007 First Light is a delightful romp that could be more

In 1970, about a year before the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, the university was home to a much more benign but still interesting social study. The Marshmallow Experiment saw 16 young boys and 16 young girls put in a room with a treat of their choice, along with the promise that if they waited 15 minutes, they would be rewarded with a second treat. The study found that most children could not wait the 15 minutes, and the fantasizing of a second, exponential reward actually made the allure of the first treat more compelling. It’s a study about how humans will usually take one good thing right now rather than wait for more good things later. 007 First Light feels like the Marshmallow Experiment of games.

This is by no means inherently bad. After all, when I rolled credits on IO Interactive’s first James Bond adventure, I felt like I had just eaten a tasty treat; a globe-trotting, rip-roaring romp full of set pieces and spy vibes. However, the longer I have sat with the game, the limits of its success become more defined. I like this game a lot, but it could have been a lot more; it could have engaged with its ideas more deeply, and allowed its sandbox structure to actually be toyed around with much more than the cinematic campaign lets you. It could have been two marshmallows.

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007 First Light sees Bond visit a variety of stunning locations.

A Successful Mission

Before I go deeper, I really do feel like it’s only fair to give this game the credit it’s due. First Light is massively successful by many metrics, and the act of charging through its whirlwind campaign is a delight. It’s the kind of whistlestop tour through Bond-ian pastiches and ideas that you’d hope an original game would be. It grabs bits from almost every generation of Bond and blends them together to create a more earnest version of the character than we usually get, while also hopping between social stealth, smooth action, and bombastic set pieces with swagger and confidence.

First Light has one of the strongest “first playthroughs” of any of this generation’s triple-A games. No idea is left for a sequel or a later update; missions are just packed full of neat ideas, cool settings, and breathtaking moments that link gameplay types fluidly throughout each of the 10 story missions. You’ll go from schmoozing around an elite chess tournament and bluffing your way into places you shouldn’t be, to fist-fighting henchmen, to racing through the Slovakian mountains, and eventually free-falling from a plane without ever cutting from Bond’s point of view. It’s an all killer, no filler approach that works incredibly well.

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Bond’s missions take him from Slovakia.

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to Vietnam, where thrilling encounters await.

London Brawling

The act of playing through these missions the first go around is also great. Each individual gameplay mechanic, at the surface level, feels good and cool in a way that a Bond game should. Hand-to-hand combat is deliberate and fluid, and when you do get your “license to kill”, guns feel dangerous and punchy. Being forced to jump between these gameplay types as you frequently run out of ammo in scavenged weapons feels smooth, and being able to just chuck an assault rifle at a random goon to stun him never gets old.

The fantasy of Bond’s social stealth is about as well-realized as you could hope a game could ever manage. Being able to bluff your way past guards and charm locals is the kind of thing that Bond would do, that Agent 47 just wouldn’t bother with most of the time in IOI’s Hitman games. And while this is fun, this focus on free-flowing pacing means that First Light loses a great deal of the World of Assassin’s clockwork, immersive-simulation feel. It is much easier to contain situations and move on with the mission, because ultimately the game just wants to get you to the next big story beat. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the trimming down of things like disguises and lack of “lockdown” states becomes much more noticeable in the post-game escalation missions, where it feels like First Light is trying to create interesting sandbox challenges with a limited toolset compared to those found in the Hitman series.

The other part of the gameplay that doesn’t fully live up to the fantasy is driving. Considering IOI isn’t a racing game studio, driving in First Light feels more than acceptable, but there is often a feeling that what I am actually doing doesn’t have much effect on what the vehicle is doing. It feels like the game wants my car to make this corner or hit this jump, and it will. That, too, is not necessarily a bad thing, but these set pieces are slightly hampered by IOI’s inexperience in linear game design. While the Uncharted games are maybe the pinnacle of “putting the player on rails while cool stuff happens around them”, they are also the best at making it feel so kinetic that you think you are in control and that the world is reactive. Be it slightly stiff camera work when you are driving, overly aggressive motion blur trying to make it feel like you’re going faster than you are, car sequences are where IOI’s inexperience at linear game design is felt most acutely.

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Driving leaves a lot to be desired.

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Despite looking slick, you often don’t have enough control over driving.

