My score for 007 First Light is 8.5 out of 10. It's the best Bond game I've played, and the first in thirteen years that made me want to rewatch the films rather than forget it existed. Below, in order: what's left of Hitman in it, how the gadgets and fights work, what surprised me about the Glacier engine, who plays whom, and where the game sags.
- I was afraid of Hitman in a tuxedo
- Gadgets, slow motion and the bluff
- Fists and guns: impact worth praising
- Set pieces on the level of Uncharted 4
- Glacier: a hundred people on screen and honest mirrors
- Bond, Greenway and Bawma: who plays whom
- Lana Del Rey's song and the film references
- Verdict: 8.5 and I want a sequel
It came out on 27 May 2026 on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and costs 69.99 dollars on Steam. IO Interactive has moved the Switch 2 version several times; it's now promised for March 2027. Critics liked it: the PS5 version sits at 87 on Metacritic from 97 reviews, the PC version at 84. Players on Steam leave 91% positive reviews out of 48,000, and by 20 August the studio announced four million copies sold.
I was afraid of Hitman in a tuxedo
Going in, I had one fear. IO Interactive has made Hitman for twenty-five years, and I expected Agent 47 in a tuxedo: the same sandbox, the same disguises, just with 007-flavoured targets. It isn't that. It's a different game, built around a different hero.
Some Hitman did survive. Levels are mostly non-linear: there are two or three routes to the room you need, and a problem can be solved three ways, sometimes four. They're well designed, with no wasted corners from a gameplay point of view. But they're noticeably smaller than Hitman's, and there's little of the social stealth where you hide in a crowd and pass as one of them. Very little, I'd say. If you came for a Hitman 3 sized sandbox, this isn't it. If you came for a Bond film you can play, you're in the right place.
Gadgets, slow motion and the bluff
This Bond carries a nod to nearly every era of the series. Some of the devices from the films show up as references, others are built straight into the gameplay, and those are what let you play levels differently. You can't take everything on a mission, so each time you choose what kind of run this one will be.
The best part, though, isn't the gadgets but two abilities. One is slowing time, where you can calmly line up several enemies. The other is the bluff: if you're spotted, Bond can talk his way past the guards and walk out without firing a shot. It's genuinely great. Just like in the films, getting caught almost always has a way out other than a fistfight, and the game keeps inviting you to use it.
![007 FIRST LIGHT Gameplay Walkthrough Part 1 [4K 60FPS PC ULTRA] - No Commentary (FULL GAME)](https://framesgames.com/wp-content/uploads/yt-covers/0V2MpFpht14.jpg)
The video loads from YouTube (Google) when you press play. Privacy policyFists and guns: impact worth praising
Melee has everything it needs: strikes, dodges, grabs, throws and finishers. From Hitman it inherited the ability to hurl whatever's within reach at enemies, and all of it together looks fantastic. Before an attack a prompt lights up over the enemy, and you decide whether to parry or sidestep, then punish them with a counter.
I want to single out the shooting. It's a third-person shooter, and the impact is superb: the suppressed pistol, the rifle and the shotgun all feel different, and firing is simply satisfying. There are plenty of weapons, each with its own character, and grabbing a gun from an enemy mid-firefight is routine here. It keeps fights lively.
Set pieces on the level of Uncharted 4
My one complaint: sometimes events drag, especially mid-game, and it almost forgets it's a spy story. But once the action starts, and there's a lot of it, the staging is top class. The comparison with Uncharted 4 suggests itself, and I'm not alone: France's JeuxActu says the same in a 95-point review. I won't overstate it, Uncharted 4 can still look more spectacular even today, ten years on. But there are very few games like this. If you love Uncharted and you love Bond, you'll find plenty here.
The level direction is very good, and there are a lot of locations. Things change a lot, like in a good Bond film: a desert, a nightclub, a gala in a mansion, a pool villa, a yacht at sunset. You'll go to many places, and none of them looks like the last.
Glacier: a hundred people on screen and honest mirrors
The game runs on Glacier, IO Interactive's in-house engine. Its history goes back to Hitman: Codename 47 in 2000, and according to technical director Henrik Schlichter the big overhaul came in 2012, right after Hitman: Absolution. How it differs from the usual engines is obvious within minutes.
- Crowds. Glacier's signature since Hitman. On the dance floor I counted well over a hundred people at once, and the frame rate didn't care. View distance isn't cut either: the crowd doesn't vanish five metres from the camera.
