- Genre: Action/Adventure
- Platform: PS5
- Also Available On: Xbox Series, Windows, Switch 2
I’ve always been a general fan of the Hitman series and have jumped into the recent trilogy a number of times. The way that you could take things on in a number of different ways and carefully plan the missions has always been really engaging. However, I’ve never been a huge fan of how they handled failure. It’s always felt too cut and dry to me. When things go incredibly wrong you basically fail and restart rather than adapt. In making the game focused on the Bond IP, First Light solved a lot of that problem for me.
There are certain expectations around the Bond IP that come from decades of films and videogames. Sure, he’s going to be the ladykiller spy with cool gadgets and an ability to adapt to his environment. However, the important thing for this game is that when things go wrong in a Bond movie – and they always do at some point – he will action star his way out of trouble. That is the biggest thing about this as a difference against Hitman. I can carefully plan my infiltration to areas and make sure to stealth or fake or distract my way through areas, but when things go wrong I don’t reset. I punch and I shoot and I laser gadget and I explosive my way through. Sure, I can reset the scenario and try a different approach but it doesn’t feel like as much of a punishment as it did for me in Hitman because the action escape is simply another part of the experience and another tool in my bag.
This obviously wouldn’t work if the action parts weren’t fun. Luckily, the experience here is sharp. Melee is your typical experience at this point. The AI will generally line up attacks one at a time to avoid overwhelming the player. There are color coded tells for parry and dodge-focused defense. You can punch and grab and throw things to get in offense. It’s fine and it works. What surprised me is how good the gunplay was.
This plays a lot closer to something like a Tomb Raider than a Goldeneye 64 when gunplay is active, and that’s a huge benefit to the game. There’s a pretty narrow variety of weapons, but they cover a few specific wider types. There’s a couple pistols, a couple SMGs, a few rifles, and a couple shotguns. They’ve got enough coverage to be useful in generally different ranges but you also don’t really sit on them for too long. The game plays a pretty tight line where ammo is not overly abundant so you are frequently changing out weapons to kind of whatever is nearby. This also leads to the thing that I really liked in that careful targeting is very important, but the game is also generous with its aim assists. As an example, headshots are incredibly important in reducing ammo use as they are a guaranteed kill. However, there are a lot of enemies that wear helmets. These are a guaranteed two shot kill done well – the first shot pops the helmet off in a satisfying way and the second shot is your kill shot. All of this encourages the player to efficiently dispatch enemies and preserve ammo as it can become a hazard to get out of cover to find more weapons.
This would all be incredibly more annoying if the game wasn’t fairly generous with its aim assists. It doesn’t necessarily aim correct much but it definitely leans into camera magnetism in a way that lets the player pan and scan and get close enough to an enemy’s weak point before getting pulled in to the target. This obviously helps with general clumsiness of gamepad inputs, but it also helps more importantly in preserving the speed of gameplay. The skill is in identifying targets and getting over there, and the game provides that last push once you’ve gotten to the right spot, rather than fumbling around to hit the perfect final tap of the stick. It feels like the team approached the reality of gamepad-focused gameplay with a lot more realistic of a mindset of what benefits the game as a whole, rather than being focused on whether or not there should be a skill wall involved, and I think the game ends up being better on the other side of it as a result.
Where I kind of think this falls apart a bit is in boss fights. They all kind of felt too scripted and too heavy handed. You generally can’t just melee your way through these fights or shoot your way through these fights. They generally require you to use things like gadget moves to distract the enemy and get a hit in, then run away to find a new unique distraction to do. They generally require some specific melee combo of a parry of a very telegraphed attack into a single hit, then some waiting around for it to happen again. What they are is generally slow and not really presenting the player with actual choices they can make to impact the experience. In a game so heavily leaning into letting the player approach situations in any way that they felt like, the change to heavy scripting felt jarring in a negative way.
As a whole, this is a really impressive experience. On its own it proves to be a really fun mix of Hitman stealth/planning with more typical action-oriented gameplay possibilities when things go wrong. It feels a lot more weighted toward real time adaptation over resetting than Hitman and that’s a huge win. Add in the fact that this is a Bond game that feels like how I imagine Bond would be and that adds up to an incredible experience. Goldeneye was fun, but it was distinctly an action FPS and had nothing else to really feel like Bond. The games that came after it never really stepped out of its FPS shadow. First Light feels like the franchise finally merging the movies with videogames in a way that feels correct to the IP and all it took was bending the rules of Hitman a bit to make it more shooty.