TL;DR: I never should have purchased this game.
The last time I opened a “semi-review” with those words, it was for Expedition 33. It was a negative review.
While I maintain that I shouldn’t have purchased 007 First Light, this is going to be a positive review.
Why?
Let’s start with the obvious question: Why shouldn’t I have gotten this game?
I purchased 007 First Light because:
- I’ve been a James Bond fan for years, both the films and the books. I’m not at the level of Deborah Lipp and her Ultimate James Bond Fan Book, but I enjoy a good Bond story.
- The game received glowing reviews. In reading them, I got the impression that it was mostly a stealth game, and I enjoy stealth games.
I did my usual check, and confirmed that the game had an easy difficulty mode before I purchased it.
What I failed to consider is that a game about James Bond would include action sequences that required twitch reflexes. I’m terrible at such games.
There are ways of presenting action sequences that don’t require a rapid response to visual input (QTEs in games like the Batman Telltale games or Detroit: Become Human) but 007 First Light is not that kind of game, nor did it claim to be, nor did any of the reviews present it as such.
In other words, I purchased a game that was likely beyond my ability to play.
Epiphany
The first mission was fine, almost entirely stealth. I enjoyed myself.
I became apprehensive with the training sequence after that. Some games ease you into the available combat keypresses (e.g., Batman: Arkham Asylum). 007 First Light deluges you with them, much like Marvel’s Spider-Man.
The rules quickly got complicated: click Square to hit; click Circle to parry when you see a yellow flash; click X and push the left joystick to dodge when you see a red flash.
It was the timing that got to me. Even in easy difficulty, you had less than a second to respond to these cues and pick the right keypress. I just wasn’t fast enough.
The timed racing exercises dismayed me as well. I’m terrible at that sort of thing: accelerate on straight-aways, but hit the brakes on hairpins turns.
Again, I should have known that a 007 game was going to have car chases.
I didn’t rage-quit, but I did give up for a while during those introductory lessons. I was getting through them, but by button mashing.
Later, when I looked at the tutorial pages within the game, I learned that there were even more keypress combinations that hadn’t been covered in the game’s training sequence. Sigh.
Hide and seek
However, 007 First Light was like Marvel’s Spider-Man in another way: After that frenzied introduction, things settled down.
The game’s missions usually offer more than one approach to their conclusion. You can go in guns blazing, if that’s what you choose to do. Or you can engage in fisticuffs with a dozen enemies if your twitch reflexes are up to it.
Me? I chose the stealth option if there was one. I moved slowly, took my time, listened to the enemies’ conversations, watched their movements.
Some of the encounters were clearly intended by the game’s designers to be firefights, but could be handled via stealth. That aspect reminded me of Uncharted 4: a bunch of hostiles may attack you, but if you can run away and hide for long enough, the enemy will give up the chase and start patrolling to search for you.
Eventually my button-mashng became refined enough that I could deal with a fistfight against two opponents, maybe three. If there were more, either run away or just accept defeat and let the game reload to the last checkpoint.
I found myself enjoying the game on that basis.
This is not to say that every task in the game is confrontational. Some are puzzles. What’s fun about them is that there’s usually more than one solution. If you look around, listen to conversations, use a gadget a couple of times, you can find multiple ways to (for example) get access to a restricted room.
There were some puzzles I couldn’t solve and had to look for answers on the web. The solutions turned out to be of the form “I wasn’t paying attention” rather than “I would never have figured this out on my own.”
Juicy tidbits
Since I’ve mentioned conversations, I should complement the game’s writing team. The non-plot characters around you tell interesting stories through their conversations with each other. You don’t need to listen to all of them to solve the game, and they can be fun.
Here’s an example. At one point, James Bond sat a bar while a couple of women talked about an attractive guy they saw at poolside. Five minutes later, when Bond returned to the pool area, the ladies were chatting with the guy. In other words, the NPC interactions evolved on their own.
I’ll also give recognition to the game’s scene and environment designers. As you drive through the streets of London, walk through an arms bazaar in Mauritania, stroll through the walkways of a resort in Vietnam, every part looks different. Other games rely on duplication of assets (there’s some of that; how many kinds of batteries are there?). 007 First Light keeps it all fresh, even for pursuit sequences in large crowds for which the player might only glimpse the surroundings for a couple of seconds.
If you’re a fan of the movies, there are plenty of tongue-in-cheek references. For example, while walking through Q-Lab, you can hear a couple of techs talk about the foolishness of a submersible mechanical alligator. Some of the mission titles refer to the films as well; e.g., “All the Time in the World.”
If you’re waiting for themes from John Barry and Monty Norman, they’re there too. The game wisely saves those to near the end, to excellent effect.
Story
As for the plot, I found it engaging. It’s what kept me playing even during parts that I found challenging. The mood (though not the story) is more akin to the Daniel Craig films than the silliness of the Roger Moore era.
007 First Light is an “origin story” for Bond. It’s an entirely fresh take: a Navy crewman sent on a mission in Iceland is the only survivor of an attack on his team. As he tries to figure out what to do, his radio signal is intercepted by MI6. They guide him through the mission.
Afterwards, Bond is invited to MI6 HQ and is offered a chance by M to join a newly-restarted 00 program. He meets other members of MI6, including Miss Moneypenny, Q, and his fellow 00 trainees.
The prospective 00s don’t have time to complete their training. A disgraced member of an earlier 00 program, 009, is plotting a terrorist attack. The 00s-in-training are the only team available. They’re sent into the field, with instructions to obey orders.
Guess who doesn’t obey orders? C’mon, guess!
Overall
Once I got past the initial keypress info-dump and understood that stealth was usually an option, I enjoyed myself.
The story and its presentation are suitably cinematic. A fan of the films will find many juicy bits to appreciate.
The game is relatively short. It took me 30 hours to complete. Most of the reviews I read estimated the play time at 12 to 20 hours. Almost certainly it took me longer because I chose the stealth approach wherever I could.
If I ever revise my article on my highest-rated games, 007 First Light would find its way there.