You know you’ve played an incredible game when the credits roll and a feeling of extreme emptiness takes over. I didn’t think that ‘007 First Light’ would be one of those games for me. A game with a super spy and his cool gadgets. Is that all it takes to entertain me? Well, First Light is a little more than just that — and I was surprised by all of it.
A big reason for my initial expectations from the game was the developer, IO Interactive. They are the studio behind the stealth-forward ‘Hitman’ games. While stealth is certainly a core pillar in ‘First Light’, I completely underestimated how varied Bond’s toolkit would be. The game has a well-paced story that it wants you to pay attention to. And it does this by constantly shifting the gameplay between stealth, social deception, environmental puzzles, shootouts, and car chases. And even the dialogues in cutscenes are well-written (and excellently acted, if I may point out!). While stealth and social deception is a natural extension of what IO Interactive is familiar with, literally everything else is new and built around the concept of a world-famous super spy. Which makes me believe that there’s almost no other AAA game I’ve played that feels as ‘big’ and well-thought out as this one.
Over two dozen movies, and even a couple of videogames later — James Bond is an established icon. There’re a couple of things that are staple to a good James Bond story. There’s an M, a Moneypenny, a big double-crossing story plot, a Bond woman, a Bond car, and some imaginative gadgets. Given that these standards and expectations exist, the characters are quite nicely portrayed. I liked Moneypenny and James’ working friendship, and healthy banter with Greenway (a new character made for this game). It also manages to successfully update some of the stereotypes. For instance, the Bond women just about subvert the trope by having their own interesting story arcs.
The slickest part of the game were the gadgets — specifically, the Q-watch. Apart from being great advertising for Omega, it, in several situations, assists Bond in distracting people, destroying and identifying lurking enemies, and even overcoming environmental hurdles. It is a significant part of the game’s mechanics. There were several moments where it bordered on being a deus ex machina, but I just rolled with it because it was pretty cool.
I mentioned earlier that the game keeps you engaged by shifting the gameplay constantly between the different elements. What I didn’t explain is how fluid all of this felt. Here’s a specific situation: There’s a big chess tournament that’s happening in the game, and you need to enter this fancy hotel building. You could go over this in a couple of ways, one of which would be through eavesdropping and pickpocketing essential IDs. Alternatively, you could climb into a window to a room filled with guards, opening up a ‘restricted area’, where someone finding you could result in a shoot out or an intense combat sequence. What’s cool here is that the visual cues in the game immediately prepares you for what to do. In the former, you wouldn’t be given the option to get into a fist fight. In the latter, you are informed to be quiet and find the easiest way around if you want to avoid melee combat.
While this isn’t the easiest to explain, the reason why all of this felt fluid and mostly straightforward is the tutorial in the beginning of the game. Hands down, the best tutorial chapter I’ve played in a long time. It is an induction into the mechanic that cuts between dialogues, melee, and stealth sequences rapidly. It has some great quick-time events as well, which makes it feel more naturally part of the story and throws you quite quickly into what the game would feel like in the later chapters. A lot of dialogue-heavy games can take a page out of the MI6 handbook here and make something that’s a lot less text-heavy.
If it isn’t already clear to you, I loved this game. A clear contender for the best game I’ve played all year, though only half the year’s passed. A great purchase if you’ve ever wanted to be a spy. Or like spies in general. Or just want to play a good game.