Bloodstone or Nightfire or whatever else. That doesn’t matter, 007: First Light is a banger James Bond game.
Mild Story and Gameplay spoilers follow. Reader discretion is advised.
‘Earn the number’ was a tagline used throughout the marketing campaign for the game and while this is technically an origin story, save for the first mission and subsequent tutorial/training mission, you’ll feel like the James Bond you know already – No Surfing Dracula nonsense here. Of course this isn’t a bond you’ll know, as this is a new Bond portrayed by Irish actor Patrick Gibson in both voice and body. Gibson is immediately one of my favourite Bonds, delivering lines with the perfect amount of dry sarcasm and charm that is required of Bond. All of the games voice acting is phenomenal, with allies like Greenway and Moneypenny being standouts.
Without saying too much of the story, I think the movie its closest to might be Spectre but it does its own thing (and does the Spectre bits a million times better than Spectre does). Following an incident in Greenland, Bond is brought into the revived 00 program who are tasked with hunting down a rogue agent, the old 009, who has returned from a 10 year disappearance. Things are never as they seem and the story twists and turns a fair deal, really making use of the longer than a movie runtime.
There’s plenty of Hitman influence in here given that it comes from series developer IO Interactive and it benefits greatly from it. The social stealth here isn’t putting on a variety of costumes but it’s listening to crowds, finding openings to enter exclusive areas and the like. Once you get somewhere you shouldn’t, things get interesting. You can bluff and lie your way through but when the cover is blown, it’s not the gun you’ll grab for but the fists come out. The game has a fairly expansive melee system complete with dodges, parries and grapples. Bond will make use of his environment often slamming peoples head against walls or throwing them over furniture. It’s only when the enemy pulls out guns is the player allowed to bring guns out themself. Gunplay is good but you can’t rely on it, you can collect ammo from dead enemies but you’ll never have a ton of ammo, maybe a full reload at most and half a mag at worst. Shoot outs are infrequent but that’s not to say they don’t happen at all, there’s a roughly 75/25% split between combat styles.
It’s not just guns, 007 is famous for his usage of gadgets straight from Q-Branch. There’s a dart gun phone and a laser watch among other things but they all kind of fill the same niche as each other which makes the choices not really matter so much. I stuck with the aforementioned two and got on just fine throughout my playthrough.
Each mission has an array of missions the player can complete for brownie points - stealth, different ways of completing the objectives, chapter specific challenges. I enjoyed seeing what these were but had no real intention of doing them. The same goes for the ‘Tac Sim’ mode but I did do those since there was some trophies. Tac Sim are remix missions from the main story with additional requirements and handicaps. The most interesting thing I saw from my brief time with the Tac Sim is that there’s an expanded combat tutorial that would have been good during the actual tutorial of the main campaign but I suppose it’s neither here nor there really.
While First Light doesn’t do anything super unique or better than other games, it’s a perfect blend of Hitman and Uncharted that masterfully uses the 007 licence. I’m excited to see the future of this series under IO Interactive and Patrick Gibson as the leading man. Shaken, not stirred indeed.
