‘007 First Light' Review: James Bond Returns for a Dense, Sexy Blockbuster
A month before the release of 007 First Light, I traveled to Los Angeles to play an early five-hour selection of the new action-adventure game from IO Interactive; and almost immediately, I knew this was going to be one of the more meaningful games I'd play all year.
The April weather in LA was warm in that deceptively gentle way the city attempts to flatter you. That evening, after my hands-on session with IO Interactive, I found myself listening to a jazz band where every member wore the same pair of sunglasses; scribbling notes as diligently as I could about what I had played of a character I have spent 20 years enamored with across literature, video games, and, of course, film. A woman named Viv, bought me a drink from the hotel bar and asked what I was writing about so intently. I told her I had signed an embargo, I simply could not be stirred to say.
What I wanted to tell her that had me shaken was simple; that earlier that day I had played a video game that felt like meeting an old friend. That I was pleasantly surprised by the cleanest, boldest, most heroic, sexiest, and, somehow, most human iteration of Fleming’s 007. Not because 007 First Light reduces James Bond to be another hollow video game protagonist that uses a gun to solve most problems, but because it immerses you closer than any Bond game to the complete sphere of the character; love, betrayal, misdirection, danger, seduction, nerve, and the thrilling uncertainty of surviving through wit just as much as force.
That first impression only deepened after spending roughly 25 hours with the full game, on the hardest difficulty, for review. What IO Interactive has made is not simply a stylish action game with Bond's name attached to it; it is a deeply considered interpretation of a character who has too often been flattened to be a generic action game power fantasy. It’s with immense relief, that IO reframed Bond in 007 First Light as a standalone, reimagined origin story for his young self; a 26-year-old recruit who ascends through MI6 following his heroic life-saving actions following a dreadful helicopter crash, creating a perfect playable entry point into the character. CEO Hakan Abrak of IO Interactive had explicitly described the game as the studio's effort to redefine 007 to video games, and it has been thankfully revitalized in that redefinition with a bright future.
The reintroduction is impressive since 007 First Light understands something many Bond adaptations in games have not for a very long time; James Bond is not simply a vehicle for spectacle. He is not just a gun, a tuxedo, a watch, and an expensive car arranged into a marketable silhouette. He is a performance under pressure; a man whose greatest asset is not dominance, but composure. The fantasy has never just been about power. It has been about staying elegant when circumstances are threatening to come apart. My favorite, most memorable moments for me, are when Bond throws caution to the wind and puts himself in dangerous positions; in truly heroic moments. And that’s present here from the opening twenty minutes, establishing James Bond as someone who wants to do the right thing for the sake of other people’s lives. Losing his parents, people who were meaningful to him, shapes who he is. He respects them through his character, balances his individuality with his earnest desire to uncover the truth.
007 First Light launches May 27, 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, with a Nintendo Switch 2 version planned for later in the year. There’s also 007 First Light “the controller” to accompany the video game’s two collector’s editions; 007 First Light “the Golden Gun” and 007 First Light “the Golden Mask”, making this an incredible year for Bond fans that like golden finishes to their gaming collectibles.
For me, Bond has always been at his most compelling when the fantasy is complicated by emotional weight. Casino Royale remains my favorite spy film, with On Her Majesty's Secret Service close behind it, precisely because those stories allow Bond to feel bruised and incomplete rather than an icon of British patriotism. Call me the Yankiest Bond fan, but Ian Fleming's Bond in the novels is often even more severe; pulpy, yes, but also dark, atmosphere-driven, unexpectedly sensitive, and constantly surrounded by textures of danger, sex, violence, wealth, and melancholy. He is not a clean hero in the modern blockbuster sense. He is a man moving through a fantasy that shifts frequently to a curdling nightmare. That tension is what made him such a page-turner and a cultural touchstone for almost a century.
And the video game being equivalent to a page turner, I completed the game’s campaign in three eight-hour chunks. The pacing was brilliant, and especially because Patrick Gibson’s iteration doesn't imitate one single Bond. Instead, he seems to have pondered what remains essential across all generations of the character. Boldness. Charm. Improvisation. Vanity. Desire. Nerve. The ability to improvise when a plan collapses. This Bond is younger and still in formation; but rather than making him feel diminished, that gives the game room to let his identity emerge through player choice rather than assumption. You are not stepping into the shoes of a finished icon; IO makes sure you are inhabiting the process of someone becoming one.
The aforementioned Gibson is a major reason that approach lands. His body of work spans across The OA, The White Princess, Shadow and Bone, Dexter: Original Sin, and the film Tolkien. That range is integral, since his Bond is far from a museum-piece impersonation. Instead, IO Interactive places the experienced actor to provide sincere contradiction, and texture to the role. This Bond is suave, vulnerable, emotional, sensitive in ways that make him stand apart, yet he never loses the sharpness necessary to remain recognizably Bond. The responsiveness to him; running like a gorilla and with a sense that he is not merely imposing himself on the world but being shaped by swiftly emerging technology in robots, surveillance, and AI. That confidence in who he is as a person, within the time that he lives in, is earned rather than assumed.
