007 First Light

PS5 Review

007 First Light is the first James Bond since 2012’s 007 Legends and is an action-adventure game that sees James Bond being recruited by MI6 to be an agent, developing into the pop culture icon most people know him as. 

First Light is available on all modern consoles as well as PC with my review being on the base PS5 version, which does have some performance issues with framerate drops during heavy action scenes.

Pro:

Cast.

A big surprise for me was how much I enjoy the voice cast of this new entry with no returning voice actors from any film or game prior.

The standout performance was Patrick Gibson as James Bond, having the hard task of performing a new and inexperienced James Bond who has just been recruited by MI6 to the 00 programme. He is the second Irish actor to portray James Bond after Pierce Brosnan and after his performance in this game I would enjoy seeing him in the role in a life action film or TV show instead of just the games.

The new mechanic that shows off his voice talent is the new Bluff mechanic, where if the player gets caught by enemies, they can tell the enemies a lie to escape suspicions for a short time. However, this only works if it is the basic enemies as more intelligent enemies cannot be bluffed past. 

Hearing Gibson try his hand at these lies and story dialogue shows off his range and really cements him as James Bond being able to do these one liners as good as any of the main film Bonds.

Other great cast members in First Light would be Lennie James as Greenway, who serves as Bond’s primary instructor & mentor during his training and missions. He puts in a more emotional and deep performance than many actors do in the live action films.

The last actor who stood out was Kiera Lester who portrays Moneypenny, who is similar to the character from the Daniel Craig run of films, but in First Light her role is expanded being Bond’s introduction to MI6 and a constant presence throughout most of the story.

Level variety.

Like any Bond film, First Light sees the player jet off to a variety of locations around the globe to go on missions and track down villains.

The game starts with a very bombastic opening in Iceland before James Bond is even part of MI6, exploring an enemy base and rescuing scientists before escaping.

The highlights later in the game are Mauritania being a desert level, with the fun gimmick of taking place in the hulls of wrecked ships for buildings, and the sheer amount of NPCs are very impressive.

Vietnam is the other highlight of the game that sees Bond tracking down various people to safeguard at a luxury resort, with a lot of optional paths and ways to progress through the level creating the feeling like it is straight out of a Bond film.

Gadgets.

Throughout the story players get access to seven gadgets from Q, with more being accessible further into the story, and for the most part being able to deploy with three at a time. They help the player really feel like James Bond the secret agent, rather than the assassin Agent 47.

Gadgets are split into two types, being chemical or electric based. Each usage of said gadget drains a portion of the players reserve, so gadgets cannot be reused indefinitely. This leads to players needing to scavenge their surroundings for more resources to resupply their gadgets.

Players begin with the classic bond watch here called Q-Watch, seen in many other James Bond media and one of the most versatile gadgets being able to hack a variety of electronics.

Other early gadgets the player gets access to are the Dart Phone, making you able to distract guards by making them nauseous leaving their posts for a short duration. This allows players to sneak past in stealth or perform a takedown to remove them completely.

The last main gadget I used in my play through was the Laser Strap, which while attached to the Q-Watch, is classed as a separate gadget and is needed to break padlocks or blind NPCs to pickpocket them or in combat to quickly shoot them.

Replayability.

First Light, just like the Hitman games before it, feature a lot of replay value. Not only does each level have a variety of ways to complete each objective, there is also the challenge feature.

These reward the player for doing very specific challenges during each level, ranging from completing the level while staying in stealth the entire time to gunning down enemies with five different weapons in a combat situation.

This made going back for all the collectibles for the platinum trophy much more enjoyable since I could see what other decisions I could make to get though levels. I would recommend other players experiment with their replays too, since the player also hears new dialogue from characters depending on the path they choose.

Con:

Online connectivity.

The most common issue I encountered throughout my play through was the game disconnecting from the online service.

It is a complete pace killer when playing the game normally and your progress is ground to a halt due to a pop up saying the player has been disconnected and needs to reconnect to the server.

