Commit d695084

# 007 First Light

- **Category:** Game

- **Platform:** PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2

- **Date:** 2026-06-03

- **Rating:** 4/5

- **Link:** [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/007_First_Light)

## The Magpie Spy

*IO Interactive's Bond origin story borrows liberally from Max Payne 3, Control, and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It never quite out-does any of them — and it's still a thoroughly good time.*

There's a particular pleasure in playing a game that wears its influences this openly. 007 First Light, IO Interactive's reimagined origin story for a younger, rougher James Bond, plays like a mixtape of the studio's favourite action and stealth games — and, to its enormous credit, most of the tracks land.

The Max Payne 3 DNA was the first thing I noticed. It's there in the gunplay — the way Bond can run two weapons at once, the weighty, cinematic feel of a firefight — but it's just as present in the character himself. This isn't the unflappable, martini-dry Bond of the films. He's younger, more reckless, more bruised, and the game leans into that the way Rockstar leaned into a sweaty, self-destructive Max. You're playing a man who isn't fully formed yet, and the rough edges suit him.

Then there are the environments, and this is where Control kept flashing through my mind. The Webb Industries buildings in particular share that same cold, monolithic, faintly oppressive architecture — clean lines and brutalist scale that make you feel small inside them. Wandering those interiors, I half-expected the walls to start rearranging themselves.

The stealth, meanwhile, is doing its best Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory impression. Let me be clear: it does not reach those heights. Chaos Theory is a high bar, and First Light's stealth is shallower, more forgiving, and less systemically rich. But it borrows the grammar — the shadows, the patient route-reading, the quiet satisfaction of slipping through a room nobody knew you were in — and it borrows it well enough to stand on its own. That's the through-line of the whole game, really: it takes a little from everything it admires, and even at a notch or two below the originals, the sum is genuinely satisfying.

The standout moments, for me, were the License to Kill sequences. When the game finally takes the leash off and clears you to go loud, the combat opens up beautifully — you can drop into a gunfight exactly how and when you want, and it feels fantastic every single time. Those stretches are where First Light stops imitating and starts feeling like its own confident, swaggering thing.

It isn't all smooth, though, and the cracks are worth naming. For all its set-piece spectacle, the moment-to-moment gameplay is restrictive in a lot of ways. The driving is the clearest example — serviceable at best, more rollercoaster than open road, with little of the freedom the films' chase scenes promise. Even exploration can feel boxed in; there are stretches where poking around a map you'd expect to be open turns out to be a narrow corridor dressed up as a sandbox. You can feel the Hitman skeleton underneath all of it — the level design, the disguises, the systemic plumbing — and at times First Light reads less like a fresh creation than a Bond-flavoured remix of IO's own house style. Which, given who made it, is hardly a surprise.

And yet. For every limitation, there was a sequence that pulled me right back in. First Light is a game assembled from other people's best ideas, executed a step below the source material across the board — and somehow that adds up to something I had a genuinely great time with. It's not the best stealth game, or the best shooter, or the best Bond fantasy I've played. It just happens to be a really, really fun one.