Mechanically, the game supports that interpretation by refusing to turn Bond into a generic military-shooter protagonist. Across the missions to pore over, what’s impressive is how often 007 First Light asks for rolling with it rather than save-scumming to get a masterful run as you may be used to with Hitman. The most fun comes when your plans crack. Or when your cover fails and you have to quickly dash to a new vantage point. The wrong person may notice you at the worst times because of a dialogue choice you made earlier. Firearms, while especially useful with Bond’s slow-motion abilities, are not always the wisest decision. There are gadgets galore (albeit gradually introduced throughout the campaign), behaving like intentional, reusable gameplay systems rather than disposable trailer/scripted moments. The game rewards problem-solving over preening perfection, which will be tremendously appealing to those who may be overwhelmed if it had been the more immersive sim approach.
The moment that truly sold the James Bond fantasy to me came during a gala infiltration later in the game. Early on, you realize you can't get in because you don't have an invitation. No problem; laser a guest in the eyes while everyone else is minding their own business a little too well, then pickpocket the invitation off the distracted target and keep moving. That's the kind of problem-solving the game thrives on. It can almost feel like brute-forcing your way through objectives, but in a distinctly Bond way; social manipulation, gadget use, opportunism, and absurd confidence all swirl together into something that is elegant even when it is deeply mischievous.
That elasticity is where the game is at its strongest. It is not at its best when played as a brute-force action game, and it is not always at its best when treated like a rigid stealth sim either. The most exciting way to play sits somewhere in the middle; letting the bluffing, stealth, gadgets, movement, and brief bursts of violence speak to one another. It’s noticeable on the higher difficulty, that the game doesn’t want you to overcommit to one system. It wants you to adapt the way Bond adapts; never using the same trick twice, with survival that’s practiced so well to become style.
That broad flexibility is part of why the game feels so refreshing when set against Bond's long absence from the medium. Because the truth is that Bond games lost their place a long time ago. For me, that happened almost immediately after GoldenEye. Once Bond was scattered across a variety of developers who were rarely given enough time, freedom, or trust, the games increasingly stopped feeling like their own thing and started bending toward whatever the surrounding shooter landscape demanded. They became too derivative of every other action shooter game. Too eager to flatten Bond into a conventional armed protagonist. During the Craig era in particular, the games often felt trapped between incompatible identities; some leftover trace of Roger Moore-era pulp adventure on one side, and the Jason Bourne-influenced bruising seriousness that had come to dominate Bond's cinematic identity on the other. Instead of turning that tension into something mechanical and interesting, they collapsed into generic action. Bond became static.
That collapse became impossible to ignore with 007 Legends. Metacritic still records the game at a 45 Metascore based on 49 critic reviews. In early January 2013, GameSpot reported that Activision's Bond games had disappeared from Steam, Xbox 360 Games on Demand, and Activision's own store, even though the deal had originally been expected to last until 2014. MI6-HQlater reported that Activision no longer held the Bond gaming license, directly tying the collapse to poor reviews and disappointing sales for 007 Legends, and also noting the closure of Eurocom after the game's release. Game Informerwould later summarize the moment more bluntly; after 007 Legends failed to meet expectations, Eon Productions and MGM revoked the license from Activision.
But the drought was never only about one bad release. It was also about a loss of faith in the character's flexibility. Publishers seemed to stop trusting Bond to be Bond. They started to trust his silenced pistol instead. They trusted the military-shooter shell made popular by Call of Duty. They trusted the generic scaffolding of action-game prestige. What they really stopped trusting was everything that makes Bond distinct: the social danger, the gentlemanly survival, the gadgetry used for wit instead of brute force, the romantic and emotional friction with unbelievably beautiful renditions of people that pushed the limits of technology, the ability to be elegant in situations where elegance would be impossible for other experiences.
That is why 007 First Light is so restorative. The immense amount of trust on display here; trust that Bond can still be mechanically different from a modern shooter hero, and trust that players will meet that version of the character halfway. Amazon MGM Studios should be proud of this collaboration, because IO Interactive has rebuilt Bond not as a nostalgic museum exhibit, but as someone with cultural and mechanical staying power again.
My favorite Bond games; GoldenEye, From Russia with Love, Nightfire, and Blood Stone; all shared something beyond just being competent action games. They contained extra attention to detail, affection for the character, and gameplay features that elevated them past a typical shooter campaign. They felt like they had been made by people who actually understood what was fun about inhabiting Bond specifically, not just what was broadly marketable about pointing a gun in first- or third-person. That same love is present here, though filtered through a much more modern, systems-driven sensibility.
The gadgets are central to that recovery. One of the pleasures of Bond has always been that his tools are expressions of personality as much as function; luxury hiding precision, elegance disguising danger. 007 First Light understands that gadgets are there to change how you think about every room. They create openings to avoid unnecessary violence, or provide creative ways to dispatch groups of enemies; preserving the sense that Bond's greatest strength is not aggression, but ingenuity.
