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The last James Bond video game came out in 2012. For context: that’s the same year the Curiosity rover landed on Mars, the same year Gangnam Style broke YouTube, and roughly the same year your phone stopped being able to run the apps you’re currently using without complaining about storage. Fourteen years. That’s a long time to wait for the world’s most famous spy to show up on a gaming platform.

So when IO Interactive — yes, the Hitman people — announced they were making a Bond game, the reaction from the gaming community was something like cautious optimism wrapped in a very British kind of anxiety. And when it finally dropped in May of this year, reviews flooded in from critics who had clearly been waiting a long time to make “shaken, not stirred” jokes.

But here’s the question that most of those reviews didn’t really answer: what if you just… don’t care about James Bond? What if you’ve never seen a Bond film, or you watched one once on cable and thought “man that guy is kind of a reckless driver”? Does 007 First Light still work for you?

That’s what we’re going to find out.

Context

Let’s set the table. IO Interactive are the studio behind the modern Hitman trilogy — a series of games where you play a bald assassin named Agent 47 who has the uncanny ability to blend into literally any crowd despite looking exactly like a bald assassin. Those games are brilliant. Weird, creative, replayable playgrounds where the fun is figuring out forty different ways to push one man into a river.

So when they announced in 2020 that their next project was a Bond game — an original story, not based on any specific film — the logic was obvious. They know how to make a stealth-action sandbox. They know how to make a man in a suit do cool things in expensive locations. They know how to make a game that rewards players who pay attention and forgives players who don’t.

Development ran for about six years, the game was revealed properly in June of last year, and landed on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on May 27th, 2026. Switch 2 is getting a version later this summer if that’s your situation.

The premise is a Bond origin story — and I mean origin origin. This is James Bond before he’s James Bond. Before the number, before the license, before he’s earned the right to introduce himself in that particular order. You’re playing a young naval air crewman who does something heroic, gets pulled into MI6’s Double-0 program, watches a mission go sideways, and then spends the rest of the game untangling the conspiracy behind it.

WHAT’S IT LIKE TO PLAY

This game feels good to play. And I say that as someone who has played a lot of games that feel like homework.

The combat is snappy and satisfying. You can go loud with guns and explosives if the mood strikes, and the game lets you. Environments have a gratifying level of destructibility, and if you want to turn a chateau in Slovakia into a controlled demolition, nobody is going to stop you. But the game is equally happy if you want to ghost an entire level without a single body hitting the floor.

This is where the Hitman DNA really shows up. Locations feel like actual places rather than shooter corridors — there’s verticality, there are social spaces, there are conversations happening in the background that you can either eavesdrop on or interrupt, depending on how Bond you’re feeling. The game quietly rewards players who look around and experiment. You’re not going to run out of ways to approach a situation.

The pacing is one of the things I enjoyed most. After a relatively slow opening at MI6 that functions as the game’s extended tutorial, it basically takes the hand-holding guardrails off and lets you loose — and from that point forward it moves at the kind of pace that’s friendly to people who can only play in ninety-minute windows. Missions feel self-contained enough that you can put it down and pick it back up without feeling lost.

The stealth system is forgiving without being toothless — guards have actual AI behavior, there are sightlines to manage, and getting caught feels consequential without being punishing. It’s not quite as deep as the Hitman games at their best, and if you’re coming in as a hardcore stealth fan you might find the ceiling a little low. But as an accessible action-adventure that trusts players to make interesting choices? It works.

One thing the game handles well: variety. Missions don’t repeat the same rhythms. You’ve got a gala infiltration, a car chase through mountain roads, a fight scene that turns into a deception sequence, a levels-within-levels social puzzle. IO was deliberately designing against repetition, and the campaign earns its runtime.

Story

Here’s where the game actually earns its place and where non-Bond fans should pay attention.

The story is good. Not “good for a video game”—just good. It’s a well-written espionage thriller with a protagonist you actually want to follow, a supporting cast that has real relationships with him, and a villain who gets enough screen time to feel like an actual threat rather than a plot device in a suit.

Patrick Gibson plays Bond, and he’s great. He’s playing a Bond who hasn’t figured out how to be Bond yet — he’s confident but not invincible, charming but not smooth, capable but still making mistakes. It’s a character arc, and it actually completes. By the time the credits roll, you understand why this person becomes the version of 007 everyone knows.

The tone is the thing I want to highlight specifically for non-fans. This isn’t the grim Daniel Craig era, where Bond’s emotional damage is practically its own character. But it’s also not the Roger Moore era, where the game acknowledges that a man can ski off a mountain and parachute away with a Union Jack parachute and everyone treats this as a reasonable Tuesday. It’s lighter than the Craig films, smarter than the campy stuff — self-aware enough to have fun, grounded enough to take the stakes seriously. It doesn’t feel like homework. It doesn’t feel like a theme park ride. It feels like a good spy movie you haven’t seen.

And you don’t need to know anything about James Bond to follow it. The game tells you everything you need. The lore is scaffolding, not a prerequisite.

BOND LORE FOR NON-FANS

Now, that said, there’s a whole other layer here for people who want to go deeper.

