007 First Light: Competent, Forgettable, and Not Quite Bond

Hitman 2: Silent Assassin was one of the first games I ever touched. Mid 2000s, the first PC that ever lived in my house, and a demo disc with exactly one playable level on it: "An Invitation to a Party." I replayed that single level into the ground. Different routes, different disguises, different ways through the same villa, for weeks, because it was the only level I had. That a single mission could absorb that much repeat play without going stale is, in hindsight, a small marvel of design.

IO Interactive has done something almost no studio manages: they mastered an entire genre and held the monopoly on it. The stealth sandbox, which in plain terms is a puzzle game with shooting elements and a bald assassin mixed in. They don't own it through copyright or trademark; that isn't how either of those works. They own it because they are the only studio consistently good enough at the level design the genre demands. So calling me a fan is an understatement, and my expectation going into First Light, while never "make another Hitman," was high by default.

The game is fine. It is a 5.5 out of 10. A good enough third-person action-adventure that is, at times, boring, and that rarely feels like James Bond. The boring part is the one I cannot forgive, because Bond is many things and boring has never been one of them.

The problem with a game this big

Before the complaints, some sympathy, because it explains a lot of them.

A James Bond game in 2026 is not made for one audience. It is made for a committee of them, and they want incompatible things. Amazon MGM controls the IP now, which means there is a rights holder in the room with opinions. There are the book purists. There are the players who fell in love during the Brosnan years, when the gadgets were gloriously silly. There are the Craig-era fans, who watched the gadgets get stripped out in favour of a grounded, bruised, human spy. And then there is the commercial imperative that matters most: capturing brand-new players who have never cared about Bond and turning them into fans.

Games are bigger than movies now, and nobody plays every kind of game. To reach the widest possible audience you cannot lean hard on any single genre, because every genre you commit to is an audience you write off.

Audience	What they want from Bond
IP holder (Amazon MGM)	Brand safety, broad appeal, sequels
Book fans	The cold, methodical original
Brosnan-era fans	Gadgets, spectacle, charm turned up
Craig-era fans	Grounded, physical, consequences
New players	An accessible game that doesn't demand 60 years of canon

You can see First Light trying to satisfy all five at once, and the result is a game with no strong opinion about what it is. That is the root of nearly everything below. It is also, I suspect, the thing no amount of extra polish was ever going to fix.

It doesn't feel like Bond

Let me be clear about what I am not complaining about. I do not mind that it isn't a Hitman clone. I do not mind Denuvo. I do not mind the casting, the cinematic cuts, graphics that aren't bleeding-edge for 2026, or that it's on the easy side. None of that is the problem.

The problem is that James Bond, of all people, is boring here.

This Bond reads like someone who would back down after a stern talking-to. I understand he's the version who is just starting out, but he feels the same at the credits as he did in the opening, and by then he has been on missions, seen things, lost people. The game frames him less like foreign intelligence and more like a thief or a domestic-intel grunt. People keep comparing it to Uncharted. I haven't played those, so my closest read is that he comes off like a younger Indiana Jones, if Indiana Jones were British. He's quippy, but not in the Bond way; the lines are occasionally funny but they never land the way a real Bond line lands. Where are the car chases that earn the name? Where is the charisma? Where is a Vesper, a character who actually leaves a mark?

Bond can be many things. The one thing the films never let him be is forgettable, which is exactly what this game settles for.

Forgettable people, a thin story

The cast does not stick. Greenway, the reluctant mentor, is the one character who lands, and a little of Q. Everyone else evaporates the moment the scene ends. There is no relationship here with the weight the series trades on. I keep returning to the comparison because it's fair: Hitman, a series with a near-mute protagonist, leaves a stronger impression with its story beats than this does with a fully voiced, supposedly charismatic lead.

A game unsure what it wants to be

The young-Bond identity crisis bleeds into the mechanics. The game itself doesn't know what it is. Stealth game? Puzzle-and-gadget game? Shooter? It never commits, and that indecision is its weakest point.