- Reflections. An almost forgotten technique: mirrors in 007 First Light reflect properly, with Bond himself in the frame. There was no hardware ray tracing at all at launch, the game ran a raster renderer with software global illumination, and NVIDIA's path tracing only arrived in a patch on 15 September. The mirrors worked from day one anyway, which is what Glacier has always been loved for.
- A construction kit. Senior product manager Andy Touch compares Glacier to a box of Lego: mechanics are assembled from ready-made templates inside the running game, without restarting it. That's where the level variety comes from.
- Streaming. According to Schlichter, the game runs from the first scene to the last without hitches, loading levels in chunks on the fly.
The graphics are odd, though. Sometimes the game is gorgeous, especially in cutscenes and at sunset, and sometimes a scene looks like it's from the PS4 and Xbox One era. It doesn't get in the way, but it's surprising. The gamegpu testers noticed the same from another angle: there's barely any visible difference between the lowest and highest settings. The requirements are modest, too: at max settings in 1080p even an RTX 3060 averages 47 frames.
Bond, Greenway and Bawma: who plays whom
The actor playing Bond fits perfectly. He's Irish actor Patrick Gibson, in his first video game role. You may know him as Prince Nikolai in Shadow and Bone, or as the young Dexter Morgan in Dexter: Original Sin. Here he plays Bond at the very start: a hot-headed MI6 recruit who still has to earn his number.
Bond's mentor, MI6 instructor John Greenway, is played by Lennie James. He's a very recognisable actor: Sol in Guy Ritchie's Snatch, and Morgan for years in The Walking Dead. The chemistry between him and Gibson works, and half the story rests on their conversations. The main villain, Bawma, boss of the Aleph black arms market, is Lenny Kravitz, Cinna from The Hunger Games. The rest of the cast includes Gemma Chan as Dr Selina Tan, Priyanga Burford as M and Alastair Mackenzie as Q.
Lana Del Rey's song and the film references
The opening song deserves praise of its own. "First Light" is sung by Lana Del Rey, who wrote it with David Arnold, the composer of five Bond films from Tomorrow Never Dies to Quantum of Solace. It plays over the opening titles, with strings and brass in the unmistakable Bond style, and it's the level of a real film in the series. I watched the sequence to the end and don't regret it.
The video loads from YouTube (Google) when you press play. Privacy policyThere are a lot of references. Most point to the Daniel Craig films, but the older Bond gets nods too. Chronologically this is the very start of his story, and the opening of the game struck me as the weakest part: some plot decisions looked questionable. I'm so glad I was wrong. Just keep playing, and about three hours in you get exactly what you want from a Bond game. Everything from the films is in it. I haven't enjoyed a new game this much in a while, about as much as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
Verdict: 8.5 and I want a sequel
I liked it a lot. It dips a little at the start and a bit in the middle, but overall it's very good. It won't land the same for everyone: Slant Magazine gave it 60 and writes that only traces of Hitman's depth are left. That's true, I just wasn't expecting a second Hitman. The Washington Post gave it 100 and called it the best Bond game ever made, and after the credits I'm not inclined to argue.
If you haven't started yet, now is a good time. In early October the free Extended Operations add-on arrived with New Game+, a new 00 difficulty and a photo mode, and on 7 October the game got update 1.3.1. To see how it looks for a regular player on PC in 4K, there's a full playthrough below.
The video loads from YouTube (Google) when you press play. Privacy policy
My score is 8.5 out of 10. Bond has earned his number, and I'm waiting for the next one.
Sources
007 First Light on Steam: price, player reviews, announcements on 4 million copies (20.08.2026), path tracing (15.09.2026), Extended Operations (01.10.2026) and update 1.3.1 (07.10.2026). Metacritic, reviews by The Washington Post, JeuxActu and Slant Magazine. IO Interactive on path tracing, 15.09.2026. GamingBolt on the Glacier engine, quoting Andy Touch and Henrik Schlichter, 30.07.2026. gamegpu GPU and CPU benchmarks, 26.05.2026. Shacknews on the cast. Rolling Stone on the Lana Del Rey and David Arnold song. Gematsu on the Switch 2 delay. Screenshots by the author, PC version. Videos: playthroughs by MKIceAndFire and Gamer's Little Playground, title sequence from the official James Bond 007 channel.
