007 First Light Review: Earning the Number, Rough Launch and All

IO Interactive built its name on murdering strangers in increasingly elaborate ways as Agent 47, so handing the studio an original young-Bond story for 007 First Light was always going to be interesting. The pitch, summed up by the game's own tagline, is "Earn the Number": before the tuxedos, the gadgets, and the double-0 status, James Bond is a cocky, unproven MI6 trainee working his way up through a training program that clearly doesn't trust him yet. It's a prequel angle that could easily have been an excuse for a bland tutorial-length game, but by most accounts it isn't that. Does it land? Mostly yes, with a few stumbles on the way out the door.

That framing matters because it changes what kind of game this is. Rather than another open checklist of assassination puzzles, First Light leans into a scripted, story-first structure: missions escalate as Bond proves himself, trust from his MI6 handlers is earned rather than assumed, and the whole thing is clearly built to be played start to finish in one or two sittings rather than picked at over months. That's the right instinct for an origin story, and it's also where most of the actual praise in the Steam reviews is pointed.

Pros

• The stealth-meets-gunplay loop is the star of the show, and it's what most players bring up first when they're happy with the game.
• Hand-to-hand combat gets specific praise for feeling weighty and satisfying rather than tacked on.
• The story and the soundtrack come up again and again as highlights, with more than one reviewer calling it one of the better things they've played recently.
• Several short, no-nonsense reviews ("yes," "good game," "yuh") are really just people confirming it's fun to actually play, which counts for something.
• Even players who went in skeptical, expecting another round of Hitman-style microtransaction fatigue, came away pleasantly surprised that this is a focused, complete single-player campaign.

Cons

• Launch-week stability is the biggest recurring complaint: one player reported crashes roughly every 20 minutes and explicitly won't recommend the game until that's fixed.
• A separate bug sends some players into an endless loading screen after dying, which is exactly the kind of thing that turns a quick retry into a reason to close the game.
• At least one reviewer said the game simply wouldn't launch at all and had to request a refund.
• The story's final chapter gets called out as the weakest stretch, a noticeably softer landing after a stronger build-up.
• The campaign runs around 18 hours, which several players flag as short given the asking price.

Performance & PC

On paper the requirements aren't outrageous for a current-generation cinematic action game: 16GB of RAM across both the minimum and recommended tiers, a GTX 1660 or RX 5700-class card to get in the door, an RTX 3060 Ti or RX 6700 XT for the recommended experience, and 80GB of storage with an SSD required outright rather than just suggested. That SSD requirement lines up with what players are actually running into — the complaints in the reviews aren't about frame rate, they're about stability. The every-20-minutes crashing and the endless-loading-screen-after-death bug both point to launch-week jank rather than a game that's fundamentally too heavy to run. There's no mention either way of Steam Deck or Linux behavior in the reviews we looked at, so treat that as an open question rather than a confirmed yes or no for now. Given how recently the game launched, there's a decent chance a stability-focused patch is already in the works; it's the kind of problem IO Interactive has fixed before in its other live titles, rather than a structural issue baked into the game's design.

How it compares

If you liked Remedy's CONTROL Resonant for its tight, story-first single-player campaign wrapped around a strong combat loop, First Light is swinging at a similar target, just with a license instead of original IP. SILENT HILL: Townfall sits in the same "narrative action-adventure you finish in one dedicated push" category, though it's chasing dread rather than spy-thriller slickness. And next to Resident Evil Requiem, another story-heavy single-player action-adventure built for one focused playthrough, First Light's stealth-and-gadgets toolkit is the clearer differentiator — it's playing a different game within the same general shape. All three sit in the same neighborhood: single-player, campaign-length, more interested in pacing a story well than in giving you an open-ended sandbox to live in.

Summary

007 First Light is a genuinely good idea executed by a studio that knows how to make stealth and gunplay feel good, and the reviews back that up: the combat, the story, and the soundtrack are landing with the people actually playing it. The problem right now is that a real chunk of that audience is also running into crashes, a nasty loading-screen bug, or in one case a game that wouldn't even start. None of that is a design flaw — it reads like exactly the kind of thing a patch or two should clean up — but it's enough to make the launch window a rougher ride than the game underneath deserves, especially at a premium price for an experience most people are finishing in under 20 hours.

If you've been waiting for a Bond game that actually treats the character like a person rather than a cutscene mascot, First Light is worth your attention — just maybe not on day one, and maybe not at full retail. Let the first patch or two land, and this has a good shot at becoming the Bond game people quietly recommend to friends a few months from now.