The movement is clunky, so the parkour feels like a chore you resent. The hand-to-hand combat is genuinely bad; Sleeping Dogs nailed melee over a decade ago and this doesn't come close. The gunplay is mediocre, propped up by explosive barrels scattered everywhere, and the boss fights feel forced into a game that didn't need them. Since when does Bond spend thirty unbroken minutes climbing pipes and ledges?

The puzzles wear thin, especially in the back half. What made Hitman never feel like a grind is choice: if you didn't want to climb the ledge, you didn't have to. Here you do it because the level says so.

Then there's the gun rule, which I find baffling as a design decision. You cannot have a firefight unless the game decides it's time, and when it decides, you must. There is no freedom to draw a weapon on your own terms. I understand the intent, that Bond shouldn't reach for lethal force unless it's warranted, but it's a game. If you must enforce it, at least hand me a non-lethal option, a dart, a taser, something, instead of locking the holster until a scripted moment unlocks it.

The stealth, which should have been the floor

This is the part that stings most, because stealth is the thing IO Interactive does better than anyone. Here it's the weakest pillar. You can't hide bodies. Swapping cover is clunky at the best of times and simply doesn't register most of the time. For a studio whose entire reputation is built on readable, reliable stealth, this plays like it was built by a different team that had read about Hitman but never shipped one.

The AI is asleep

The enemies are dumber than Hitman's, which is saying something for a game that came out this year. Fire a laser into someone's face in plain view of a crowd and nobody reacts. Pick a pocket in a packed room and the room stays oblivious. Throw hands with a guard a meter from his colleagues and walk away clean. Everyone, it turns out, is deaf and partially blind. It collapses any tension the stealth might have generated, which is the whole point of stealth.

The UI and QA failures are inexcusable

Performance, mechanics, tone; those are design judgments I can argue with. The QA state is not a judgment call. It's just unfinished.

Did anyone test this on a PC? The control that runs and tackles is mapped to the same combination as attack and sprint, so you constantly do the thing you didn't mean to. In melee, the camera regularly wedges itself into an angle where you can see nothing at all.

The main menu is the part that truly gets me. It was clearly designed by someone who never imagined a mouse touching it. Everything is a dropdown, and you have to close one dropdown before you can click another, even though the next one is sitting right there on screen, fully visible. Someone built that on a PC, looked at it, and signed off.

And the holstering. Who approved a rifle clipping straight through Bond's hip while holstered, intersecting half the character model? Adding a back-mounted holster animation and a second skeletal socket on the spine for large weapons is not exotic work. It is the kind of thing a character pipeline handles as routine. Shipping the clip is a choice to not look.

Looks get you the install. The unfinished menu is the first thing every player touches, and it's the first thing that tells them how much care went in.

The thing it is not: woke

There's a chunk of the discourse insisting the game is "woke" because M is a brown character and Moneypenny is black. I didn't find it woke in the slightest, and frankly I'm secure enough not to read a casting choice as an attack on me. It's a game, not a national election. Whatever is wrong with First Light, this isn't on the list, and spending outrage here just distracts from the actual problems.

Performance

No issues on my end, though on this rig that's the expected outcome rather than a compliment to the port: a Threadripper 7960X, 128 GB of RAM, and a 4090. I can't speak to how it behaves on mid-range hardware, and a clean run on a 4090 tells you very little about that. The QA problems I hit were design and interface bugs, not framerate; those would land the same on any machine.

What I wanted, and what I got

IO Interactive earned their reputation by being the only studio patient enough to master a hard genre. First Light is the rare case where that mastery is mostly absent from the screen, buried under a game that's trying to be everything to everyone and committing to nothing. The stealth is weak where it should be the strength, the combat is filler, the AI is asleep, and the menu is broken in ways a single afternoon of PC testing would have caught.

It isn't a bad game. It's a competent one, which is somehow worse coming from this studio and this character. A bad game you forget. A competent, boring Bond you keep poking at, asking where the version you were promised went. The pieces of a great game are in here; they're just pulled in five directions by five audiences and never allowed to settle.

5.5 out of 10. Good enough. Boring at times. Not quite Bond. I wanted "An Invitation to a Party," a level so well built I'd replay it for weeks. I got something I finished once and won't think about again.