Review of 007: First Light. The best James Bond origin story worth your time

At some point the game tells me: "You can't save these people anymore, get out." Naturally, I go in to save them anyway — because otherwise, what was the point of any of it. And that's 007 First Light in a nutshell during the first few hours: it constantly pretends a proper Bond experience is just around the corner, while handing you yet another tutorial segment, yet another whispered hint, and yet another excuse to jog between waypoints.

After four hours, I had the distinct feeling I wasn't playing a game but sitting through a very expensive junior agent training course. A brief opening sortie where we're the only survivors after a missile strike, then the base, then a spy den, then an introduction to the watch and its tricks. All of it stretched out longer than necessary. But let's go into detail.

The strangest thing about the opening hours isn't that the game teaches you. Almost every game does that. The strange part is how long First Light refuses to stop teaching, even though it already has a solid set of tools and a clear framework for a full-blown mission. You're dragged through the base, introduced to spy life, handed new gadgets, told that some abilities need electronic components, others chemical ones, and certain skills operate by their own murky cooldown rules that remain unclear even after you've used them.

The irony is that even at this stage the game doesn't feel like an empty backdrop. Quite the opposite. It has a taste for atmosphere, for small details, for background chatter. You don't have to rush toward the next waypoint — you can take your time soaking in the whole lab, listening to what the NPCs are saying, watching how this spy anthill actually operates. Thanks to that, the place feels less like a museum of cardboard cutouts and more like a working den where people are genuinely busy.

For atmosphere: a plus. For pacing: pure frustration. When you've already been shown a tense, high-stakes opening mission and are then fed two and a half hours of "go here, go there," you start grinding your teeth. Not because everything is bad — because the game keeps you in the training pen far too long, even though it's holding all the cards for a big-budget Bond action experience.

Bond's age in this version also feeds the overall feeling. He's twenty-six. Not yet an untouchable icon. He argues, defies orders, makes mistakes, pushes back, defies them again — and there's a rawness to that attitude that the more polished "canonical" versions of the character often lack.

Once the game finally lets you off the leash, its most enjoyable side emerges — gadget-assisted stealth. Not high-level chess. Not a sandbox with twenty routes to calculate. Just lively, intuitive, often quite satisfying spy work: eavesdropping opens up patrol routes, lures fool guards, electrical objects create distractions, and bluffing works almost like a little "everyone leave me alone" button.

The bluff mechanic is a nice find. At one point it works not just on the guard approaching you but on everyone nearby, and the whole group suddenly loses interest. It's not an elegant super-system; it's more of a household cheat you're happy to press when a scene starts getting on your nerves. The problem is that the game explains timings poorly. Sometimes it helpfully offers a prompt; the next moment it leaves you guessing. Lose focus for a second and you're already blown.

This is a core trait of First Light. It likes to look freer than it actually feels in certain stretches. You're often formally offered a choice between quiet or loud, but in practice you can miss the scene's logic entirely and watch the spy fantasy collapse into a mundane brawl with another batch of guards. Nothing catastrophic — the game just doesn't always manage to be as clever as it wants to appear. Enjoyed hiding in shadows, disabling cameras, and tricking guards with gadgets? Check out the Best Stealth Games of All Time: Top 35 on PC and Console — plenty of great titles about playing in the shadows.

Shooting compensates for a lot. The weapons feel good, recoil registers, enemies drop satisfyingly, and headshots occasionally land more generously than you deserve. There's a funny sense that sometimes you shoot nearly wide and the game just says, "Sure, you look great today, take the kill." I'm not complaining. After too many walks and too much route-juggling, it's a relief to finally feel like someone who actually needs his pistol for something.

Melee is weaker. One-on-one is tolerable — nothing to cheer about, nothing to hate. A crowd turns the fight into a messy scrum where hits come from every direction, reaction windows disappear, and all the spy polish evaporates in three seconds. Nobody's calling it cinematic on paper, and you won't call it that inside the game either. When there are too many enemies, shooting is simply more comfortable.

One small but telling detail: an empty magazine doesn't turn your gun into garbage. You can hurl it at an enemy and finish them off in a stupid yet perfectly on-brand way. A tiny thing — but it nails the vibe immediately.

Not all missions are equally well made. No surprises there. Some sections let you listen to a conversation, pick out a lead, work your way inside, set your own pace, and actually feel like a competent agent. Others, despite simple objectives, feel like a cruel joke. The garden episode is one of those: you need to escape the grounds, follow audio cues, find a library with passwords to a utility room, then locate the utility room itself — except the area is overrun with guards who constantly spot you, and at some point you just want to end this pantomime the honest way by sprinting out and shooting everyone.

