The name’s Bond, Royal Navy Aircrewman James Bond. At least, that’s what the future Double-O was known as before he became the international man of mystery. In 007 First Light, developer IO Interactive offers us an original take on the iconic character first brought to life by British author Ian Fleming. I recently had the opportunity to get an in-depth, hands-on look at First Light, playing roughly three and a half hours of some early levels of the game. I came away both impressed by its scale and ambition, and relieved to say that it sticks the landing while playing it a bit safe.
Many familiar mechanics and design sensibilities from games of its ilk are present in First Light, mostly in its combat and exploration, but as the old adage goes, “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” Despite a lack of willingness to take big gameplay risks, what I played was an extremely fun and frenetic vertical slice with a truly captivating narrative that I can’t wait to jump back into.
Everything from the hand-to-hand combat and gunplay, to the robust stealth system and impressive sandbox world design, and even the classic Bond-style espionage tale the game tells are testaments to First Light’s overall refinement and quality. Getting into a fist fight involves more than just punching, dodging, and blocking. You’ll use your environment as your weapon most of the time, slamming enemies into walls or throwing thermoses at their faces, and it was one of the most enjoyable aspects of my demo.
Stealth gameplay is a big standout, which makes sense given Hitman’s pedigree, and IOI nails the same style here. But it isn’t all just sneaking around; with the Bluff and Lure machanics, Bond can use his charm to get out of sticky situations. If your Instinct meter is full, burning some of it while putzing around restricted areas can either help you takedown thugs quietly using Lure, or let you Bluff your way into making them think you belong. But if you’re empty on Instinct, you’ll have to resort to more traditional ways of dealing with enemies. This level of player agency offers a nice variety of ways to achieve the same goal, and I even replayed certain sections of this preview just to see how much I could do.
My demo was split into three sections, each designed to offer a reasonable onboarding with its systems and controls and provide just a glimpse into the epic spy thriller narrative. Bond’s story begins on a remote island off the coast of Iceland, where we meet him as a young and green relative nobody with intense drive and a sharp moral compass. After the helicopter I’m in is shot down and my crew perishes, I wash up on the frigid beach, taking control of Bond for the first time. This is essentially the game’s tutorial level; I got used to the movement and camera (the speed of which I had to adjust early on because of how glacially slow it moves by default), and learned a bit more of the environmental traversal mechanics like vaulting over obstacles and sidling along a narrow cliff face.
If you’ve played any of Naughty Dog’s Uncharted games, a lot of what I did in First Light will be familiar to you. This isn’t a bad thing, though. Jumping from cliff face to cliff face isn’t the newest traversal method on the block, but I can’t deny how cool it looks or the function it serves. But a notable difference here is that combat, while incredibly fun, frenetic, and well-designed, isn’t always the avenue Bond (or you, the player) should take.
Resources and ammo can be hard to find in certain sections, so opting for a quiet approach could mean the difference between life and death. Once I quietly evaded a handful of enemies through a patch of tall grass and got field analyst Moneypenny, Bond’s longtime ally portrayed by Death in Paradise actor Kiera Lester, in my earpiece, my next objective was to find clothing appropriate for the tundra I’d found myself in.
This is where I’m introduced to how some of the stealth mechanics operate. Not only will crouching and moving slowly help you stay hidden from prying eyes, but there are always multiple routes to an objective, whether it be through an open window or an open skylight. I made it to an enemy base, freezing and desperate for a jacket and some hot cocoa, where some dopey henchman left a window open for me to hop through and find some warmer clothing.
While no actual hot or cold survival mechanics are in First Light, I appreciate the attention to detail in showing Bond’s body language clearly indicating he needs shelter, and he needs it fast, which helped immerse me in feeling the tense and rushed nature of the situation. Here, an interesting exchange occurs where an enemy henchman comes in after Bond’s changed clothes, speaking to him in Montenegrin. The interesting part? Bond responds to the goon fluently, blending in with the surrounding mercenaries and making his trek to escape all the more convincing. I couldn’t help but scoff a bit that Bond just happens to speak this language, and even Moneypenny is taken aback by it. This is explained in a throwaway line that he’s done his fair share of traveling, but we’re given no other context. It’s likely the full game will explain this, but it elicited a chuckle from me nonetheless.
It turns out this Serbian gang has been under MI6’s watch for quite some time, and they have other operatives held captive. Luckily for them, James Bond is as stubborn and brash as ever even in his younger years, and even with Moneypenny’s warning that he has a less than 1-percent chance of success, he’s dead-set on rescuing the captives and making it out of Iceland alive. It’s here that the stealth mechanics truly shine in the early game. There are two groups of MI6 captives and I not only had the agency to decide which to go after first, but how. The encampment was nestled in a small valley with plenty of tall grass to wade through and nearby cliffs to ascend.
