007 First Light

TLDR: 007 First Light feels like someone remastered a mid-tier stealthy action adventure game from over a decade ago. Everything feels borrowed and none of it feels properly executed. Their hoping the name alone will carry the experience. It's Uncharted 3 in a rented tuxedo. I'll start with the story design and how the timeline itself isn't canon. Call me particular, but how many times are we going to fully reboot Bond and invent a new origin for him? The franchise just did this with Daniel Craig, calling back to the first novel, and it finally pointed the series in a decent direction after decades of corny Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, and Brosnan-era stumbling. Craig's run took a bit to find its footing too, but it eventually built a Bond who could be suave and charming without coming across as a should-be-registered predator on screen. Giving us spy action with some grit. It was finally enjoyable, especially in the last 3 movies. And that's what makes this game's choice so baffling. Bond died at the end of the last film. The door was wide open to let players create their own character, get assigned the 007 number, and lean on Bond's legacy while playing a solid stealth action adventure game. Instead, the game drags Bond himself into the modern age, ignoring the franchise's story history while still cramming in iconic elements from it, like the Day of the Dead outfit and the Golden Gun among other things. The opportunity was knocking and no one heard the door with their heads jammed up their.. Anyway, they missed the mark with the story. For the actual gameplay, ugh.. So many parts of the game you're just slowly driving while characters talk or walking through environments just to get from A to B. I get cinematic experiences and such but this is not that. It's fodder. then when you're in an action sequence, they'll cut to scene to show Bond doing the most epic part of the sequence like we wouldn't have been able to do it ourselves. Good thing I can slow drive across the African desert in my Range Rover while Greenway talks but I can't jump off the ladder truck on to the plane while it takes off. I might've missed the dangling fuel line with the massive 'JUMP AND GRAB THIS!' marker in the middle of my screen. The stealth (if we can call it that) here isn't systemic, it's binary. Your contact lens scans the room and highlights the few things your watch gadgets can interact with, if anything. There's no real environmental problem-solving here, no emergent gameplay. You're not identifying opportunities, you're just waiting for the game to flag them for you. The loop is: scan, see if the watch can manipulate something, and if not, you're funneled into combat if you can't sneak past the sentries. With how bad the character movement is, they pretty much always hear, see, smell, or think about you so you'll have to fight them. That's not stealth design, that's a checklist with a spy skin on it. Bad mechanics. The weapon system in this game is infuriating, and the gadgets are dumb, particularly the constant refueling your watch after every single use. Luckily there's a suspicious abundance of random batteries and chemicals scattered across the world for you to loot so you can power up your watch. I have no idea how that made sense to the design team, but it's dumb. The hand to hand combat is bad. It's clunky, unresponsive, and just bad. The traversal system stinks. The climbing, running, vaulting, and general environmental interaction you'd expect from someone as athletic and resourceful as Bond navigating a non-permissive environment, is seriously lacking. If your idea of a good time is walking at a snail's pace and turning on every vacuum cleaner or photocopier you pass to distract someone, sure, I guess it works. Not to mention there's parts where you can drop off a ledge or walk through a door and the game says okay you're done with that section behind you so now you can't climb back up the ledge or go back through the door, this is the path you've chosen. But you're just still in the same set of rooms and haven't changed objectives or anything. So then you have to restart from checkpoint if you want to try a different approach instead of just climbing back up the ledge and crawling through the air vent to the position you were in 20 feet back. Sneaking into the CCTV room at the Webb Gala, I'm looking at you here. The hand to hand combat is really bad. Exploration and environmental interaction amount to nothing more than chasing a marker from point A to point B. There's no real discovery, no systemic problem-solving, just constant hand-holding toward the next objective marker. And the hand to hand combat is terrible. The graphics are mid af. Some of the highlight objects they put in the game like the sponsored vehicles, such as the Jaguar Type 00 sitting in a spotlight in a villain's personal collection of highly coveted goods, look like they were ported over from a Minecraft server. Much of the environments are okay some parts of the game look decent but mostly it's unimpressive and mid af. What's the point of the bluff system? It doesn't work on anyone above a low level adversary if at all lol. And why bothering having the ability to ask so many questions or give so many answers when talking to people? The questions and responses, no matter what you choose, have no impact on the outcome of the situation or overall game. Lastly, because I'm just tired of pointing out the endless failures here. The boss fights. Because the Devs don't want you to just use your watch or service weapon, you have to figure out the puzzle to overcome the boss. You can't use hand to hand combat, the chemical darts that make every other human sick, the laser that blinds people, none of it. You have to use the environment to beat the guy chasing you with a gun because the combat system you've used everywhere else in the game, now doesn't work on this one guy. So the even the illusion of choice through creative means they've dangled in front of you this whole time completely goes out the window here and you just have to figure out how they wanted you to beat him. This is where I stopped playing altogether. The first real boss fight. I didn't even bother figuring out how to do it. I just uninstalled the game, requested a refund for the $85 I spent on the deluxe edition because I like the 007 franchise still for some reason, and came to write this review so you can avoid the utter disappointment and frustration that I am currently experiencing. Avoid buying this game. Go watch whatever movie you think is the best Bond installment. Play a Hitman demo. Then move on. This type of release is the problem with the game industry right now. If this game came out in 2005 I might go wow this was fun and innovative but it's 2026 and we still get rehashed nonsense year after year.