Combat, meanwhile, feels best when treated as an extension of that same philosophy. Bond is physically capable from the outset, so progression is less about unlocking strength than learning how to apply it wisely. Close-quarters encounters emphasize timing and environment. Firearms exist, but once things escalate into open violence, the game never lets that feel completely clean or glamorous.
And yet, for all the game's mechanical elegance, its biggest flaw is how glitchy it can be. Even on the hardest difficulty, it sometimes feels too easy to overwhelm enemies by playing like a spinning tornado; less Bond than Taz from Looney Tunes, dodging and weaving faster than their bullets can meaningfully catch up. You can pick things up, throw them around, spin through spaces in a kind of improvised chaos, and still come out alive too often. That looseness can be exhilarating in the moment, but it occasionally undermines the more disciplined, danger-laced tone the rest of the game works so hard to establish. Towards the end, my PS5 Pro edition started to hitch during the busier moments. As well, there were noticeable checkerboard glitches around the character models with the way light interacted.
That said, the game's sensory overload makes up for this, and is never exhausting. Instead, it’s exhilarating; never too busy for the sake of being busy. The extravagance or lack of elegance in a scene usually feels tied to the characters Bond is surrounded by. Design choices reflect how these people dress, where they live, how they spend their time, and the way they project themselves into the world. That attention to personality through environment makes the scale of the game feel expressive rather than merely noisy.
Replayability also grows naturally out of that density. Publicly available trophy reporting confirms collectible categories such as postcards, MI6 files, mementos, and playing cards, alongside a substantial block of hidden story trophies. In practice, those collectibles are worthwhile. Some of them deepen the meaning of the larger espionage mystery; others feel like affectionate nods to Bond's long history in games. I still suspect, based on the hidden trophy structure, that there may be more than one meaningful resolution state or outcome variation for the story; but I have not confirmed exactly how that would be triggered, so I would treat that only as informed suspicion for now. The public trophy information confirms hidden trophies and collectible categories, not multiple endings.
The driving is one of the few places where the game feels more limited than the fantasy around Bond's vehicles might imply. There are vehicle sequences, and when they hit, they hit; especially when Bond hijacks larger vehicles and the game briefly taps into that exaggerated action grammar we've come to expect from Bond media. But the campaign itself is fairly constrained in this regard. If you expected to luxuriate in a souped-up Aston Martin at your leisure, that is not really what the main story offers. Publicly available descriptions of Tactical Simulation mode, or TacSim, present it as a replay-focused challenge space tied to XP, modifiers, and leaderboards; not as a free-drive sandbox.
TacSim is the important endgame pillar, which looks to be expanded post-launch. It positions itself as a challenge-based replay mode with scoreboards and unlocks and reinforces how sturdy the game's core systems are once you stop treating the campaign as a straight line. This scratches a different itch; more gamey, more systems-forward, but still full of Bond's theatrics that deserve to be seen.
What lingers most after all of this is that 007 First Light has a heart. It respects Bond's contradictions. It understands that he can be romantic and violent, elegant and damaged, heroic and vain, soft in one moment and ruthless in the next. It lets those qualities coexist without sanding him down into a broader, easier-to-market protagonist.
That is why the future this game hints at is so exciting. If 007 First Light succeeds, the most thrilling implication is not simply that Bond is back in games. It is that Bond now has a game identity flexible enough to evolve the way the films once did. What IO Interactive has built here is measured; this Bond is still being formed, which means the fantasy is restrained by inexperience, uncertainty, and consequence. But that restraint creates a roadmap. There is every reason to believe future entries could gradually move toward something more expansive, more overtly fantastical, and more gadget-heavy; something perhaps closer in spirit to the lusher, shinier power fantasy associated with the Pierce Brosnan years, where Bond's excess was the rewarding default that made for the most memorable moments in the video games.
The key is that 007 First Light makes that eventual expansion feel earned. If Bond begins here as someone shaped by pressure, betrayal, emotional consequence, and improvisation, then later games can hand him more of the full fantasy; the ease, the arrogance, the toys, the gloss, the grandiosity; without losing sight of the man underneath. In games, those modes don't have to cancel each other out. They can build on one another.
That is what makes 007 First Light feel bigger than a simple comeback. It doesn't just prove Bond still works in games. It suggests that games may finally be the medium best equipped to let Bond's full range make sense again; the spectacle, the emotional scars, the seduction, the gadgets, the wit, the absurdity, and the cold professionalism all at once.
For a character who has spent years absent from the medium, or reduced to something flatter than he deserved, that is no small thing. 007 First Light does not merely bring Bond back. It restores his mystery, his danger, his humanity, and most importantly, his flexibility.
Newsweek rating: 10/10
It’s as if Bond has had the breath of God blown through his dusted, pixel-crusted nose.
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This story was originally published May 26, 2026 at 10:29 AM.