007 First Light Review: The Best Game Of 2026 Is Also the 26th Bond Film

Nobody warned us that the best James Bond story since Skyfall, which was nearly 15 years ago, wouldn’t come from a live-action movie but a video game developed by IO Interactive. The Copenhagen studio, mostly famous for its work on the Hitman games, has done what no developer has managed since GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64 back in 1997 — made a Bond game that people will still be talking about decades from now. And the sales and critical reception for 007 First Light prove it. The title sold over 1.5 million copies in its first 24 hours of release and received an 87% score on Metacritic. But those are just numbers. They don’t tell you just how incredible the game feels to navigate. With a controller in hand, for the first time ever, players feel like they really get to be 007.

Loading up First Light for the first time, you feel like you’re watching a movie. Except you’re holding a controller and the movie is also a game, and somehow both of those things are true and excellent at the same time. In fact, the cutscenes are so good and so cinematic here that you could piece them together and release them as a standalone film without changing a single frame. Honestly, if they called it Bond 26, nobody would be disappointed.

007 First Light Is The Bond Origin Story Hollywood Was Too Scared to Tell

Patrick Gibson, best known from Dexter: Original Sin, plays a 26-year-old James Bond who hasn’t earned the number yet. He’s raw, reckless, and constantly doing things he’s been told not to do, which turns out to be exactly what makes him compelling and relatable to a new generation – he’s not a robot for hire.

Also, this isn’t the Bond who orders a martini, has women on his arm and walks into a room already knowing he’s the most dangerous person in it. That was your grandfather’s Bond. This one takes chances, breaks protocols, ignores instructions from his superiors, and yet somehow, like a cat, keeps landing on his feet through some combination of instinct and luck. You watch this young and arrogant James Bond become 007. And it’s a story the films were never bold enough to tell – the origins of the hero (inspired by novels and short stories by Ian Fleming, of course).

IO’s narrative director Martin Emborg explained the game’s direction to Deadline: “We immersed ourselves in everything Bond available anywhere. But we did quickly end on Ian Fleming because the novels are where he comes from, and the novels are ground zero for all the interpretations that’s been made over the decades. It’s the only appropriate place to go and look to find the truth of who he is.”

And that translates so well in the game. 007 First Light starts off with Bond as a Navy aircrewman for the Special Air Service and the sole survivor in the middle of an ambushed attack in Iceland. Guided by MI6, he is tasked with finding an asset in a research camp that is occupied by a mercenary group. But he goes completely off script and saves the captive scientists, destroys the camp, including the asset, instead. And while his disobedience lands him in hot water, it also gets him an invite to join MI6. 

The game then allows you to compete alongside other MI6 cadets (who begin as rivals but soon turn into something closer to friends). It’s the Rocky training montage, but with Bond at the center. You’ll need to learn how to shoot, fight, and use stealth to take out enemies. And while all this is happening, Bond grows closer to a select few of recruits, especially Lennie James’ John Greenway, a hardened authority figure who doesn’t appreciate Bond’s reckless attitude to the training. The two clash multiple times early on, but soon grow closer. 

The relationships Bond forms in 007 First Light – with his fellow recruits and with the more popular characters, like Q, M, and Miss Moneypenny – actually affect you. They’re not cardboard cutouts here. You actually get to know why they do what they do and why they’re key figures in Bond’s life. And honestly, it takes you by surprise. It’s the kind of writing you don’t expect from a video game in 2026.

And the good news is that the gameplay is just as good.

The PS5 (And The Xbox Series X) Finally Has Its Uncharted Moment

The last time a Bond game felt this good to play, it was 1997, and you were on a Nintendo 64. GoldenEye 007 set a bar that nobody touched for nearly thirty years. IO Interactive just touched it.

But IO Interactive clearly spent a lot of time with Uncharted 4, too. The shooting mechanics, the climbing sequences, the cover system behind crates while enemies pour through doorways, the vehicle chases, the way the camera pulls back during a brawl to give you room to breathe, all of it carries that DNA. But that’s not a criticism. Uncharted 4 was definitely the best game on the PS4 (alongside God of War, of course). It was one of the few titles that pushed the console to its limits.

007 First Light makes the same argument for the PS5 and the Xbox Series X. This is a next-generation game. This is the reason why you spent all that money on this gaming console. For the first time, for me anyways, the environments, the physics, the lighting, and the performance capture feel like a massive step that actually feels next-gen. 

Locations stretch across multiple countries, each one distinct, each one carrying the kind of production detail that you usually find in the films. The combat is also tight enough to stay satisfying across the full campaign without turning repetitive. You’ll love smashing the heads of bad guys into walls or uppercutting them into the ocean. But the game lets you choose what kind of spy you want to be. You have the choice of John Rambo-ing your way through hordes of goons or performing stealthy moves that hide Bond from the enemies. Personally, I enjoyed taking down every bad guy in sight. But that’s just me.

The Blueprint for Bond 26 Now Exists

What 007 First Light also does, without necessarily intending to, is set a bar for the film franchise that Denis Villeneuve now has to clear. And boy, it’s a high one now. The Villeneuve Bond 26 is still being written by Steven Knight, who has been meeting with actual SAS operatives and intelligence figures for months to build a grounded version of the character. I feel like that version of the character already starts here.

“Bond has been bulletproof. People have been able to make mistakes and variations, quite elaborate variations, and the character has survived because the core of it is like a diamond. You can’t touch it,” Knight said. That sounds like someone who understands what the franchise needs to make Bond relevant again. Unfortunately or fortunately, it has just gotten harder because 007 First Light already showed us what a grounded, character-driven, origin-focused Bond story can look like when it’s done properly.

Traditionalists won’t be disappointed either. I mean, if we’re honest, the film franchise has swung between tones for sixty-plus years. Brosnan had invisible cars and gadgets the size of a briefcase. Craig had raw fistfights in stairwells and a villain who cried blood. 007 First Light sits closer to Craig’s end of that scale, but it adds something Craig’s films, Casino Royale included, never fully committed to: showing you who Bond was before any of it happened.

007 First Light answers key questions about the character: What drove him to become 007? What did it cost for him to get there? And, why is he still the world’s best and most famous spy?

If you own a next-gen console (PS5, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch 2 or even a PC) and you don’t own this game yet, that’s a gap worth fixing. And if Denis Villeneuve is reading game reviews, which seems unlikely but not impossible for a filmmaker this thorough, he should probably play it twice. Three times. Ten times. Because this is the future of the James Bond franchise.