If the player disconnects from the online service then the challenges the player completes will not be added to their saved progress. Since I kept disconnecting every 15 minutes on my first play through of the Vietnam level, I finished that entire level with only two challenges completed even though I completed more of them like sneaking into the pool without being seen. I know this as when I replayed the level to get the rest of the collectibles I did exactly the same process and the challenge actually got ticked off.

Crashes.

First Light had a regular issue during my play through, which was the infrequent hard crashes and soft locks.

I found that the game was most prone to crashing towards the end of the game with Vietnam or Antarctica, with the more complex levels involving a lot of NPCs and objects.

While not as frequent, I had the game softlock where I could not progress, and was forced to restart a checkpoint when needing to pickpocket specific NPCs for key cards where the NPC would spawn in the floor, or in the Tacsim and Q Lab portion of the game it would freeze on the gadget layout screen.

Checkpoints.

One of the most frustrating aspects of First Light is how poor the checkpoint system works.

The game uses an auto save mechanic, but the player cannot load those auto saves when wanting to reload the game if they fail a stealth section and want to retry it for the stealth challenge on the levels.

This can be a real nightmare if you need to reload a checkpoint after dying and losing a lot of progress like what happened in Mauritania. This was where after doing the crypto stealth side event and going to do the art deal for the rest of the money, I was almost killed in a gun fight and had to reload my last checkpoint after running out of ammo and options, which was back before I started the crypto side event.

There really needs to be an option where the player can reload the auto save instead of checkpoint as it makes no sense to be restricted.

Stealth.

Coming off the Hitman games that have fantastic stealth gameplay, I was disappointed in the randomness of the stealth gameplay, especially since the game has challenges on nearly every level to complete its combat encounters in stealth only.

However sometimes the Takedown action in stealth won’t work even with button prompt on screen, causing Bond to throw a punch and alerting all guards in the area due to breaking stealth instantly.

Other times the enemies would detect me by filling their bar from white, yellow and red almost instantly, while other times I could stand in front of them for 6 seconds before they got suspicious and get to the yellow stage. At times when performing a stealth takedown on an enemy, a random enemy in a separate room would be alerted for no reason since they don’t have line of sight or audio clues.

I also had several instances when I was performing a stealth takedown behind an enemy, that during the process of performing the takedown animation the enemy would be alerted so it voided any stealth challenges I tried to go for. This does seem random, though it only happened a handful of times across my playthrough where I tried to stealth as much as possible.

Driving sections.

Car chases have been a staple of almost every Bond film throughout the franchise, however the ones in First Light are very linear and too simple.

The player is limited on shortcuts they can take in pursuit of their targets or when driving in London have autopilot take over if they get too close to civilians or traffic. This means that these levels feel extremely easy, with little player input besides holding down accelerate and occasionally avoiding oncoming vehicles.

Players cannot even engage in combat from vehicles aside from a few sections, since Bond does not have access to the traditional armed Aston Martin as a personal vehicle for the story.

Load times.

In combination with the terrible checkpoint loads after failing a challenge, the load time of that checkpoint would regularly take over 10 seconds on base PS5.

This really added up when going for the stealth challenges on each level due to how hit or miss the games stealth mechanics choose to work at times, with its randomness from attempt to attempt leading to extra frustration waiting on a blank screen.

Textures.

While the majority of the game looks good, there are quite a few times where the game would have very low quality and low resolution textures.

I noticed this the most on the Mauritania level in the desert, especially in the marketplace where players have to raise £100,000 to progress the story, and other times I noticed the low textures where in the Slovakia level at the Chess Championship the hotel rooms would have muddy textures on the furniture and flooring.

Score: 8.7

Conclusion:

A great attempt by the team moving from the Hitman formula to a more narrative focused gameplay style, with longer linear level design than sandbox type maps.

I hope a future sequel will be better optimised to reduce performance issues and crashes as First Light is a solid foundation to build upon.

This is a great game that i can recommend to fans of the Bond IP especially the original novels by Ian Fleming and the prequel book Forever and a Day, due to focusing on a younger inexperienced Bond.