007 First Light review roundup: the best James Bond game since GoldenEye

But it's maybe not as good a Hitman game as Hitman

Appropriately, perhaps, for a game about a secret agent who loves to defuse bombs with seconds left on the clock, 007 First Light is coming in hot. The James Bond game from Hitman developer IO Interactive is out tomorrow, May 27, but review copies only arrived in journalists' inboxes at the last moment before the long holiday weekend, with the result that many sites missed today's review embargo or posted reviews-in-progress. (Polygon's review will be up soon!)

Late review code can be a bad sign, but not in this case, it seems. First Light is getting overwhelmingly positive write-ups, with the common consensus being that it's a worthy return to gaming for the character — there hasn't been a Bond game in 14 years — and the best Bond game since 1997's legendary GoldenEye 007. Metacritic currently pins the game's rating at 88, while on OpenCritic, it's at 90.

Fittingly, many of the reviews posted are from the U.K., perhaps thanks to a more amenable time zone. The Guardian's Matthew Castle awards 007 First Light a "triumphant" five stars, and reserves particular praise for the way IO integrates high-octane action and cinematic storytelling with Hitman's "social stealth" gameplay to deliver a different kind of Bond. "Plenty of games have let us be a gun-toting version of Bond, but this is the first opportunity we’ve had to be a Bond relaxing beside a glittering infinity pool in Vietnam, or a Bond trying to get one over on a shell game hustler," Castle writes. "Very few fans get to play in the sandbox of their obsession like IO has here. As far as Bond video games go, nobody has done it better."

VGC's Jordan Middler agrees, also slapping five stars on the game and calling it "a real frontrunner for 2026’s Game of the Year." So does IGN's "review so far" by Luke Reilly. "007 First Light has made a fabulous first impression, and I’m certainly already quite comfortable to say it’s the best Bond has been since GoldenEye," Reilly says. "Perhaps above everything so far I just adore the attention to detail, from the big-picture consideration of giving Bond the long, vertical scar on his right cheek the character boasted in his literary origins, to tiny embellishments like the scratched rims and ziptied trim on the busted-up, 2006 Aston Martin seeing out its time in the service as the training car at MI6’s Malta-based training camp."

Some reviewers coming to the game as fans of IO's Hitman games, rather than as fans of James Bond, are slightly less impressed, but only slightly. Eurogamer's Rick Lane awards 007 First Light four stars and says it's "less cerebral and replayable than IO's World of Assassination trilogy," but makes up for it with its immense charm. "First Light is not IO Interactive's best game. But it is by far the studio's best-written game, and like the superspy himself, it keeps you on side even in its weakest moments by sheer dint of its personality."

Kotaku's Jackson Tyler finds First Light to be suspended between an Uncharted-style cinematic action game and the stealth mechanics of Hitman or Metal Gear Solid in ways that can be awkward, but aren't always unproductive. "Uncharted is more than the sum of its parts while First Light is less than the sum of its parts, but those individual parts are almost all much more interesting and alive than those usually found in the genre First Light desperately wants to imitate," Tyler writes. He dings the inconsistent tone of the game's story and the weak hand-to-hand combat, but finds that IO's talents as a developer of sandbox stealth games shines through.

"It’s a game from an incredible team playing against type, one which has a tendency to obscure its own strengths and overplay its weaknesses," Tyler says. "Sometimes it wants to sand down its rough edges and be everything to everyone, but all of its best moments are where it stalwartly refuses to where other studios would fold. It’s too expensive for its own good, it’s smarter than it has any right to be and so much dumber than you wish it actually was."

You can find out which of these takes you agree with when 007 First Light launches on May 27 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.