007 First Light hands-on: "Explosive action, creative bluffs, and cinematic storytelling – the Hitman developer might have made the best Bond game ever"

The best Bond moments, across the movies and the books, are when you don't quite know what the super spy is going to do to get through a tight situation. 007 First Light embraces this as only IO Interactive, the developer of Hitman, can: by letting you make those decisions yourself, steering a young, peppy James Bond who feels like he's up for anything.

Early in my hands-on, I'm in the lobby for a gala with no invitation. I could slyly poison a guest, swiping their glittering invite while they're nauseous, or find another way to slip in. Instead, I use a different Bond gadget to temporarily blind the guards and waltz right in, feeling like I'm skipping an objective thanks to my bold wiles. That's just the start of my infiltration. Within minutes, I'm presented with multiple paths to breach deeper through security, and options to do so that range from silently choking out guards to boisterously trying to befriend them. 007 First Light has me stirred.

Invitation only

007 First Light's gala mission – presented to me as being the sixth chapter – forms the bulk of my hands-on after playing a thrilling opening sequence followed by a brief slice of one of Bond's own training missions. As I slide between rich guests, the comparisons between 007 First Light and Hitman: World of Assassination are immediate – this London setting is a stone's throw away from Hitman's opening Paris mission with its glamor, glitz, and layers of security.

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The gala is in preparation for a keynote from an industry leader, hosted in an art gallery. I can briefly chat with the bartender, browse exhibits celebrating the company hosting the event, and keep an ear open for opportunities as guests rub shoulders and I probe for security weak spots. My target is deeper within the complex, not at the party itself. Keycard protected doors and guards blocking stairs hide restricted rooms, and beyond them, Bond is sure to encounter more trigger-happy henchmen involved in the conspiracy he is, naturally, trying to rumble incognito.

Comparison to the divisive Hitman Absolution also rings true, but only in the sense that 007 First Light echoes that game's most interesting design choice – focusing on using quick-witted espionage tricks to always push forward. While 007 First Light has moments of sandbox play where you can choose different ways to progress, you're always moving James Bond further into the mission, building momentum. No looping back. Save that for the replays. And, with the option to reload at mission sub-chapters, I've already played through missions in several different ways. What's more, the newly announced TacSim mode promises greater replayability that nods to the challenges available in Hitman: World of Assassination.

It's a "forward, focused approach," senior combat designer Tom Marcham tells me. "We want you to move through the level, we don't want you to be massively concerned with the challenges you've already overcome behind you. [...] Then, we'll just give you more challenges instead, and that allows us to make [those] challenges more difficult, because you don't have to worry about the stuff behind you. It's very forward facing – the challenge you need to solve is in front of you."

007 First Light's marketing has described playing as Bond in these different ways as a '360 Bond experience', mixing car chases, shootouts, stealthy moments of espionage, quieter moments, and more together. What that really means is that each chunk of a level hands-off Bond seamlessly between different modes of play, in which his moves and abilities are recontextualized in order to meet the shifting goal posts of his mission at hand.

One sequence leads into the next one, into the next one, but that doesn't mean that Bond is always escalating. Action will slow for a story moment, Bond may need to use his silver tongue to progress, there may be a chase, then, guns drawn for a glass-bursting, cover vaulting, heart-pumping few minutes until 'situation contained' flashes on screen, and Bond saunters on. Like scenes in a movie, excitement is up and down, pull and release. 007 First Light is mechanically dense – it's not trying to be a movie in how you interact with it – but it's still echoing a cinematic sensibility in how Bond's adventure progresses. You won't get sick of endless hallways of shooting dudes.

I get a taste of this in 007 First Light's tense, bombastic opening sequence that has James Bond, a navy crewman in-training, barely surviving as the rest of his crew perishes when terrorists blow up his helicopter in Iceland. As the sole survivor, he's trapped behind enemy lines as a villainous group attempts to seize control of a secret MI6 asset at a research station.

Staying low, he must approach the station by avoiding enemy line-of-sight, and hopping Uncharted-like across ledges. Then, swiping an enemy parka and balaclava (though, crucially, the game proper does not have a disguise system, I'm told), he moves silently through the enemy camp, before losing the outfit and moving through a tight series of pre-fabs to free scientist hostages, with multiple points of egress and patrolling enemies. Then, it's weapons free as an exciting escape ensues.

It's a great opening. The stormy weather, and heavy rain really shows what IO Interactive can do with its updated Glacier 2 engine. Sure, I'm playing on a doubtless beefy gaming PC, but it's absolutely gorgeous, even though I'm told the build I'm playing is missing some lighting effects that they're still tweaking. Hitman 3 was already stunning. 007 First Light is a step above. Yet, there's the sense, as there can be in a lot of gaming set pieces, that maybe this opening is a bit of a one-off.

