🎯 ShireHub Score: 8.5 / 10

The best Bond game since GoldenEye — and an imperfect one. IO Interactive built something obsessively detailed, emotionally grounded, and stylistically flawless. The gameplay occasionally gets in the way of that. Worth every hour anyway.

IGN: 9/10 · PC Gamer: mixed · Metacritic: tracking high

🎬 The last Bond game worth talking about came out in 1997.

GoldenEye on Nintendo 64. Everything since has been a footnote. That changes now.

007 First Light, IO Interactive's origin story for James Bond, is the Bond game fans have been waiting for since the N64 era.

✅ The Good

• Patrick Gibson's Bond. No Daniel Craig, no Connery callbacks. Gibson plays a late-20s Bond who hasn't figured out how to be Bond yet — cocky, reckless, quietly brilliant. It's an original portrayal, and it works completely.

• 17 chapters, ~18–20 hours, almost no filler. The structure gives the story room to breathe in ways no Bond film ever has — slower in the early acts, building a world before it burns it down.

• World-building that earns its obsessive reputation. Bond's beat-up London flat. MI6 headquarters with actual people doing actual things. A Malta training camp with a weathered, duct-taped Aston Martin in the corner that exists for maybe two minutes — but IO aged, scratched, and field-repaired it anyway.

• Music that knows when to hit. The score holds back through the slower scenes and lets the Bond stinger land exactly when it should. When it does, it does.

• Combat that justifies the gadgets. Laser watch, detonating earpieces — they feed into melee that plays like a stripped-back Arkham: block, counter, chain a gadget into a combo. The set pieces escalate correctly. The final act delivers.

❌ The Bad

• Stealth that doesn't fully commit. IO built its reputation on Hitman — the most sophisticated sandbox stealth design in games today. First Light uses those instincts diluted. The sandbox is there; the creativity isn't.

• Slow start. The first six hours are more repetitive than they need to be. When First Light shifts to linear, cinematic action, it's working outside IO's comfort zone, and the game takes longer than it should to find its footing.

• Nothing to do after the credits. No multiplayer. No New Game+. Once you're done, you're done.

• 

ShireHub Verdict

Story & Writing — 9 / 10

World-Building & Detail — 9.5 / 10

Combat & Gadgets — 7.5 / 10

Stealth Design — 7 / 10

Presentation (Music, Visuals, Acting) — 9.5 / 10

ShireHub Score — 8.5 / 10

If you've ever cared about James Bond in any form: film, book or game, this is a mandatory play. If you've never cared about Bond, start here anyway.

💬 Have you played First Light yet? And the real question: does it earn the GoldenEye comparison, or is that too far?

📥 Download ShireHub

📲 iOS →

📲 Android →

🌐 Web → shirehub.net

Whether you're a gamer, a creator, or someone who just loves what they love — ShireHub is the place where your people are. A global community platform. Real interests. Real people. Real conversations.