Stirred but rarely shaken

The characterization of not just Bond, but the supporting cast is something I have found myself straining the most to reconcile my feelings with. James is extremely likeable, maybe the most genuinely good-natured and least sociopathic he’s ever appeared in any media. A lot of this is down to him being so new to spycraft, but the game goes to great lengths to highlight this Bond’s basic human empathy as one of his strongest assets. While he lies constantly and flirts incessantly, he rarely feels gross or manipulative. A lot of this is thanks to Patrick Gibson’s excellent acting, but it’s helped by some strong anchor points in Lennie James’ Greenway and Kiera Lester’s Moneypenny keeping his ego in check, while Alastair Mackenzie’s Q is a genuinely caring father figure to the would-be spy. Not all the casting works, however, with Lenny Kravitz’s Bawma feeling so flat, you’d think his line reads were the first time he said these words out loud.

The strange thing is that the inherent likability of these characters is a large part of what has me struggling a bit with them in the context of the story of the game. The problem is less that First Light has made these people “too good”, and more that the game rarely interrogates its own morals. Instead, the game opts to label any decision made by these characters as inherently “good” or “correct” because the people who made those hard decisions are inherently good people, which is something of a landmine to step on when we are talking about people who are state employees for British Intelligence.

007 First Light is a game about how governments should not put all their trust in AI, least of all when it comes to national security. The big midpoint reveal of the story relating to AI is a huge one that on the surface seems very relevant to today’s issues, and the dangers presented by usage of AI in global warfare. Its message is one that, in a vacuum, stands to reason very well, especially in 2026. My hangup comes in the IOI’s proposed solutions. Individuals.

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The cast are all extremely likable.

For England, James?

Countless times throughout the campaign, Bond acts recklessly, goes against protocol, or ignores the data in the name of a hunch. Pretty much every time he does this, he’s proven right, either in the short or long term. The game includes these moments frequently to prove its ongoing thesis correct as often as it can. That thesis is simple: “Humans can make decisions, AI can’t.” And while that observation is correct and well delivered, there is a part of this presentation of reality that doesn’t sit right with me. Bond is an employee of the British government who largely acts without oversight, or at least the oversight that is enacted against him is seen as naive, because ultimately, he is a just man, acting justly.

British history is littered with examples of bad intel (the war on terror) or the reforming of truth (Cromwellian folklore) being weaponized by humans who claim to have strong morals, unafraid to break the rules or make hard decisions. You leave the UK, and these historical events take on a different tint from colonized nations that have been subject to the consequences of these so-called hard decisions. The history of British Intelligence has been paved by people acting in accord with their moral convictions on behalf of the crown. People like Bond whose judgment is considered unquestionable — therefore, their actions are surely just.

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There are multiple paths through the more open levels, although not on the level of a Hitman game.

This is obviously a pretty big and complex idea, and at no point did I expect a pulpy James Bond video game to tackle the history of imperial exceptionalism. However, taken in the context of the game, the realities of Britain’s historical report card not exactly gleaming on the old atrocities count, and James Bond often acting as the sole arbiter of global policy in the heat of the moment, it makes it harder to get behind a rather simple anti-AI story, which I’d normally be all about.

It feels almost comical at this point to criticize a piece of James Bond media as being uncritical in its nationalism. It’s James Bond, of course it is. But the Danish studio seems acutely aware of pretty much all of the character’s problematic characteristics outside this one, and so the choice not to address it feels notable. This is especially noteworthy as it came out the same month that Riz Ahmed’s Bait was released, which almost solely focuses on the politics inherent to a symbol so tied to British imperialism.

One Marshmallow

Ultimately, 007 First Light is a summer blockbuster, a popcorn romp, a good time at the movies from the comfort of your own home. However, its gameplay feels so much wider than it is deep — in contrast to the endless depth of Hitman that saw it updated for over a decade — while its story seems to accidentally fall into haphazard “those on the front lines are always right” characterizations that are usually reserved for the most jingoistic of Call of Duties.

From the moment it was announced, IOI sounded like the perfect match for James Bond; it made all the sense in the world and then some. And the resulting gaming is great, but it’s often less thoughtful than you’d want it to be and less considered than it should be. In the rush to get one sweet sugary treat, we have deprived ourselves of something exponentially more.