I'm surprised, then, when the sixth chapter – the one with the gala – is able to smoothly move James Bond between differing plot beats and moments of action as well, tightening up the possibility space when needed and then loosening it for moments of creative snooping that feels very natural, especially when I can't help but mentally compare 007 First Light to the likes of the Bond movies (though, IO Interactive are keen to point out it's drawn a lot from the books – such as Bond's distinctive facial scar).

For your hands only

Let me roll back that mission for you. Bond doesn't actually start at the gala. Instead, the mission begins with him returning home to his Kensington flat-share feeling sorry for himself (for story reasons I'm yet to be privy to), able to briefly wander around, check his messages, pour himself a little drink, flip over one of his precious ornithology tomes and, of course, read his own suicide note. Wait, what? As he looks at the forged paper, he's jumped by an assassin, ripping him out of the scene and into a fight.

All the set-dressing I was poring over can now tumble and break as James Bond gets to work discombobulating this fella in a deliberately extensive one-on-one fight that's meant to directly mimic the zoomed-in action of such moments in other Bond media. "The assassin fight is a really good example of us nailing in on a Quantum of Solace style – the knife sequence from [the movie], and just going like: this is our close combat system," says Marcham. "This is a gritty encounter with someone who's really tough to bring down."

With the threat dispatched, there's no time to breathe, sniper rifle fire shattering Bond's windows, action transitioning into a staggered chase across the rooftops as Bond must move forward while taking cover. The bad guy gets away, but Bond is able to trace him with assistance from (of course) Moneypenny. Hence, the gala. Here, as mentioned, Bond's infiltration is more about wits than combat, the lobby opening up the play space, then the gala itself opening it up wider again.

Once through the layer of security, though, Bond isn't able to trust anyone on staff – having to make his way through to check the CCTV for his bad guy himself. This is also an open sequence, giving several wings of restricted space to move through in order to nab a keycard that'll get him into the room. With civilian guards, there's simply no way Bond will open fire on these guys. He could run in and try to batter them, but with lots of them patrolling, getting pummelled isn't really a prime super spy plan.

Bond's gadgets use an almost Watch Dogs-like interface, able to use his Q-Watch and other gadgets to spend a collectable energy or chemical resource to mess with guards or the environment. Crouching low, printers can be activated as a distraction, or radios switched on to draw guards nearer for a silent takedown. But, Bond can also expend energy to interact with these non-alerted guards. Able to bluff, Bond can use information gathered (some of them optional) to pretend he's exactly where he's meant to be – cheekily making out that he's been asked to fix a broken coffee machine, or that he's a specific journalist he's learned is a no-show through crafty eavesdropping, and that he's been asked to wait in the area for his contact.

Bluffing won't work on every guard (leaders are marked in the Q-Watch UI), but when it does they'll have a pop-up timer for how long they'll tolerate your presence to simply walk through a zone unbothered. It's a real thrill to pull off, and fits Bond's personality perfectly. He won't be judo chopping guards to steal their uniforms, but he's still up for a bit of bold, social manipulation to act like he's not out of place. It's a fresh take on the genre that'll be making 'best stealth mechanic' lists for some time to come I'm certain. Mixing smooth-talking, crouch-walking behind desks, and using gadgets to disable security cameras and distract guards, this is a dynamic, snappy sequence.

From there, Bond's mission keeps evolving. I play a quick boss fight that channels a bit of Batman: Arkham City's iconic Mr. Freeze boss fight, having to mix-up environmental traps to get the drop on a sharp, dangerous assassin who's hunting him down. Briefly moving into a narrative-focused experience, Bond then ends up making his escape through waves of what Marcham calls "dynamic escalation spaces", where stealth and action collide.

Each encounter here has guards steadily getting more dangerous, more on edge. But, as Bond's escape begins, they won't pull guns immediately – you can even still bluff some guard groups to get a head start, using gleaned information about fellow commander names to act like you're on their side, before weaving through vents and scaffolding to pick them off one by one so you have fewer enemies to deal with if you break cover.

Only when enemies have clear intent to kill, whether that's drawing a gun in a fistfight or storming his position fully-armed, is Bond able to respond in-kind, the screen flashing up 'License to Kill' to let you know that his privilege from the state has been activated. In that sense, 007 First Light is almost the complete opposite of Hitman – only using proportional force where necessary, and otherwise non-lethally knocking out enemies.

That mission alone took me a good couple of hours to get through on first play, and it really does feel like with 007 First Light, IO Interactive has been able to refine its approach to have narratively-driven missions that are constantly evolving stakes and playstyles as you move through them. I can't think of a better way to approach adapting what James Bond is into a game.

There have been some great 007 games before, but none of them have managed to capture the experience of a full Bond adventure and the way it ebbs and flows between explosive set-pieces, grounded action, and quieter moments like IO Interactive manages here. 007 First Light just gets James Bond. I can't wait to be aiming down sights for the full experience, and hopefully beyond (be-Bond?), when 007 First Light launches on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on 27 May – with Nintendo Switch 2 to follow.

Want to catch up with 007? Check out our best Bond movies ranking for what to watch next!