First Light feels like a bunch of millennials who grew up playing N64 Goldeneye got together to make a James Bond game.
It’s a solid game that hits the beats you’d expect from a Bond story. A young James Bond charms his way through a variety of social infiltration challenges, aided by a swathe of quirky gadgets, while seducing glamourous women across the world. And when that fails, it’s mostly fun shooting bad guys in beautiful environments, then throwing your gun at them when you run out of ammo. First Light does what it says on the box: it delivers a James Bond game.
That might be a good thing to you; and if that’s the case, First Light will probably satisfy your expectations. I’m not surprised it’s getting strong reviews, because technically, there’s nothing wrong with it. But despite the danger, First Light feels safe.
The story scaffold is still visible
The story revolves around MI6’s use of AI technology that allows them to make rapid threat assessments. Topical, yes. You know as soon as they mention an all-seeing AI, that it’s going to go badly. Of course, there’s a double agent leaking secrets. There’s a mysterious and intriguing woman. And a gruff mentor who doesn’t have time for Bond’s shenanigans. I can almost see the story beats hanging off the Joseph Campbell clothesline. But this is the problem, right? I can see the scaffolding. There’s nothing new here.
Maybe I’ve been spoiled from playing an inordinate amount of Hitman, ioi’s prior game which featured some of the best environment design you’ll ever see. In comparison, First Light lacks flavour. There’s less of the unbridled joy of their bald, barcoded creation. It feels corporate.
And if you were thinking, well, it’s James Bond. It’s a different IP, it’s going to have a different tone. But Bond has been wildly outrageous at times; think jet packs, ski chases in cello cases, razor blade hats, and big guys with metal teeth taking over space stations! There’s nothing I loved more in N64 Goldeneye than chasing around my sister as Oddjob with a bazooka.
Maybe I’m just disappointed I didn’t get a bazooka. There is a missile pen, I suppose.
James Bond: On Rails
Instead of the delight of sandbox style gameplay, First Light feels very directed, almost as if it’s on rails. And I get it. It’s challenging when you have a linear story to tell, but you need to allow the players enough flexibility to feel involved with that story.
Case in point: an early mission sees you identify an informant in a nightclub. There are three ways to reach the same conclusion. These approaches are mostly discovered by listening into conversations while fiddling on your phone. This would be fine if this was just one mission, but this structure repeats itself in every chapter of the game.
This safe storytelling extends to the environment itself. There are some standout levels – the modern day pirate city of Aleph, where I thought, this is where it’s going to get interesting. The social infiltration challenge here is well-thought out and designed. But the size of the level means it feels like it’s sacrificed some of Hitman’s exceptional environment design in favor of scope. The world is less detailed, there’s more repetition, less micro challenges, less flexibility. Yes, there’s more than one way to approach the level, twisting through shipping containers, taking a full-frontal assault or a more stealthy approach. But they all end in the same place; your approach doesn’t affect the outcomes.
There was a delight in discovery in Hitman, that’s not present in First Light. I was always asking myself, “How can I do this quicker, better, weirder? What’s in this corner? Where can I find that flamingo costume?” I’m the kind of gamer who checks every corner; here, I was left in blank corporate spaces with little reward. In First Light, collectibles are limited to a series of cards; this kind of object collection feels dated in 2026.
Less curiosity, less replay
First Light has an issue with environmental storytelling. Take for example, the multitude of corporate offices Bond finds himself exploring. When you’re making a game, you need to think about who inhabits the spaces you create; these offices mostly lack the stories of the people who work there. In First Light, there’s no office lady with fifteen collectibles on her desk. I get that that’s often a budgetary issue and not possible for every place to have a story, but even a little flavour goes a long way to creating a wholistic world.
This lack of detail in the environmental storytelling has a flow-on effect to replayability. The game urges you to replay the levels, but without that curiosity factor, I’m left wondering why would I replay this?
Part of this is the game’s hand-holding nature. Seventeen hours into the game, in the final boss battle, I was still getting tutorial messages: here’s how you play the game. Maybe that’s on me for not turning them off, but if it’s not obvious to the player by that point, then that’s a gameplay and narrative problem.
The TacSim, or tactical simulator, goes some way to addressing this, creating new challenges in the same environments. But overall, once I finished the main mission, I didn’t feel an urge to revisit the game.
So, First Light is fine. It’s not a bad game at all. It’s a game screaming for a multiplayer option, so that I can finally re-challenge my sister to a showdown. If you’re not looking for something that pushes the boundaries of games, you’ll have a good time.
But in the end, First Light’s safe storytelling left me shaken, not stirred.
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