After making my way around via a cliff to the first building, I came upon a lone henchman with his back turned, and I performed a satisfying and crunchy stealth takedown to proceed. I hadn’t quite gotten the lay of the land in this area yet, and I ran directly into two more baddies after rounding a corner. Getting caught during these linear stealth sections results in an auto-fail, but luckily checkpoints are pretty forgiving. And if it’s a more open-ended combat encounter and you decide to sneak, getting caught will simply draw aggro and you’ll have to fight enemies head-on instead of having your progress reset. Soon enough I entered the building through an open skylight to free the first batch of prisoners. For the second group, the same sleuthing and sneaking was afoot, but this time I distracted enemies by sending an ATV off a nearby cliff. I didn’t engage any mercenaries this time around, and easily rescued the rest of the crew.
007 First Light wouldn’t be a Bond game without some over-the-top action sequences, and this section ended with exactly that. Naturally, the mercenaries grew wise to my subterfuge and called all hands on deck to eliminate me and the MI6 captives, but in classic Bond fashion the young airman couldn’t help but detonate the surrounding explosives to mask their escape and run off into the distance with iconic James Bond music playing me out. Playing through this section took about half an hour, and was a great way to learn the game’s maneuvering mechanics, rules, and controls, but it also offered an intriguing set-up to the game’s overall narrative and showcased some impressive voice performances. It’s clear just from this short section I played that IO Interactive is taking great care with its riff on James Bond as a character, both iterating on what’s come before in movies and staying true to Fleming’s decades of mythos to achieve a wholly original depiction.
The next section was a significantly more hands-on combat tutorial, in which you’ve got firearms and other useful gadgets, like the Q-Lens, to incapacitate your foes with. The Q-Lens is Bond’s most trustworthy gadget throughout the game. Not only does it allow you to scan and survey the surroundings for pick-ups, exits, enemies, and points of interest, but it’s how you’ll activate the many hacks you’ll acquire later on. After an interlude from the title sequence featuring Lana Del Ray’s new original song (naturally titled “First Light”), the demo dropped me a bit further into the story.
Bond’s now been accepted into MI6 and is training for the Double-O program through the guidance of John Greenway, portrayed by The Walking Dead actor Lennie James. This is an obstacle course-like environment where my goal was to capture the flag at the top of the building without being taken out by the Interpol agents scattered around the arena. You can go about this through stealth or brute force; there’s no wrong answer, but an interesting caveat is the License to Kill mechanic. Every enemy encounter in the game offers Bond the opportunity to either sneak around, bluff, or lure his way out of sticky situations, with drawing firearms being relegated to last-resort status. Even trying to aim down sights will prompt Bond a Professor Oak-like “you can’t use that right now” quip. But if your enemy has intent to kill, which seems to be when enough aggro has been drawn, it’s guns free and weapons blazing.
And boy, did I blaze ‘em. I replayed this section twice. The first time was to practice my stealth skills again and get more time with the newly added Q-lens. Hacking enemies and their surroundings, like turning on a radio to distract them or taking out their earpieces for a momentary stun, was really intuitive and fluid, and opened up a breadth of opportunities for blending hacks with combat. The second time through I wanted to get a better feel of how gunplay works in First Light.
Like in Uncharted, it’s pretty standard third-person over-the-shoulder fare, but where I found the steepest learning curve is when you’re out of ammo. Reloading was mapped to O (I played on PS5), which was counterintuitive to literally every other game I’ve played like this. But running out of ammo meant you could hurl your empty weapon at an enemy for a temporary stun and transition into a melee combo. Hand-to-hand combat is fluid and responsive.
You can dodge and parry like you’d expect, but your surroundings are the most useful tool to fight with. With the right button prompts while an enemy is blocking, you can shove them against a wall, smash their head against a table, push them into glass, and so on. Plenty of different options for interacting with the environment are at your disposal in both combat and exploration, and I welcome this sort of willingness to let the player go crazy and find the playstyle that makes the most sense to them. I made it a point to take my time during this run on the obstacle course to get the gunplay down, then I was on my way to the third and final leg of my demo.
