007 First Light is perhaps the most cinematic game I've played in years – it's simply gorgeous on PC
James Bond looks better than ever
It's not always that easy to work out what type of lighting makes a game look cinematic – because it's not always about ray-tracing and unbelievably photorealistic approaches. The best-looking games, and the ones that seem to have something about them that suggests real artistry, often use a stylised approach to get a more memorable result.
That's how I'd describe 007 First Light, which uses its lighting so effectively in the first few missions that I found myself stopping to take screenshots every few minutes. It creates a look that doesn't seem initially to be anything other than realistic, but has just enough verve to be a little hyperreal and frankly beautiful.
I've been playing the game a little early on my gaming PC, complete with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, and it arrives as one of those titles that Nvidia has clearly collaborated on from a settings perspective. All the newest toys are here in style, including the option to go with dynamic multi-frame generation if you have a compatible GPU, right from the get-go.
The game also features the setting that I've been raving about in the last couple of years – global illumination, letting ray-traced lighting upgrade not just the reflections that you see in mirrors and on surfaces, but also the entire character of the light in a level. This is what powers the baked, arid sunshine of a training base in Malta, or the clear purity of Slovakian mountain air – plus the dank smokiness of a popping club night under the arches in London.
You only have to play the first few missions to get a sense of the variety that IO Interactive has cooked up for its Bond game, and I've been hugely impressed. The fact that I played for about five hours yesterday, during a 33-degree day with my gaming PC basically acting as a giant hot-air blower, is a testament to how fun the game feels.
It's basically exactly what IOI promised, in that the game can feel like Hitman at times, while you case out a level and sneak past guards while following trails and clues, but it's so much more directed and ambitious in its storytelling. While Hitman lets you follow scripted events from a distance and set them up, First Light puts you right in their centre with seamless cutscenes and action sequences.
It's also richly detailed, with so many side conversations and little subplots to check out in each level if you have the time and patience. From running into rich parents going through a drama with their kid applying for college in one level, to exploring the camp and silly tech being developed in Q branch between missions, the amount of dialogue squeezed in is genuinely crazy.
The tone of the game also seems spot on from my point of view. Bond has only recently been a character with a more serious core, and while First Light doesn't take things to proper Moonraker levels of silliness, it's still a little more winking than the likes of Skyfall.
This Bond is younger and fresher, and full of a pumped-up sense of his own importance, and his ego is actually pretty fun to play with as you make small dialogue choices and get yourself into spying scrapes. The stealth system is extremely familiar from Hitman, but the combat is much more free-flowing. One of my only complaints so far has been some camera wonkiness during close-quarter fights, but the simple melee system opts for more satisfaction and less mechanical complexity, which feels about right.
Gunplay is also miles smoother than in Hitman, which was a needed upgrade, and the whole thing feels incredibly slick. It might be overhyping it to say that it feels on the same level as an Uncharted game, but it really is refreshing to see a licensed game like this arrive with such a sheen of polish and detail.
Playing it on a 5070 Ti, I've experimented with all the Nvidia bells and whistles, too. At 1440p with everything maxed out, I've been getting a playable 60fps, roughly, so sticking 2X frame-gen on has got me feeling really smooth at more like 80-90fps. Using dynamic frame-gen, though, I've been able to stay up at 160fps, my monitor's refresh rate, even at 4K – so if you don't mind a little ghosting and sometimes a tipple of latency, you can get crazy performance gains from the system.
I've been keeping it on a lower setting, but knowing that there's headroom out there is pretty major, and means the game feels like it's already in a great place on arrival. I'll be very curious to see how it performs on a PS5 Pro, meanwhile, to compare the two.
In the meantime, any Bond fan with a console or gaming PC should be checking out 007 First Light. I'm gutted that some work travel means I won't be able to play it much more this week, which is always a sign that a game has its hooks into me decently.