This isn't a case of "the player just didn't get it." It's a case of a level that doesn't particularly want to be understood quickly or without frustration. Sometimes the game confuses you not for the sake of intrigue, but simply because it misreads its own space. You don't think "interesting challenge." You think "where the hell is that passage."

Elsewhere, 007 First Light suddenly remembers it can be a thrill ride rather than a suffering club. The airplane chase is the obvious example. You're not sitting idle while things explode around you — during the dogfight you can bank the plane left and right with Q and E, knock enemies off, combine that with gunfire, and the scene immediately feels like participation rather than spectacle. The boat, the cars, the speedboat — same effect. The game isn't shy about handing you a vehicle frequently, even if the paths are linear. Honestly, for a Bond story I don't need an open world with ten pointless forks. Give me a corridor with speed and risk.

The QTEs here don't make you want to pull the power cable. They're built into the scene, they don't shatter the rhythm, they don't scream at you in red letters — they help maintain the feeling that you're inside the cutscene, not watching it. In some games QTEs are a slap across the fingers. Here they're part of the attraction, and that deserves genuine credit.

There are also challenges along the lines of "complete it this way" or "infiltrate differently." That adds replay value to missions even if on your first run you just pick the most obvious approach you can see. The levels don't feel like disposable napkins because of it. Secrets unlocked through eavesdropping, alternate entry routes, a loadout of gadgets before each sortie — the game occasionally winks very openly in Hitman's direction, and that's a good vector. It just doesn't reach the same level of freedom.

Worth mentioning is the separate Tactical Simulator mode, which opens up missions outside the main story and serves up costumes, gadgets, and weapons — practically telling you outright: "Go ahead, dress your spy, don't let yourself get bored." It's an entertaining mode that feels like a supplement to the main game. You go there not for deep mechanical reinvention, but for minor fan-minded tinkering with the toolbox.

First Light is beautiful. The game delivers a great-looking picture everywhere, without compromise — to the point that I ended up with nearly five hundred screenshots not because I decided to catalog textures, but because the game keeps shoving another postcard in your face and waiting for you to press the button again.

Iceland at the start. Malta as a hub and launch point. Slovakia with its luxury hotel. A desert location built from the hulks of sunken ships. The Webb Industries tower with its cold corporate gleam. Vietnam with jungles, dense greenery, and that hot-movie feeling where even the air looks sticky. Antarctica, where everything suddenly turns white, dead, and suspiciously clean. The game races across climate zones like a child loose in a toy store, and it suits it well.

The nicest part is that the beauty isn't limited to distant vistas. There are mundane details that catch you off guard. Mirror reflections without any RTX fuss. Light on faces and surfaces. The general tidiness of the environment. None of it sells the game separately from the gameplay — it just makes time spent inside it comfortable, even when the level is already starting to annoy you.

Performance is less flawless. In ordinary scenes the game can run smoothly and steadily. In areas where many characters pour onto the map at once, FPS noticeably drops — most painfully in crowd-heavy locations or specific dense scenes like the chess tournament and some of the larger open spaces. The impression is that the game strains not just the GPU but also the CPU, especially when the number of people and active events becomes too high. If your hardware is also struggling under the weight of next-gen demands and framerates crash to embarrassing numbers mid-firefight, let your GPU breathe: check out the the best games for Low-End PCs and laptops.

The music also does its job for the atmosphere. Early on the game rolls out opening titles and a title sequence in an almost cinematic fashion — cutscenes, credits, the sense that you've launched not just another campaign but an actual Bond production, with a love of surface glamour and a light swagger. Some will find this excessive self-indulgence. I enjoyed it. For a game like this, it's better to lean slightly too hard into the theatrical than to sit there with a straight face afraid to be beautiful.

First Light presents a young Bond who is twenty-six and doesn't yet look like a finished legend — more like a very stubborn rookie being drawn into the bigger MI6 game. After a failed operation at the start, he isn't simply dispatched to the next mission; he's walked through spy boot camp: introduced to the base, the gadgets, future colleagues, and the rules of the service. The first major plot hook is built around missing agent 009, and it's through that case that Bond gradually gets pulled into a story about old MI6 mistakes, suspicious trails, the influential Webb family, and a system called THEIA — a quantum computer whose predictions have come to underpin too much of the organisation's decision-making. The plot takes its time laying out its cards, so early on it feels like a string of self-contained spy episodes, but its baseline is fairly simple: a young agent trying to figure out who was framed, who is lying, and why the whole construction is cracking from within.

