The Hitman studio just made the best Bond game in years

There has not been a great James Bond game in a very long time. 007 First Light ends that drought, and it does so by leaning into the one thing IO Interactive does better than anyone: building a level and then handing you the keys.

This is an original origin story — a 26-year-old Bond clawing his way through MI6’s training programme, not a film tie-in — and the freedom from movie canon clearly gave the studio room to make something that feels like theirs. The result is the rare blockbuster that trusts you to play it your way.

The maps are the masterpiece

Level design is the headline here, and it is phenomenal. Every mission space is a layered sandbox where a dozen routes to the same objective sit stacked on top of one another. You can ghost through a location without being seen, or kick the front door in and go loud, and crucially the game does not punish you with a fail-state for choosing violence. The mission bends around your instincts instead of forcing you down a corridor.

The “thousand ways to the same result” design is genuinely thrilling. Two players can finish the same objective with completely different stories to tell afterward, and that is the highest compliment you can pay a stealth game. This is Hitman’s DNA, scaled up and dressed in a tuxedo, and it wears it beautifully.

Pure, premium presentation

Everything around the gameplay is top tier. The transitions from cutscene to gameplay are seamless — there is no jarring handoff, just one continuous cinematic flow. The voice acting is excellent across the board, the casting is superb, and the whole production sounds expensive: the score and the Lana Del Rey theme give it real atmosphere, and the audio design is premium throughout.

The visuals hold up to the pedigree, and the animation work is where the polish really shows. Small flourishes — like Bond kickflipping a pistol up into his hand — sell the fantasy of being the most stylish man in the room. It is the kind of detail that costs a fortune and is worth every penny.

Where it stops short of perfect

For all that, this lands shy of greatness, and the reason is simple: it is too easy, and it knows it.

The challenge floor is low. Enemy AI is the weak link — guards rarely behave cleverly enough to make the sandbox dangerous, which means the freedom never gets tested the way it deserves to be. The gadget department also underdelivers; the tools are fun but thinner than a Bond fantasy demands.

Worse is how much the game leads you by the hand. Navigation is constantly signposted, and traversal “puzzles” — the drive out to the boat with Greenway, the climb-the-pipes sequence to open a route — read as filler rather than design. They are the moments where the game stops trusting your instinct and starts steering, and a game this confident in its sandbox should have trusted the player far more.

Verdict

None of that undoes what IO Interactive has built. 007 First Light is a gorgeous, generous, endlessly replayable spy game and the best the franchise has been in a generation. It comes strongly recommended — it just stops shy of greatness because it never quite finds the nerve to make you sweat for it.