After 3 hours with 007 First Light, IO's weaknesses are on display in a way they haven't been since Hitman: Absolution

It is the present day and young Mr James Bond is having a horrible time in Iceland. The dewy-eyed SAS rookie's transport chopper has exploded, all his friends are face-down in the basalt sand, and a cosmopolitan band of armed men seem alarmingly determined to make sure none of them get back up. He's hypothermic, bleeding, and utterly ignorant as to who his enemies are and why they want him dead.

None of which matters, because even at a tender 25-or-so, he's James Bond, the most stalwart defender of His/Her (delete as appropriate) Majesty's interests the English public school system has ever produced. He's beating up the baddies, he's quippin', he's charming the feminine voice who took over his earpiece and claims to be from MI6. God, he's cool.

… Is what, I think, IO is going for with 007 First Light, which releases on May 27 and with which I got a few hours of hands-on time at a recent event in London. Is that what it achieves? Ah, well, that's dicier.

James Bond Jr

With all the usual caveats about preview events—being airdropped into a series of disconnected levels is not the best or most natural way to get to grips with a game—I did not walk away from my time with First Light feeling like I had played the next game from the studio which made the bonafide all-timer Hitman: World of Assassination. I felt like I had played a modest, sometimes archaic third-person action game with some neat but underdeveloped ideas. And a very annoying protagonist.

My time with First Light took me through three levels: the aforementioned introductory romp in Iceland, which functioned more or less as a tutorial; a second, more gadget-focused training level during Bond's first days as a rookie spy; and one full-fat level spread across stealth, infiltration, combat, a boss fight, and a vehicle sequence.

Rasmus Poulsen, First Light's franchise art director, calls the game a "more orchestrated experience" compared to IO's Hitman games. You aren't being dropped into a big clockwork sandbox and left to poke at it however you like; you're being shuttled between different modes of gameplay. A lite sandbox leads to a stealth section which leads to a gunfight which leads to a vehicle chase. A more traditional, cinematic experience than IO's most famous games.

"They go from large social arenas where you can manipulate and turn all these things to a more concentrated stealth bit… and then into, let's say, a linear chase or an action arena with all guns blazing. So in many respects, this makes it feel like a movie," says Poulsen.

Let's focus on that last level I played, then, which feels most representative of the rhythm IO is going for. Bond's on the hunt—evildoers are doing evil at a gala in Central London. All Britain's haute-monde is there: ministers, CEOs, hobnobbing journos. Bond has to blend in, sniff about for a way into the restricted security area, and find his man.

And he has various options to do that. It's a sandbox! Of a sort! A kind of miniature British redux of Hitman's Paris level, and I'll give IO this—the studio has clearly put a lot of thought into ensuring First Light's levels have multiple routes. Sometimes they manifest as, uh, literal routes: high and low paths, vents to duck into, a range of different triggerable distractions scattered about the level, and in sandbox sections they also appear in the form of different, Hitman-style mission stories you can overhear and pursue.

I ended up going after two simultaneously: trying to nab the press pass of a no-show journalist I overheard some PRs complaining about, and posing as a member of a government guest's security team, all to purloin the right keycards to get me into the soiree's restricted upper sections.

But it's a limited sandbox. For one thing, it's literally smaller—just one part of a level which also consists of cinematic combat and stealth sections. But you also have less room to interact with it. It might recall Hitman's Paris, but Bond's tools are more limited than 47's. The gadgets I had allowed me to fire an emetic dart at people to get them out of the way or interfere with electronic devices to create distractions. I could not, as Agent 47 might have been able to, create a distraction by obliterating half the shadow cabinet with an explosive duck, or draw a gun and start firing.

I never felt like I had quite the room to get creative that I do in a Hitman game, a feeling that's a little at odds with a series so defined by its hero's many wonderful and creative toys. I was snuffling about to uncover paths IO had laid out in advance, rather than combining my exotic tools to create paths myself.

An example: at one point I screwed up a mission story that would let me get a security keycard by attempting to bluff a guard rather than intimidating him, which left him staring directly at the key I was trying to snatch. I tried to use Bond's other tools to make up for the error, thwip'ing a dart into the guard's throat to distract him with a bout of vomiting, but he was immune. What I should have done, I found later, is gone down the semi-hidden path right near him that IO had put there precisely for people who made the mistake I did. Less sandbox, more multiple railways you can shunt between at will.

Those restrictions are unavoidable to an extent—007 is meant to be a good guy, after all. "He operates under a set of rules," points out Poulsen, "which means that he can't just explode an entire room full of innocents—that would be complete madness and feel terrible for the player.

"When you do a simulator," says Poulsen, "the simulation is the attraction. Here, the spectacle and the ride and the emotion is the attraction, right?"

Put up your dukes

Once I'd obtained my keycard, I was off upstairs and out of the sandbox. Now was the time of stealth. I was sneaking between offices, ducking behind bookshelves, and using my Watch_Dogs-style gadget view to highlight and trigger devices to lure guards out of my path.

