007 First Light first impressions from a former Hitman speedrunner — a totally different beast (but in a good way)

Hitman: World of Assassination is one of the greatest stealth games ever made, and when I saw IO Interactive get the gig to make 007 First Light, it felt like a match made in heaven.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew this wasn’t going to be a copy + paste of Agent 47’s formula. I wasn’t expecting to muffin boost up to a ledge and finish a gigantic level in seconds (yea, Hitman’s fastest players do some crazy stuff). But if even a whiff of Agent 47’s DNA that got me hooked made it to the Bond universe, we’re onto a winner.

What I ended up playing is not what I expected, and as Tom Marchum, Senior Combat Designer for the game explained to me, that’s very much by design. Instead, I got to work (and rework) my way through three hours of a real blockbuster that is equal parts Uncharted and Hitman — all while capturing the essence of an all-time great Bond game. Let me explain.

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This is not Hitman

This is the first thing I should be absolutely clear about from the get-go. The second I felt panic because I couldn’t move a body to avoid detection, the distinction became apparent. This isn’t the Agent 47 formula of “here’s a map and your objectives — figure it out yourself,” but it takes that inspiration and blends it with so many of my other favorite games.

There are indeed some sandbox moments to strategize and figure out your way through a la Hitman, but this is merged with the fast-paced linearity and gripping story of Uncharted, the cover-based shooter mechanics of a Gears of War, and even visceral hints of Hellblade II. All of these seamlessly flow into one another throughout every level I played. And all of these inspirations are squished together with a Bond presentation to truly put you in the shoes of 007.

Tom calls this “forward-focused momentum,” and as he explained it, I realized why a full Hitman formula transplant would not have worked here. "In Hitman, you'd probably go back and through a space three or four times to work it out. You might spend 20 minutes walking around the encounter to work out what you wanted to do,” Marchum pointed out. “A lot of the audience for Bond don't want that. They want to go through — they want forward progress."

One of the reasons why I absolutely love the Hitman games is that beneath the violent face of it all, it’s essentially a puzzle game featuring a whole lot of death. The more Tom went into the intentional differences, the more it made sense to move away from this mechanic. "Whereas Hitman's design becomes an evolving set of puzzle pieces in a much larger puzzle that may influence each other later, we just want this to feel like a Bond movie,” Marchum added.

The more I played, the more it became clear to me that IOI has absolutely nailed it.

Licence to Thrill

“This guy’s doomed because I’m James Bond,” Marchum joked, while highlighting exactly what the mission is with this game: to make you feel like 007. And everything from the aesthetics to the play styles and the all-encompassing narrative drives this incredibly effectively.

I got to play through three levels, and I will not be going into any story details here. Basically, these handpicked locations gave me a chance to experience the versatility of First Light, and how IOI has managed to stitch it altogether into one impressively seamless tapestry of forward motion.

From the gorgeously barren (and almost alien) Icelandic landscape to the shining lights of a resplendent gala, this game is visually gorgeous with a fantastic orchestral score underpinning all the action. For context, I was demoing this game on a beastly RTX 5090 PC, so of course I’m getting all that path traced goodness. But on a stylistic level, that cinematic aesthetic is a great direction with a lot of variety in the locales.

Throughout all the scenarios I played, there was a regular drumbeat of story progression that was either told with linear moments of character movement (with fantastic voice acting from Patrick Gibson and the crew), which then opens up to dramatic vistas and sandboxes to play as you like.

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You can do things quietly (more on that later), or you can go full action movie and lean on the combat system, which is a lot of fun. When I told Tom, he threw his fists up in the air — it’s so clear how much of a passion project this game was to IOI!

“That's one of the things that we really wanted to focus on was making sure that you felt like Bond combat,” Marchum added. “That you don't feel like you were struggling, and that combat didn't feel like a last resort."

There’s a real fluidity in the deep melee system using the environment around you, and satisfying gun combat that is all glued together with a satisfying fluidity between the two. You can tell the team has confidence in this by limiting the ammo in guns you pick up, which forced me from calmly popping headshots into the frenetic close quarters of taking down the next enemy.

Throw gadgets into the mix like my flashbang earbuds and it’s an addictive loop of really feeling like 007 — outnumbered but always with a chance of overcoming if you keep your wits about you.

Doing things quietly

But when things got mightily interesting is when I replayed some of these key scenarios and approached them in different, more subtle ways with spycraft. First Light is designed to make all out gun battles an absolute last resort (the Licence to Kill is only approved when enemies are shooting at you).

So the encouraged way forward is to focus on your stealth — be it creeping around or the more Hitman-esque social stealth elements. In one particular scenario, I had to work my way into a security room to gain access to the security camera system.

The first time around, I was not thinking stealthily, and ended up punching my way through the situation. But in the second and third replays, I opted for a more subtle approach — using a sick dart or hacking distractions around me with my watch, and quietly taking down my opponents.

Then I moved into the world of bluffing, which only works on guards that don’t have a dot above their heads (sort of like the disguise system from Hitman, but also nobody wants to see Bond in weird costumes).

There isn’t really a mechanic to it, but watching 007 blag his way through a scenario talking about a broken coffee machine or being a penetration tester is always fun, and it distracts the guards temporarily while you move through the situation.

Some frustrations

That’s not to say it’s completely without small frustrations that I found. That emphasis on forward momentum the lead engineer spoke of does make for some odd moments of very loudly obliterating guards in one room, then waltzing through the next door to the party as if nothing ever happened.

And while three hours of this feeling great did allay some of my fears of repetition, I guess I’m more nervous-excited about how these building blocks will age over a whole game. Of course, this is a small snippet, and IOI has a lot of them at its disposal to construct a versatile game to playthrough (plus a way harder difficulty that I tried).

Plus, the Tactical Simulation mode looks primed to add some strong replayability (setting up a prayer circle for a Hitman Custom Contracts-esque player-created scenario mode in the future). But does this altered level of gameplay depth compared to the sheer complexity of Agent 47’s missions mean that the longevity is impacted? We’ll find out soon enough!

Outlook

“James Bond doesn’t steal someone’s pyjamas,” Marchum proclaimed, and after playing First Light myself, it’s clear that leaving the safe haven of Hitman behind is absolutely the right mode.

It looks fantastic, sounds fantastic with a really impressive orchestral straw and great voice acting, and the gameplay is freakishly addictive. Of course, I can’t say for sure whether this holds up throughout the entire game, or whether repetition starts to sink in. But this is IOI in full blockbuster mode, and from what I’ve tried, you’re in for an absolute treat.

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Jason brings a decade of tech and gaming journalism experience to his role as a Managing Editor of Computing at Tom's Guide. He has previously written for Laptop Mag, Tom's Hardware, Kotaku, Stuff and BBC Science Focus. In his spare time, you'll find Jason looking for good dogs to pet or thinking about eating pizza if he isn't already.