I enter my Kensington apartment with a suave air of confidence and charm, observing the absence of my roommates and taking note of the eerie silence. After exploring and learning more about the events of the previous mission (as well as finding a bug where Bond would stop moving and not respond to controls for a few seconds), it becomes clear some time has passed since I last took control. I won’t get into story specifics, as many of the moments and reveals are best experienced through fresh eyes, but the narrative starts to come together just as Bond’s attacked by a mysterious assailant.
I take him out, and find another in my kitchen waiting for me. After a short tussle, I’m shot at by a sniper from across many city rooftops, and I give chase in the night like a comic book superhero. I’m repeatedly pinned down by sniper fire, but eventually find my way to the top of a construction crane to get the jump on the shooter, using the Q-lens to hack nearby floodlights to distract him. After trekking across the towering machinery, I confront the shooter, who eventually sends me tumbling off the building and makes his escape. Bond being Bond, he emerges relatively unscathed and eager to pursue his attacker. With the reluctant help of Moneypenny, the two trace the foe’s phone to his next location—a high society gala with some of Slovakia’s most powerful players.
This section is what I imagine the bread and butter of 007 First Light’s gameplay loop will be, and was the perfect culmination of everything I’d learned in the last hour or so. Once I entered the gala using the Q-lens to make a patron dizzy, prompting a pickpocket action to steal their invitation, I had free rein to explore the packed museum. To find out where my attacker ran off to, I had to use sneaky means and my classic Bond charms to gather information. I was expecting some sort of charisma mechanic or dialogue tree to get the answers I needed, but alas there was none; story moments are exempt from the rest of the game’s agency.
I would have preferred some sort of persuasion mechanic in conversation aside from using Bluff, especially given Bond’s history as a smoothtalking manipulator, but changing the outcome of the narrative isn’t on the table here. Instead, I eavesdropped at the bar, which prompted me to impersonate a journalist to gain access to some restricted rooms, with the ultimate goal being to get into the security room. This is where First Light’s sandbox mechanics truly shine, as there are dozens of different ways to get there. I had to get past a pair of security guards (while impersonating their superior, no less) who were short staffed.
I had to locate their work schedule and find the right guy to call in. But since this is a 007 game, it’s not always that easy. I found my way to another bar in a side room and eavesdropped on some of the staffers, where I learned the passcode for the tablet containing the schedule is in one of the drawers behind the counter. I had a few ways of distracting the overworked employees like turning on a radio or inducing nausea via the Q-Lens, which requires a finite green material that I could find scattered about the area to refill. I chose the former, and rummaged through the drawers to find the passcode. After much more sleuthing and impersonating, I finally tracked down my target and engaged in a pretty unique boss battle that required me to use my environment to deal damage.
Similar to the Mr. Freeze fight in Batman: Arkham City, once I used a particular method of attacking, like electrocuting the ground when he walks over it, my foe grew wise and removed it from the equation. This forced me to think even further outside of the box to harm him twice more to win. More incredibly well-acted and spoilery story beats happen, which reveal what I’ve deduced to be First Light’s main villain, and I’m once again thrust into a frenetic and chaotic combat arena to escape the museum. The skills I learned during the obstacle course portion are on full display here, but the License to Kill has been initiated from the jump.
After shooting and sneaking my way through hordes of enemies and weaving through the backrooms of the museum, the final combat encounter brought me to a red-lit art gallery with new, heavily armored foes encroaching. Hacking and using stealth wasn’t the best option here, so I took cover behind an exhibit and waited for the opportune moment to pounce on an enemy with melee strikes and perfectly timed parries, take his weapon, and start blasting my way out the back door.
I died a few times here; First Light’s combat may be familiar territory, but it does behoove you to have a solid game plan instead of wildly shooting and not strategically taking cover, which is how I met my end the first couple of times. To cap off this disorienting night at the museum, my time with 007 First Light came to an end with Bond driving a garbage truck through the back alleys, and even through the bottom floor of a shopping mall, culminating in an explosive climax set to the iconic James Bond theme.
So far, 007 First Light feels like an awesome blend of what makes a good James Bond story work. It’s equal parts moody espionage thriller and high-octane action film, and its gameplay mechanics reflect these tenets well, despite it forgoing some risk-taking in terms of exploration and combat. Despite playing it safe, it feels like IO Interactive has concocted a recipe for a great 007 game, if not a mechanically revelatory one. The game truly shines when it comes to its story, characters, performance capture, and sandbox elements, and even when combat feels like it treads familiar ground, it’s some of the most fun and engaging I’ve had the pleasure of previewing, with enough of its own DNA to set it apart from the pack. From what I played, I anticipate 007 First Light will be a standout among 2026’s slate of blockbusters.