Earn the Number as a Young James Bond
Before the tuxedo and the licence to kill, James Bond was a 26-year-old with a Navy record, plenty of nerve and no 00 number to his name. 007 First Light, IO Interactive’s single-player action-adventure, covers the stretch in which that changes.
Missions are linear and cinematic, played from a third-person view. Between them you return to MI6 headquarters, pick up intel and choose which Q Branch gadgets to carry, then decide how loud the next job needs to be.
Top 3 Reasons to Play
- A Bond who is still under construction. Eurogamer’s reviewer ranked the writing as the best in a big-budget game since Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Patrick Gibson plays the lead as impatient and over-confident on purpose: IO’s narrative director wanted that swagger to read as naivety. The same review singled out the supporting cast as the real surprise.
- Missions with more than one answer. Most encounters can be cleared quietly, with gadgets, or by shooting everyone in the room, and the game rarely forces a single method. Going loud is always on the table, though a few sequences throw enough enemies at you that brute force stops working.
- A proper Bond itinerary. The campaign moves through Iceland, Malta, Slovakia, Mauritania and Vietnam. Lana Del Rey sings the title song, co-written and produced by Bond-film composer David Arnold, and the score by The Flight blends orchestral writing with electronic textures.
Story and Lore
The campaign opens in Iceland. A Special Air Service team is ambushed during a retrieval operation, leaving Royal Navy aircrewman James Bond as the sole survivor. He reaches the target, a research camp occupied by mercenaries, ignores his orders and frees the captive scientists.
That act of disobedience earns him a meeting with M and a place in MI6’s revived 00 programme, several months behind six other candidates. A mentor who doubts him oversees the training. The first live assignment, tracking a rogue former 009 to a hotel in Slovakia, ends in a bombing and sets the conspiracy in motion.
- Continuity. The story is original and sits outside the film canon, though it draws on Ian Fleming’s novels and the film series. This Bond’s likeness is not based on any of the actors who played him on screen.
- Theme. According to the game’s art director, the plot deals with artificial intelligence in defence work and the risk of trusting a machine’s judgement.
- Language. The script was scrubbed of Americanisms: where an early demo had “parking lot”, the final game has Bond say “car park”.
Gameplay and Mechanics
Play is third-person and guided. IO has pointed to Uncharted for its large set pieces and to the Batman: Arkham games for the way fights flow.
- Melee. Enemy attacks are telegraphed: a red flash calls for a dodge, a yellow one for a parry. Chained dodges, parries and grapples set the rhythm, and objects in the environment can join the fight.
- Licence to kill. Bond normally sticks to non-lethal takedowns. Lethal force opens up once enemies show intent to kill him, and ammunition is scarce enough that you will often swap to weapons taken from defeated enemies.
- Bluffing. Bond can talk his way past guards, blend into crowds and eavesdrop on conversations. Bluffs draw on an Instinct meter, and sharper enemies see through a weak one.
Gadgets come from Q Branch. The Q-Lens highlights hackable objects and useful details, the Q-Watch operates devices to divert attention, and the toolkit grows with items such as the Dart Phone, which quietly moves guards out of the way, the Smoke Pod and the Flash Mine.
Cars are new territory for the studio: this is its first game with drivable vehicles, and an Aston Martin Valhalla features in the action.
Outside the story, Tactical Simulation (TacSim) turns training scenarios into scored challenges. Each run earns an Agent Score for global and friends’ leaderboards, while XP raises a Clearance Level that unlocks weapon skins, gadget skins and cosmetics, which Intel then buys.
The execution has rough edges. Reviews flagged enemy AI that sometimes ignores Bond standing in plain sight, checkpoints placed far apart, and driving sections that feel less developed than the on-foot action.
Characters and Factions
- James Bond (Patrick Gibson). Younger and more unrefined than the screen Bonds; Gibson supplies both the voice and the face.
- John Greenway (Lennie James). An original character, a former 00 agent and Bond’s reluctant mentor.
- M, Q and Moneypenny (Priyanga Burford, Alastair Mackenzie, Kiera Lester). Reimagined for this continuity. M is younger and backs Bond’s growth instead of clashing with him, Q plays the “cool uncle”, and Moneypenny works as a field analyst who helps on missions.
- Dr. Selina Tan (Gemma Chan). A psychology and game theory expert who heads MI6’s Tactical Simulation department.
- Isola Vale (Noémie Nakai). A professional thief and the game’s Bond girl, first met posing as a French agent.
- Theresa Lorca (Raquel Cipriano). A geneticist whose path crosses Bond’s at a luxury resort.
- Bawma (Lenny Kravitz). A flamboyant arms dealer.
Three camps shape the plot. MI6 and its 00 programme are Bond’s home base, where fellow recruits Cressida Bright (Jessica Rhodes) and Lennox Monroe, a former SAS trooper (Chris O’Reilly), train beside him. Webb Industries, a defence-technology company run by Sir Nicholas Webb (Anthony Howell), is the opposing power, with his son Damien (Bart Edwards) and a pair of assassins, the Murto twins (Anssi Lindström), handling the dirty work. Aleph, a lawless black-market hub ruled by Bawma, belongs to neither side and trades with both.
Editions
PC buyers choose between two digital versions, with a boxed collector’s release above them.
- Standard Edition. The base game with the full campaign and TacSim mode.
- Deluxe Edition. Cosmetic extras: four outfits (Day of the Dead, Desert Explorer, Silent Anchor and Gentleman Operator), the Agent’s Mark weapon skin and four Gleaming Pack gadget skins. Standard owners on Steam can add them through the Deluxe Edition Upgrade DLC.
- Legacy Edition. A boxed collector’s edition that adds a Golden Gun replica with display case, a magnetic steelbook, a certificate of authenticity, and the Obsidian Gold suit and Golden Gun weapon skin on top of the Deluxe content. A Collector’s Edition sits below it as another physical release.
PC System Requirements
IO Interactive publishes five performance tiers for the PC version, each tied to a resolution, a frame-rate target and a graphics preset. You pick the tier that matches the screen and smoothness you want. All five need Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit), 80 GB of free storage and an SSD, so the game cannot run from a hard drive.