007 First Light Review
Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC
Release Date: May 27, 2026
Main Story Length: 16 hours
Developer: IO Interactive
Reviewed on PS5
I grew up on GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64 and Nightfire on the PlayStation 2. With Nightfire, we even broke out a multitap just to squeeze more controllers into the living room. A different era — and an impossible standard to chase.
So when word dropped that we were finally getting a new Bond game, something in my brain immediately lit up. Not just curiosity. Genuine hope. I wanted this to be good. More than that, I needed it to prove that 007 still had a place in gaming — that the license hadn’t just been gathering dust waiting for someone to waste it.
For the most part, 007 First Light earns that hope.
The Bond Fix You’ve Been Waiting For
This is a polished, cinematic single-player experience that understands the assignment. The gunplay is sharp. The hand-to-hand combat has real rhythm and weight. The cutscenes are well-executed, and the overall presentation keeps climbing the deeper you push into it. It is not a perfect game — there are stretches where the world around you feels oddly hollow — but when First Light is operating at its peak, it is genuinely difficult to put down.
The combat is the engine that drives everything. Shooting feels smooth and satisfying, and the hand-to-hand system rewards aggression — comboing parries, counters, throws, and takedowns until the rhythm becomes second nature. The more the game trusts you to fight, shoot, sneak, and improvise, the more alive it feels. These are the moments where First Light stops feeling like a good licensed game and starts feeling like just a good game.
The problem is that not every mission gets there fast enough.
A Slow Burn That Takes Too Long to Ignite
The opening stretch is the game’s weakest stretch by a significant margin. The hotel mission in particular — an early set piece that should be making a statement — too often reduces itself to walking from one room to the next while the action waits to finally show up. There is a version of this sequence that establishes atmosphere while keeping you engaged. First Light does not always find it.
I understand the instinct. Origin stories need runway. You want the player to feel the world before they start blowing it up. But the intro overstays its welcome, and the game would be sharper for cutting it down.
Stealth compounds the issue. On medium difficulty, the sneaking sections offer almost no real resistance. I was rarely trying hard, and I was rarely caught. First Light pulls clearly from IO Interactive’s Hitman DNA — in its movement system, its presentation, and its social stealth ideas — and that comparison is fair and honestly flattering. People have also drawn Uncharted parallels, though that one landed less for me personally. Either way, you are in elite company. The issue is that stealth occasionally feels like filler between the moments that actually count.
It Gets Better. Significantly Better.
Here is what surprised me most: 007 First Light is a game that grows into itself.
The early hours are solid but uneven. The later missions are something else entirely. More confident, more cinematic, more willing to let the action breathe and escalate the way a Bond story should. Environments that looked impressive in early missions start to feel genuinely spectacular. Cutscenes that were functional become impactful. The game stops easing you in and finally starts trusting you to keep up.
By the time the back half opens up, First Light feels like a completely different animal than the one you started with — and that is a credit to the developers. The pacing issues that define the opening are largely corrected by the time they matter most.
The driving sections fit comfortably in that same category. Simple, breezy, and not especially deep — but they sell the Bond fantasy with enough style that the lack of mechanical complexity is easy to forgive. I was not looking for a racing sim inside a spy game. What’s here works.
Where It Doesn’t Fully Land
Patrick Gibson’s younger Bond works. The physicality is there, the presence is there, and there are flashes of something genuinely compelling in the performance. But the writing around him too often keeps the character at arm’s length. I followed Bond through every mission without ever feeling truly connected to him — or to most of the people around him. The story is competent and the stakes are clear, but the emotional grip never quite locks in the way it should.
That distance matters more than it might sound. Bond games live or die on making you feel like the most dangerous person in any room. First Light nails the mechanics of that feeling. It does not always nail the emotional core underneath it.
The structure is mostly linear with small pockets of freedom — and for the record, that is the right call. An open-world Bond game was never what this needed to be. A focused, cinematic spy thriller is exactly the correct vision. The pedestrian sections between missions, though, can feel like homework — especially when you know how good the combat gets the moment the game finally lets you loose.
The Details That Deserve Credit
Audio gets the job done and then some. The weapon sounds are excellent. The score knows when to pull back and when to push forward. The overall sound design adds a layer of cinematic texture that quietly elevates every scene it’s in. It is the kind of work that goes unnoticed until you imagine the game without it.
At around 12 hours, First Light is not a massive experience, and replay value is modest unless you’re chasing mission-level perfection or a cleaner playstyle run. For players who love polished, linear, single-player action games — the kind that are increasingly rare — this is an easy recommendation.
Verdict
007 First Light is not the legendary comeback that GoldenEye represented for its generation. It has a slow start, a stealth system with too little bite, and characters I kept waiting to connect with more deeply. These are real limitations, and they keep the game from reaching the heights it clearly has ambitions for.
But the combat, the gunplay, the back-half escalation, the atmosphere, and the sheer confidence of its presentation combine into something that works. Something that earns its place. At its core, 007 First Light is a fun game — and proof that James Bond still belongs in this space.