Which might sound quite a lot like the stealth sections of other videogames you've played in your life. You are not wrong. 007's stealth, in what I saw of it, felt pretty underwhelming. Your enemies are dumb as a bag of hammers, at least on the standard difficulty I was playing on, and your means of engaging with them are restricted. You can knock them out from behind, distract them (including with your ever-trusty emetic darts), and sometimes use your gadget-view to turn objects in the world into traps.

Egregiously, I could not move my enemies once they fell unconscious, which felt so remarkably archaic in a 2026 videogame that I wondered if it was a bug. Fortunately, like I said, they're all profoundly inattentive. You can do really quite noisy takedowns, or even have full-on one-vs-three fistfights mere feet away from enemies who will remain blissfully ignorant the whole time. At one point I smashed a guard's head onto a desk and through a flower vase; his buddy on the other side of the room just kept staring at his monitor while the game UI congratulated me on containing the situation.

It's almost absurd enough to be funny, but as Poulsen told me when I spoke to him: "Many people in the [Hitman] universe are deadpan, which makes the absurdity quite humorous. For Bond, we have a world that is quite serious." When you're able to have a massive punch-up that goes completely undetected by other people in the same room? That seriousness is undermined a little.

Anyway, you will have fistfights. Elements of First Light's control scheme are remarkably squirrelly, and my particular nemesis is its "Dash to cover" button. On the Iceland level, this is presented almost as a get out of jail free card: tab RB to have Bond quickly dip out of sight and behind the nearest obvious cover—ideal for when you notice an enemy detection meter start filling up.

In my experience, it actually functions as a button that makes Bond sprint across half the room like he's trying to lay claim to a dropped five-pound note, completely disregarding nearby cover and, more often than not, ending up thoroughly spotted in the process.

That's not disastrous. The game never autofailed me for getting detected, and it sometimes is easier to just start throwing punches than it is to pick your way through a level. I'll say this for First Light: the melee combat actually feels good. It's weighty and embodied, and Bond will make use of bits of the environment contextually in ways that are actually kind of impressive, from a "Oh wow they actually animated that" perspective.

It's not complex—you hit the parry button when the enemies flash yellow, you've done this dance before—but I did enjoy repeatedly punching people in the face.

Shooting them? Less so. First Light makes great hay of Bond not being allowed to go weapons-free whenever he likes. Unless someone is trying to kill him, he can't kill them, but when they are trying to kill him, the game goes into License to Kill mode, meaning you can whip out guns and start blasting. But the guns feel a lot less well-realised than the fistfights. They're light and insipid in a way that suggests they aren't really the main course of what the game's trying to serve you.

Plus, the encounters I used them in felt like they could have been torn from most any third-person shooter of the last 20 years. You're popping headshots as enemies rise from cover, shooting explosive barrels when they clump around them, and sometimes popping multiple headshots to take down the odd heavily armoured enemy.

Oh, and when you're not punching or shooting, you'll also find yourself throwing a lot of stuff. Almost anything left lying around—folders, teacups, desk decorations—can be quickly grabbed and chucked at an enemy to put them in a takedown-able stun state. Which is fun!

Less fun: Bond will quip endlessly as you do this, inviting enemies to tea as he rams a cup in their face and whatnot. Some may find this charming: classic roguish and cavalier Bond. I felt like I was being forced to spend time with all the moneyed dickheads I tried to avoid at uni.

Bossman

The highlight of my demo was a part I didn't expect: its concluding bossfight. I have signed a thick sheaf of digital papers which mean I am limited in what I can tell you about this fight's narrative content, but fortunately it's the mechanics of it that I enjoyed.

In short: Arkham City's Mr Freeze fight is back, baby. Given its focus on creating a cinematic, movie-like experience with 007 First Light, I half-expected IO to conclude my demo with a Metal-Gear-style filmic punch-up. Instead, I got a stealth arena that required me to do three bouts of damage to my opponent by using gadgets and the environment to my advantage. Blind him with a floodlight and do a takedown, lure him into traps, that kind of thing.

It felt engaging and creative in a way that my previous 30 minutes of punching out half of London had not. And then, well, it ended, and I was back to gunfights and fistfights and a finishing sequence in which I plowed a garbage truck through a lot of Kensington—an Uncharted-style vehicle sequence where I didn't feel in control of much of anything.

Which might be symbolic of how I came away feeling about 007 First Light in general. On the surface, Bond might seem a natural fit for IO: all glitz and gadgets that make it feel like barely a skip away from the world of Hitman. But what I saw had me feeling that the studio has not leaned into its strengths, trading the absurd clockwork worlds of Agent 47 for a more tightly choreographed, linear, and "cinematic" game that IO has never been all that good at. The last time it tried was Hitman: Absolution. We know how that worked out.