The game is absolutely stuffed with references to the wider Bond universe, like the scar on Bond’s cheek that is from the books, but never quite made it over to the movies. I’m probably not qualified to walk you through all of them myself, but there’s a great video about it over on IGN.

None of this is required to enjoy the game, but if you want to go looking, there’s a lot waiting for you.

Graphics

IO Interactive made a beautiful game. The environments range from snow-covered mountain passes to underground black market lounges to brutalist government buildings that look like they were designed specifically to make you feel like you shouldn’t be there, which is perfect.

Character models are detailed, cutscenes are cinematic, and the whole thing runs cleanly on current-gen hardware. Nothing here is going to make your hardware sweat or your framerate apologize.

Gripes

Okay. What didn’t work. The gadgets. I want to talk about the gadgets.

Bond is famous for his gadgets. The pen that’s actually a bomb. The wristwatch that’s also a grappling hook. The car that turns into a submarine. The history of Bond gadgetry is essentially a timeline of spy cinema’s most creative nonsense, and it is wonderful.

In First Light, the gadgets are… fine. They exist, they have uses, they occasionally open up a new approach to a situation. But they rarely feel indispensable. I never found myself in a moment where I thought “thank god I have this or I’d be completely stuck.” They feel more like optional flavoring than core mechanics.

My best guess for why: this game was built to be accessible. IO wanted non-gamers to be able to pick this up, and a deeply gadget-dependent game punishes players who don’t read the tutorial carefully. So the gadgets got softened into supplements rather than tools. I understand the choice. I don’t have to love it. A sequel — if we get one — should lean harder into the gadget sandbox.

There’s also a villain whose motivations, while not bad, don’t quite land with the weight the game wants them to. The final act reveals a little too much through dialogue and a little too little through action. Not a dealbreaker. Worth naming.

The Sequel ‘Situation’

One thing I thought about a lot while playing the game was how much I hoped this would become an ongoing franchise from IO Interactive. Their experience with Hitman is a perfect fit for an action adventure featuring super spies and mysteries and just… general mayhem. They know how to how to craft a solid story and gameplay that balances the intrigue and the explosions in a way few developers can. They’re a very accomplished studio firing on all cylinders with a passion for the source material as well respect for players who aren’t all that into James Bond. In a way, it sounds too good to be true… because it is too good to be true. 

This is 2026, after all, and we can’t have nice things. IO Interactive made a deal with MGM Studios that included self-publishing the game. A few years later, Amazon bought MGM Studios and that eventually included full creative control of the Bond franchise. See where this is going?

When asked about future 007 games, Amazon’s GM of gaming responded: “We did not [make First Light],” Gattis explained. “We do have a stake in it because we now own the IP, but that IP acquisition happened after the First Light IO deal was already done.” 

He also added: While Amazon “didn’t have the full rights to this First Light James Bond game”, any future games will be “done by MGM and, theoretically, by Amazon Game Studios.” (Source)

any future games will be “done by MGM and, theoretically, by Amazon Game Studios.”

Jeff Gattis, Amazon GM of Gaming

That doesn’t sound very promising for IO Interactive. More importantly to me, is that that doesn’t sound very promising for ME, and my ability to play another game in this series with this game engine with these writers and charter models and voice actors. Mark my words right now, it’s July 2025. Amazon will try to make the next game themselves, they’ll think they know how to do it better, and years from now we’ll look back at this game as the high water mark for Bond games since Goldeneye.

**UPDATE** Ok, future me here. There was an update to this situation while I was in the process of editing it, and it’s probably good news. GamesIndustry.biz reported that Jeff Gattis clarified those comments I just spoke about, saying “we did not confirm anything about who’s publishing or developing the next Bond sequel.” He added “Given the success of this one, I think you probably want IOI developing it.” The question even came up of whether Amazon would be interested in purchasing IOI outright, but he said there were no conversations about that right now.

“Given the success of this one, I think you probably want IOI developing it.”

also Jeff Gattis, Amazon GM of Gaming

So, ok, there’s still hope that IOI makes the next Bond game, but now I’m worried they might get swallowed up into the Amazon machine, and see time and time again that the big guys like Sony and Microsoft are willing to pay just about anything to acquire creative and talented studios, but within a few years they lose the stomach to pay for those salaries and benefits.

But I digress. Let’s get back to the original question.

Final Thoughts

So, can you enjoy 007 First Light if you’re not a Bond fan? Yes. Without asterisks.

What IO Interactive have built works on two levels at once: a polished, accessible action-adventure for people who just want a well-made spy game, and—for anyone who wants to pull on the threads—a game that quietly makes the Bond universe feel worth exploring rather than intimidating. You don’t need to do homework to enjoy it. But if you want to, there’s a lot there.

Busy adult gamer? It’s a well-paced campaign with enough hours to feel complete without overstaying its welcome. No filler, no padding, nothing that feels like a chore. Curious about Bond but don’t know where to start? This is a better entry point than sitting down with twenty-six films in chronological order, trust me.

The gadgets could be more interesting. The villain could land harder. Those are sequel problems. This one? Thumbs up 👍. 007 First Light earns the number.