One of key the reasons developer IO Interactive is an inspired choice for adapting Ian Fleming’s secret agent James Bond for a new video game is the team’s work on the Hitman series. Focused on a variety of stealthy sandbox missions where you can use any method to take out targets hidden in lavish, exotic settings, Hitman’s house gameplay style fits well with the conceit of a Bond adventure – especially as IO’s flagship series already has plenty of 007 influence baked in.
But for 007 First Light, the developer wanted to offer a different spin on the open-ended gameplay it refined across earlier Hitman games. Along with familiar action set-pieces and slick gun battles, First Light’s character-first approach to missions will let you use Bond’s social skills and resourcefulness to overcome challenges. This created an opportunity for the dev team to make a more social, personality-driven stealth-action game, one that gives you the tools to make the most of the tense, over-the-top situations Bond finds himself in.
“It’s been fantastic re-evaluating our learnings from the Hitman series for a James Bond game,” said narrative director and Bond IP creative director Martin Emborg. “Agent 47 shines as a character because he’s nobody. He’s like the grim reaper that walks in dead-faced, does his job, and then gets out. But for 007 First Light, it’s the complete opposite, because Bond is all about that charm and being cheeky and irreverent.
As I discovered in my recent preview, it’s clear that 007 First Light puts emphasis on punchy forward-momentum in its overall structure, which is packed with big set-pieces and more laid back encounters. Think Hitman’s freeform gameplay, but channeled through tightly designed levels in the vein of Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series. Unlike the sandbox design of the Hitman games’ clockwork-like levels, 007 First Light is a narrative-driven adventure that takes Bond on a variety of more linear-ish missions, yet the open-ended problem solving is still in full effect.
However, Bond doesn’t have the ambiguity and chameleon-like veneer of Agent 47. Rather, he’s always putting himself out there – even when undercover – and uses his approach of ‘walking in like he belongs’ to get him in and out of trouble. That aspect presents a really intriguing angle to explore in a stealth-action game, where you pick up clues, eavesdrop on conversations, and leverage information and quick wits to get ahead.
Along with social engineering, Bond can also use his heightened charisma to deceive his way to the objective. The bluff skill, which requires spending action points to pull off, allows you to remove suspicion from guards and even create humorous setups to slip past security personnel. It’s very much an attempt to gamify Bond’s famous quips and one-liners, which is amusing to see play out. Along with situations where you can fake surrender and then use the opportunity to pull off a quick finisher when enemies get close, I was even able to convince a suspicious guard that their fallen comrade (who I had previously knocked out) had a medical emergency and needed help, which allowed me to deliver a blow to his head when he came to investigate.
According to Emborg, the bluff and social-engineering elements add a new layer to the stealth-action gameplay and are designed to make the level settings feel more lived in.
“I think what we’ve done to make this world feel more active is with NPCs,” he explains. “You can overhear conversations and then use that to bluff your way into areas. It actually pays off later in levels, too. When you bluff early, there’s some interesting connective tissue going on where there’s little mini plots that you can reference, and some other characters will go, ‘Oh yeah, I heard about him.’ I think that’s a lot of fun to see happen.
“Does that need to be there in the game?” he asks. “No, but it’s a great pleasure when those things kind of line up, and you go, ‘Yeah, I heard them talk about that.'”
“That’s a place where I think we’re leveraging the work and the rewards of having done the Hitman series for all those years,” he continued. “These writers are very used to handling a heavy stack of scripts, because we do these living, breathing worlds. But this time, we get to funnel that into telling a very forward-momentum kind of story, which is different from Hitman, but a bit more exciting to tell compared to the static, Rube Goldberg machine-like stories and sets of the Hitman games.”
007 First Light is in many ways the most fully realized Bond game we’ve seen. While previous efforts like 2003’s Everything or Nothing and 2005’s From Russia with Love tried to inject more true-to-form spy-thriller aspects into a Bond game, many of the most notable entries were shoot-em-ups in the vein of the classic N64 GoldenEye. With the focus on bringing Bond into a stealth action-adventure game about truly being a spy, it presents an exciting restart for the series after 2021’s farewell to Daniel Craig, No Time to Die. Hopefully, IO Interactive will be able to pull off its Bond reboot and build a new type of action-adventure series for the iconic character.
Alessandro Fillari is a longtime games media professional. Talk video games with him on BlueSky at @afillari.bsky.social.
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