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Video Game Review
There are high-tech gadgets and delightful moments in 007 First Light. But too often it becomes an action hero’s linear journey.
Early in 007 First Light, as the churlish young Bond is being put through rigorous spy training, his instructor tells him to “always do the unexpected — it’s the first rule of spycraft.”
Bond and his two training camp besties proceed to break into the course overnight and steal the flag that’s the goal of the next day’s exam. This comes as a surprise to the rest of the trainees and their grumpy instructor, but to the player it is an entirely programmed experience, scripted down to the nanosecond. Sneak here, wait for the command, move there, grab the flag, let the cutscene play.
This is a little unfair. A video game is necessarily a contract made between developer and player: Surrender your time and join the carnival pantomime of freedom while being led down a fully prescribed and boundaried path. But as with theater’s fourth wall and film’s suspension of disbelief, the pantomime must be plausible. The freedom must be felt.
There are moments in First Light where it all comes together quite convincingly, where you really feel like you’re playing as the roguish James Bond. Ironically, these moments also exhibit the clearest links to IO Interactive’s previous work, Hitman, in which a barcoded, bald assassin wanders around large architectural sandboxes trying to find the right combination of opportunities and tools to discreetly dispatch his targets.
First Light contains several levels set in familiar mansions, galas and corporate high-rise offices. As in Hitman, they’re vast, elaborate spaces, full of guards to fool, items to procure and traps to set. While not as Machiavellian or palm-rubbingly calculating as Hitman’s coldblooded protagonist, Bond still has plenty of high-tech gadgets up his wristwatch. These levels are, true to the training instructor’s lesson, full of surprises — and delightful, unexpected outcomes.
Too often, however, First Light sheds its depth for a linear journey in the vein of adventure games like Uncharted, which set the standard for watching a cinematic story play out with minimal intervention. First Light, being tied to a beloved fictional property, has a lot of story to tell, and it uses this gameplay-lite approach to tell it.
The game follows James Bond’s provenance as an MI6 agent. This is a new, youthful take on Bond, one set in a hypermodern world with tech companies forcing A.I. solutions onto everyone including fabled spy agencies, which seems like a bad idea. Bond must follow his nose and his guts and shirk the shortsighted bureaucrats standing between him and a hierarchy of villains.
First Light has the loose shape of Ian Fleming’s authorial signature; what’s missing is the texture and grit essential to a 007 story. When the game leaves the estate grounds and delves into empty industrial parks full of faceless henchmen, it loses its thread to the franchise. It doesn’t feel like 007, but rather the countless action-cover shooters that Uncharted spawned.
Bond is meant to trade quippy one-liners as he karate chops an enemy or two, not square off against entire military detachments using a small arsenal of automatic weapons. Here he is more action hero and less suave gentleman. He has been infected, apparently, by the video game bug that allows you to see through walls and slow time so you can nail perfect headshots. What starts out as a brainier game is hollowed out for mindless, perfunctory interaction that’s spruced up with big explosions in the background while you press forward all the while.
Bond is so young here, so new to it all. Like the player, he is dropped into the role without managing to fully inhabit it. He seduces the required number of women, but the awkward, motion-captured plasticity of their exchanges robs them of the slightest bit of eroticism.
Throughout the game, the camera is kept at a distance. The approach makes sense in Hitman, where it’s more important to have a wide peripheral view than to hew close to that game’s cipher-like hero. But Bond is larger than life. He is meant to fill the screen as the charismatic center of every scene’s gravity. First Light’s character is insubstantial; a beaming grin on his face hides little below the surface. There’s no sense of the struggle that makes the classic stories so memorable.
In those books and films, Bond is often mature and well-dressed, if a little haggard, stuck in a state of permanent hangover while leaking the scent of whiskey, cigars and the perfume of last night’s conquest. He’s a shambles, exemplified by Sean Connery’s hangdog mug, Daniel Craig’s masochistic dedication, and Roger Moore’s dead-eyed stare. (Bond is voiced here by Patrick Gibson, who appeared in the television shows “Dexter: Original Sin” and “The OA.”) But he is also indefatigable, pure drive. He’s driven toward sex, toward violence, toward success against the adversary of the day keeping him from his 5 o’clock cocktail hour. Without that bloody edge, who or what is Bond?
First Light feels timid, as if afraid to damage the delicate porcelain figure it was given by the gargantuan Fleming estate, all while navigating the watchful eye of the franchise’s new parent company, Amazon. It loses sight of what works about Bond.
There is magic in the few levels in which the spy is let loose. At one point he must sneak after a suspicious bellhop in the bowels of an ornate mountainside resort. To do so he can chat up a waiter, shimmy up a drainpipe, knock out a guard or two, steal a chauffeur cap and break into the wine cellar. Or he could take one of the several alternate paths available.
This form of interaction rewards an open mind and quick thinking. This is Bond as an agent of chaos and surprise, who survives on pure bravado and nerve. He’s not controlled by obvious scripts and triggers, explosions on timers, cameras that frame the action, pressing X for a perfectly timed leap or the square button for a clockwork parry.
And he isn’t a ruthless killer, an action hero with a triple-digit body count. The game’s narrative even acknowledges this when Bond tuts at an ally for shooting a guard in the head instead of choking him out.
So why does he go on to mow down dozens of thugs? Why does he swap between long guns and mantling walls, ninjalike, as bullets rain down? Is it just because this is a video game, and that’s what you do in one?
007 First Light was reviewed on the PlayStation 5. It is also available on the PC, Switch 2 and Xbox Series X|S.
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