The THEIA thread is the best hook in the entire story. The machine produces predictions, the organisation trusts them, Webb's son bends reality to fit the system's errors, and Bond breaks the beautiful mathematical certainty right at the start when he saves people against a stated one-percent chance of success. That narrative move works brilliantly — and without cheap moralizing about humanity triumphing over machines. Everything here is more cynical than that. It's not the machine's fault alone. The blame lies with the people who find it so convenient to hide behind its conclusions.

009 isn't here just as a big name from an old case — he's the central shadow over the entire story. His disappearance becomes Bond's entry point into the plot, and for Greenway it's a personal thorn, because he's tied to that history more deeply than first appears. Greenway himself is not an abstract "important MI6 man" but Bond's handler, who starts out looking at Bond with irritation and distrust before gradually taking on a far more significant role in the story. Alongside him are Monroe — one of Bond's first partners — Moneypenny, who guides Bond over comms for most of the game, Cressida, who appears early in the story, and Aiزola — a French intelligence agent with her own agenda and her own distance. This roster isn't there for the sake of it: the game uses them to show how the young Bond slots into the system, who he begins to trust, and how shaky the ground beneath this entire spy facade ultimately is.

First Light discards people without ceremony. The game quickly teaches you not to get too attached: some figures vanish from the centre of the story abruptly, others stay close to the end but never stop feeling precarious. Aizola looks from the very beginning like someone with her own separate agenda, and that feeling never goes away. Moneypenny is also more than just a utility voice in your ear — through her too the game shows that even apparently stable connections here give no real sense of security.

Not every character gets equally careful treatment. Cressida is a clear example: the game carves out space for her early in the story but then provides too few meaningful beats for her arc to feel complete. The result isn't intriguing ambiguity — it's a sense of unfinished work. Tired of spy intrigue and want your nerves genuinely rattled? Here's an TOP-15 Psychological Horror Games Guaranteed to Break Your Mind.

The technical side of the dialogue also limps along. Some conversations are missing subtitles for no apparent reason. Others are mixed too quietly. The result is that you're sometimes not following the meaning of a scene but deciphering who muttered what in passing. For a game where intrigue and relationships between characters genuinely matter, that's a noticeable flaw.

The final chapters accelerate like an expensive TV series that's suddenly been given permission to stop holding back. An Antarctic base. A duplicate quantum computer that has to be destroyed. Aizola with a personal vendetta, a fabricated story about her parents, and a plan of her own. A chase for the core. Speedboats, cables, sprints, firefights. A prison on MI6 grounds under assault. The return of Damian, who was seemingly already dead. A bioskin, a cyborg killer, tunnels, Q's laboratory, the "Valhalla" car, machine guns, rockets, a launch ramp, a new boss fight. The game finally throws off all restraint, and it's absolutely the right call.

There aren't many bosses, but they stick in the memory. One fight is built around environmental interaction — you lure the enemy under chandeliers and electric traps. Others work through direct damage, multi-phase structures, shifting arenas, turrets, and extra conditions. Not a brilliant set of duels for the ages, but solid, varied encounters that at least try to be more than a fat health bar on a man standing in the middle of an arena.

Q's laboratory just before the finale is genuinely great. You're given access to nearly the entire environment: drones, turrets, all sorts of devices you can activate against enemies, and the screen suddenly becomes a toy room for a mischievous child. After a run of standard gunfights, it feels like a breath of fresh air. It's not just you shooting enemies anymore — the environment starts shredding them alongside you.

There's something I particularly liked about how the game brings Bond to 007 status. Not as a long-service reward. Not as a collector's souvenir behind glass. You genuinely spend the full length of his long, uneven, and sometimes beautiful journey alongside him — from a stubborn young agent to someone who has actually earned 007 rather than receiving it as an empty badge to applause. He's broken too much, survived too much, and taken too much onto himself for that number to feel decorative.

And that's where First Light hits the mark exactly. Not through flawless mechanics. Not through a perfect screenplay. Not through consistent quality across every mission. It lands through the feeling of a grand spy adventure that sometimes infuriates you with its training wheels, sometimes loses itself in its own levels, sometimes drops important lines without subtitles, sometimes carelessly tosses characters off to the side — and then turns around and throws an airplane, a speedboat, jungles, snow, a quantum computer, a luxury hotel, a desert town built from wreckage, a masked cyborg, a car armed with rockets, and a young Bond who is still charging forward like someone absolutely certain he can follow orders later.

This is a game that knows how to be beautiful even when it's angry at the player. A game that isn't always smart but is often alive. And when the credits tell you James Bond will return, it doesn't sound like a postcard from the gift shop — it sounds like a promise that this incorrigible fool is going to go somewhere he was never given permission to be.

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