Barely half an hour passes in the opening act of 007 First Light without one of Bond’s superiors relishing the opportunity to tell him that he’s a rash, callow, unripe banana of an MI6 agent. It’s a not-so-subtle writing trick to get you to grin when he inevitably starts proving himself and winning them over, and one I’m absolutely not immune to: Patrick Gibson’s jammy, devil-may-care take on Fleming’s secret agent is spectacularly easy to root for.
This time, it’s Q’s turn. Bond’s just let a target escape, but not before making sure he could trace them. “Quite clever, what you did back on the plane,” admits Alastair McKenzie’s dapper grandad Q – one of First Light’s most instantly charming performances in a game full of them. “How did you know the watch had a tracker?”. “It’s the 21st century, Q,” Bond quips back. “Even my toaster has a tracker.”
It’s a pithy encapsulation of the story First Light tells, one with questions about the role of romanticised spycraft in an era where we’ve all but accepted mass surveillance and technocratic fiefdoms as facts of life. Fleming’s MI6 would have killed for a data harvesting tool as seemingly benign as First Light’s online functions or Bond license holders Amazon’s Alexa, and Q’s deadly pocket gadgetry of yore looks quaint in the shadow of drone killings powered by the same companies that sell us our operating systems. But that’s exactly why the agency have given Bond a chance in the first place, says M. What MI6 need in a digitised age is a dash of human intuition, and just a little bit of chaos.
It’s a zeitgeisty theme, although First Light’s actual plot can be quite wonky, reliant on happenstance framed as spycraft, both MI6 and their adversaries sipping on idiot juice martinis, a few underwhelming big reveals that don’t hold up to much scrutiny, and moral complexity that basically amounts to ‘the only thing that can stop a bad posh twat with a gun is a good posh twat with a bowtie and a laser watch’. It’s a Bond story, in other words, though one that does such a good job of lending its fifteen hour runtime cinematic rhythm that it seems to fly by in feature-length.
What pulls it together is IO’s sense of fun and drama, of when to take First Light’s cast and their plights seriously, and when to bring in some of Hitman’s rubber ducks and banana peel silliness. Character writing is natural, witty, and at times, endearingly goofy. Escaping a lavish gala, you’re positive Bond is going to find another sports car to make a suave getaway through London’s streets. Instead, he find a bin lorry being abandoned by its terrified driver. “It sticks in second!”, the man advises Bond as bullets whizz past both their heads.
But what’s most special about First Light is its electrified undercurrent of excitement for what the well-worn, big budget action adventure format can offer when it hones in on such a specific character fantasy, then focuses its every system and flourish around delivering it at breathless pace. In the space of half an hour, Bond might go from a conversation, to tailing a target, to stealth, to a punch up, then a shoot out, then a getaway, then a setpiece or scene with some new mechanical or environmental twist you’ll never see again – from a Kojima-like interrogation to a quicktime event where Bond learns to put on a bowtie. Forget Moneypenny (although actually don’t, Kiera Lester is brilliant here) – the actual voice in Bond’s ear is an impatient director, reminding him he hasn’t shot or punched or shagged anyone in the last fifteen minutes.
Right, so: Bond’s at a hotel, tailing a dodgy bellhop. One moment, he’s eavesdropping on a guest complaining about mishandled luggage. The next, he’s posing as an employee to mollify another outraged guest so he can get more information. You’ll just have to ignore the fact Bond is dressed as a chauffeur while doing this. First Light picks and chooses when it wants Bond to blend in according to the whims of the story – this isn’t a deep or especially convincing espionage game, unfortunately.
Soon, he’s distracting a security guard with a radio, hacked with his Q-watch, so he can pickpocket a keycard. Next thing, he’s sneaking through the laundry area, silently dispatching guards four feet behind their oblivious mates with the loudest punches you’ve ever heard – he’s just that good. Or maybe they do spot him, it’s time for a brawl, and with two buttons and an analogue stick, he’s throwing out a series of punches, kicks, grabs, and slams that weave together with environmental destruction, throwables, and in and out of both stealth and gunplay.
Or maybe he’ll blag his way past one group of guards, grab a disguise from the laundry room, and saunter right through the rest. Along the way are wrenches to lob at faces, metal shelves to knock on heads, industrial washing machines to electrocute nearby mooks. Or, if your resources are spent, take the vents, or the ladders, or the side doors.
It all makes for a much wider and more textured space for improvisation than most any other big budget action adventure out there, but priotising sharp, cinematic storytelling does mean that IO’s incredible past puzzle box designs have been shrunk, smoothed down, and honestly, hollowed out. There are still some killer stealth sections here, worth replaying twice or more just to poke around and experiment in, to go loud where you previously went unnoticed. But as an immersive sim, First Light is to Hitman what Invisible War was to Deus Ex. Or, what Absolution is to World Of Assassination. Leanness and blue-red-green path linearity take precedence over any real sense of performing espionage.
Equally disappointing is First Light’s iteration of Hitman’s social stealth. Since Bond can use many of his guard-nullifying gadgets with impunity in crowded spaces, and since alerts are confined to pre-set areas, there’s no sense of having to blend in or play the part, and no real sense of danger. As a consequence, IO’s astonishing architectural design and crowds lack both presence and verisimilitude, acting here as backdrops to wow rather than integral pieces of living clockwork stealth puzzles. It leads to a level of railroading that often made me wonder whether I was playing as Bond, or just roleplaying as a man who plays him on TV.
It might seem a bit superfluous to point out that a James Bond game is politically monochrome, but I think we’re collectively comfortable pointing out something like Call Of Duty’s jingoism without any kind of “but this is just the game they wanted to make” handwaving, so I don’t think First Light being made by passionate Bond fans makes it exempt from pointing its whole cloth adoption of Fleming’s mythologising of the British Secret Service. With the grit of something like the Craig era replaced by Uncharted high adventure and graduation parties with Bond’s flatmates, it can often feel like cartoonish whitewashing.
Over their history, MI6 have helped overthrow democratic governments to promote British oil interests, abetted black site torture, been complicit or involved in abduction and yet more torture, and decided they’re basically above the law anyway. And that’s just some of the stuff we know about. “The only terrorists in our home are the two of you,” Lenny Kravitz’ pirate lord tells Bond and a companion. And like, fair enough, actually.
None of this is IO’s fault, of course. The goal was clearly just to make a fun, authentic Bond game, which they’ve succeeded at. All I’m saying is that if you made a Hitman mission where 47’s target was a smarmy spy for an organisation that had pulled even half of the shit MI6 have, I’d feel pretty good about drowning him in a toilet.
Do get those sequels out first though, please. It’s undeniably disappointing to play something so comparatively railroaded after spending years imagining all the possibilities a Bond game from IO could have offered. First Light is a far cry from the tantalising promise of Hitman 3’s Dubai mission – effectively the studio’s playable application for the license. Still, it’s all stirred together with craft, wit, and charm. It’s on the next one to actually shake things up.
Also, Lennie James’s painfully British agent John Greenway refers to a football match as “the game” at one point. Literally unplayable.
