007 First Light Launches With an 87 on Metacritic. It Is the Best James Bond Game in Decades.
Gaming | May 27, 2026
The 007 First Light review scores are in, and they are good: IO Interactive’s James Bond origin story has landed an 87 on Metacritic based on 50 critic assessments, making it not only the highest-rated Bond game ever released but one of the year’s most acclaimed releases across any genre. The game is out today on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, and it arrives six years after IO Interactive first announced it was building an original 007 title from scratch.
The wait, critics have largely agreed, was worth it.
“Games may finally be the medium best equipped to let Bond’s full range make sense,” wrote one reviewer. “The spectacle, the emotional scars, the seduction, the gadgets, the wit, the absurdity, and the cold professionalism all at once.” That assessment captures the critical consensus: First Light succeeds not because it is technically impressive, though it is, but because it understands what makes Bond work as a character and builds systems around that understanding.
Six Years in Development, One Clear Vision
IO Interactive is the Danish studio behind the Hitman series, a franchise built on creative assassination, systemic player freedom, and the tension between appearing like you belong somewhere while doing something that would result in your immediate arrest. That sensibility turns out to translate to Bond with unusual precision.
The studio announced Project 007, as it was initially code-named, in November 2020. Development ran across IO’s studios in Copenhagen and Stockholm, using the proprietary Glacier Engine the team has refined across eight Hitman entries. The collaboration with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Eon Productions gave IO access to the full Fleming and franchise archive, and narrative director Martin Emborg has said in interviews that the team returned to Ian Fleming’s novels as the foundational reference point, not the films.
“The novels are where he comes from,” Emborg told Deadline in a development interview published this week. “They are ground zero for all the interpretations that have been made over the decades.” That framing shaped the version of Bond in First Light: 26 years old, a recruit in MI6’s training programme, carrying what Emborg described as “an unearned confidence” that reads, deliberately, as a reckless young man who has not yet learned what confidence costs.
Irish actor Patrick Gibson plays Bond. The casting choice is a statement of intent. Gibson is not a household name, which means players will not arrive with preconceptions about what his Bond should be. The character emerges through the game rather than preceding it.
Stealth, Systems, and Cinematic Presentation
The gameplay loop will feel familiar to anyone who has played a Hitman title. Each mission unfolds across a richly populated environment. Players can observe patrol patterns, acquire disguises, bribe or threaten guards, exploit environmental opportunities, or simply shoot their way through. The difference from Hitman’s format is tone: where the Hitman series encourages you to be invisible and creative, First Light rewards Bond-like behaviour specifically. Being seen at the right moment, with the right attitude, in the right disguise, opens paths that brute stealth does not.
Several critics have highlighted the game’s globe-trotting settings as a standout. First Light takes players from a training facility in the Scottish Highlands through markets in Morocco, a casino in Monaco, and a server facility in Singapore, each environment built with the visual specificity that suggests the location was designed first and the mission was written around it.
Windows Central, in a review calling it “not content with being one of the best stealth-action games in years,” added that the game “comes with a huge warning to the world,” a reference to a subplot involving AI surveillance infrastructure that critics have noted feels less like a Bond-movie MacGuffin and more like a current-events briefing.
TechRadar awarded the game a five-star review, calling it “a stunning stealth action game fit for the silver screen.” Newsweek described it as “a dense, sexy blockbuster” that justifies the franchise’s years away from gaming.
Not every review was unqualified praise. Kotaku’s assessment, headlined “A Playable But Flawed Bond Movie,” criticised the game’s pacing in its middle third and argued that some of the narrative set-pieces prioritised spectacle over player agency. That minority view has not substantially dented the overall reception.
The 007 First Light Review in Context: Bond Games’ History of Near Misses
For most of gaming history, the James Bond franchise has been treated as a licensing exercise rather than a creative opportunity. GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64 remains the outlier: a game that genuinely expanded what first-person shooters could be, largely because the development team at Rare was given room to experiment. Almost everything since has aimed at the middle of the market and landed there, capable but forgettable.
IO Interactive’s track record with Hitman made it an unusual choice on paper. The studio had never made an action-adventure game with a linear narrative structure. But the same qualities that made Hitman work, a deep investment in environmental design, an understanding of social infiltration as a game mechanic, and a tonal control that could hold comedy and menace simultaneously, turn out to be precisely what Bond needs.
What First Light has done, if the reviews hold, is establish IO Interactive’s treatment of Bond as a foundation rather than a standalone entry. The ending, which several critics have flagged without spoiling, points clearly toward a sequel. Whether MGM and Eon will greenlight one will depend on how the commercial reception matches the critical one over the coming weeks.
Today, though, it is enough that the best Bond game in decades arrived on the day it was supposed to.
Sources: 007 First Light Reviews, Metacritic | 007 First Light Review, TechRadar | 007 First Light Review, Windows Central | 007 First Light is the James Bond Game We’ve Been Waiting For, Newsweek | 007 First Light, the Kotaku Review, Kotaku | 007 First Light Game Dev Interview, Deadline | 007 First Light Wikipedia
