From its announcement right up until going hands-on, I’ve never quite been sure what to expect from 007: First Light. As much as Agent 47 is able to blend into environments and crowds, he does it in a rather different way to James Bond. There’s thematic crossover between the world of assassination and the world of spycraft, but how would IO Interactive balance their first licensed game?
Well, from what I’ve played, they’ve pitched it almost perfectly. There are elements of Hitman that still come through, but there’s also much more of that swagger that Bond can bring to the table.
It starts with Bond before he’s, well, James Bond. On a mission with the SAS to Iceland, he’s the only survivor after their two choppers are shot down. Struggling with oncoming hypothermia after his dip in the freezing ocean, you guide him through evading the surprisingly well-armed bad guys, hiding behind rocks, dashing between cover, making use of tall grass, and hurriedly stopping his half-broken radio from squawking.
But then an MI6 officer comes through loud and clear, guiding Bond the rest of the way, not toward safety, but right into the heart of the base, with its glowing habitat dome, field of prepared explosives, hostages and more trouble than Bond should really be able to handle.
But handle it he does, going off script a little and proving himself worthy of some more serous training from MI6.
Through it all, Bond feels like an action adventure star, moving fluidly as he vaults over tables and obstacles, clambering along ledges – marked here with white and yellow moss instead of the yellow paint of yesteryear – and brawling with the best of them if he needs to. On lower difficulties, you can kind of mash the punch button, waiting for a yellow indicator to show you need to counter quickly, and grabbing enemies that are guarding. However you can also quickly grab items from around you to throw. launch into slick finishers, smash enemies into the scenery, and more. It feels great, though admittedly with a lot more leeway to be sloppy on lower difficulties.
Skip ahead to a training scenario, and it’s time for a little capture the flag, with two fellow trainees looking on. Now you’ve got some extra toys, specifically the Q-Lens, which is able to trigger distractions and gizmos from a distance. This testing unit in Malta is rigged up with targets, speakers and more, and with guards that have (presumably) been told to play pretty dumb. Lure them into position and you can slap them with the mechanised target, drop rigged boxes on the floor, and more. Alternatively, you can go in fists flying and (paintball) guns blazing. It’s just about getting to the flag, however works for you.
But you can’t really just walk into a place and start blasting. The rules of engagement don’t give Bond a full license to kill from the start, but rather need him to be in a genuine place of peril with armed enemies and under fire before he can use a gun.
The training wheels come off when jumping ahead to a mid-game mission. Bond is off the books at this point, chasing a lead to a glitzy Kensington tech mogul event. “Oh, hello,” I thought to myself, “Here’s where I get to go full Hitman.” And I was right… to a certain extent.
Once within the venue, having distracted and pickpocketed someone’s invitation, there’s a big crowd gathered, everyone chatting away. Trying to follow a target sees them drop off the grid, forcing Bond to adapt and try to breach the event’s security, and here we get a little bit of classic Hitman World of Assassination framing. Spotting and eavesdropping on conversations starts to give you some opportunities to slip past the cordons, whether it’s bluffing over a guard that’s not turned up, or masquerading as an absentee journalist, each bringing you context clues for how to get further into the event – there will also likely be the chance to freestyle it, using Q-Lens distractions to lure and draw guards and staff away and slipping past, and then relying on Bond’s confident bluffing if he’s caught and confronted.
Once within the heart of the operation, it’s back to more classic stealth action techniques, again using distractions, finding vents and passages to sneak through to get up into the gantries, and generally watching and avoiding guard patrols. Helping you through all of this is the Q-Watch, which, in addition to Q-Lens’ hacking ability, offers you the ability to fire a powerful laser to cut through metal in an instant or (hopefully on a less powerful setting) temporarily blind people, and to fire off darts that make people a little bit woozy. Instead of having these abilities on a cooldown, they need you to quickly scavenge for resources as you go through the level, which leads to the frankly funny need to grab batteries from phones and power drills, and top up on hand sanitiser that’s just knocking around on tables. I mean, you aren’t going to feel good if you’re injected with cleaning alcohol, but it’s both rather daft and one of the least Bond things in the game.
What really surprised me from this point out, though, was just how much the game flows from one set piece and scenario to another. There’s a fight against a key baddie, where you really need to use the environment around you to deal damage to them, triggering experimental jet engines and power pads to hurt them – and where they can adapt and avoid traps as you use them. This then rolls into interrogation scenes, and a string of pitched battles against the major bad guy organisation’s crack troopers, including in a rather fantastic museum hall filled with glowing LED screen walls – and yes, they are destructible.
You do still have the ability to choose your approach during these moments, bringing to mind the kinds of wide-linear action of Uncharted 4. There’s enemies sweeping through as they hunt for you, but there’s multiple paths and lots of cover for you to use, and multiple floors or raised platforms, so you can approach it stealthily, go all-in on action, or mix it up between the two.
With time running out for my hands-on, it was guns blazing for me, and really embracing the chaos. Once again, I found myself surprised by just how slick and satisfying this kind of close and mixed combat could be. There’s a cinematic flair to the way you can shoot guns out of people’s hands, or just drop them with cold-blooded efficiency. You don’t have bags of ammo as you scavenge from downed enemies, but I loved running out of ammo, throwing the empty gun at an enemy’s head, rushing into them for a quick takedown and then ending up with whatever gun they had in their hands to immediately use on other enemies. Admittedly, this was on a lower difficulty, but I was having a grand old time, even if set piece after set piece had me wondering quite where this mission was going to actually end!
007: First Light goes far beyond being a pleasant surprise for me. You can certainly see where IO Interactive has adapted key aspects from Hitman, but it’s been done with such a deft touch, using them as highlight moments that fit with a different kind of covert action star. You should put this straight to the top of your wish list.
