Rob Minkley, Crux magazine, here to interview Sir Nicholas Webb. Don’t mind me as I rifle through your security office cupboards.
John Fisher, museum curator, checking a valuable artefact for damage. Fletcher, operations department, searching for a rogue employee. I’m a lab technician who lost his coat, a tourist who took a wrong turn, a concerned bystander who found this heavily armed man passed out on the floor, the poor sod – and no, that’s not the outline of my fist imprinted on the side of his face. Honest.
In 007 First Light, James Bond’s superpower is literally bullshit.
Unlike Hitman’s Agent 47, Bond doesn’t need a disguise: with a single button press he blurts a tale so brazen, so blatantly untrue that it bamboozles anyone in earshot, buying you 30 seconds of peace in any restricted area. Stroll to your objective uninterrupted or, as I often do, pick off your enemies under the cloud of confusion.
You can ignore this ability, called a bluff, and make it through the campaign just fine, but you really shouldn’t. More than just a silly party trick, it exemplifies the tongue-in-cheek tone of the entire game. This is not Bond the veteran master manipulator, it’s a younger, cockier Bond, one who knows he can get away with saying almost anything, no matter how outlandish, so long as he says it with confidence and a smile. You can really feel IO Interactive’s writers enjoying themselves: “Wait a second, this isn’t my apartment,” he says with what is clearly mock confusion in his plum English accent, to a group of heavily armed thugs patrolling ramshackle plasterboard buildings in a makeshift desert city.
But the bluff’s joy is mechanical too. The way First Light handles the resource you need for them – instinct – builds tension, necessitates aggression, and gives every mission a bounding, see-saw pace as you bounce between takedowns and tall tales.
Each bluff consumes three instinct points and you can only hold six, so I often run low. Replenishment could’ve easily been boring. The chemical and electrical juice powering Bond’s gadgets, for example, are simple pick-ups scattered around every level. Instead, the easiest way to recharge instinct is through aggression. Takedowns net one instinct point – using your gadgets does it too but that’s louder and drains your other resources, whereas sneaking up to an enemy chopping them in the neck is silent and completely free.
I love the gameplay loop this creates.
Usually I enter stealth segments with a full instinct meter, and bluff my way through the first area. In the next room I go silent. I know that if I’m caught I have enough instinct to talk my way out of it, a get-out-of-jail-free card, but ideally I’m zipping between cover with a right bumper press, pulling enemies into the shadows one by one. If needed, I’ll turn on a vacuum cleaner or sabotage an air-conditioning unit to lure an enemy, and smash their jaw as they investigate. It’s these moments where First Light feels most like Hitman.
When my instinct meter is full again, I’ll swagger up to the next group of enemies and spin another audacious story – “I need to fix a boat, just grabbing some bits on my way there!”. Every quip feels like a concise, amusing reward after a stressful couple of minutes.
When you approach First Light’s stealth sections in this mindset, enemies become Bond’s playthings. They exist either to be tricked by your ridiculous stories or to be silently dispatched so you can fool their friends later.
The most satisfying segments let you do both: bluff, then eliminate. Bluffing enemies turns an area into a safe space you can walk around in full view. This opens up new lines of attack. If you dispatch those same enemies quickly you’re earning back the instinct you just used – knock three out and you’re effectively getting the bluff for free, moving to the next zone with a full meter. Bluffing those three thugs in the desert city, for example, let me climb a ladder and maneuver them with my gadgets from on high, finishing the last with a flying Superman punch.
Thinking about where you stand when you bluff pays off. You only fool enemies who can hear you, but if you walk around while yammering you can pull other enemies into your lie’s orbit as you tell it. The more enemies you bluff, the freer you can move around. Trying to flummox as many enemies as I can in one go has become its own satisfying challenge (my record is five).
Watchers, denoted by a white circle above them, are special enemies who cannot be bluffed, and neither can any comrades nearby. They create a new type of puzzle, one where you need to properly plan your route and take them out first without alerting anyone.
In an early example, you enter the laundry room in the basement of a grand Slovakian hotel. A watcher and one regular enemy block your path – beyond, another group guards your objective. You can reach it in several ways including brawling, luring enemies to your location, or draining your gadgets to stun and blind them. Instead I kick a laundry cart towards the regular enemy, crushing him and panicking the watcher, who sets off to investigate. I creep around a pillar, choke him, and amble into the next room, where nobody is smart enough to stop my ruse. “Burton, hotel security. Any reports of pickpocketing in this area?”
Dispatching one watcher is usually simple: my tool of choice is the flash mine gadget, a one-hit knockout. I enjoy the absurdity of emerging behind cover the second it detonates and launching into a bluff. “I scared off the man that attacked him – a chap in a green beret!”
But multiple watchers loiter in some zones. These, not boss battles, feel like First Light’s biggest test. You’ll often need to skirt around the perimeter to find an approach that works and exhaust your full arsenal of gadgets to draw individual watchers away from their colleagues.
In the security office where I pretended to be a journalist, two pairs of watchers patrolled two areas. I failed a lot, triggering First Light’s concussive fistfights. In a sense they’re a reward in themselves – throwing a bottle at a watcher then slamming their head into a bookcase is just as powerful as a takedown – but I kept restarting instead, eager to hear what story Bond would’ve spun given the chance.
007 First Light presents plenty of bluffing opportunities, with multiple stealth sections in each chapter, but I wish it had more. Most missions contain firefights you can’t sneak through. Guns feel fine but bullets rain on you from all sides, making the shooting galleries feel a bit shapeless. More than once, I’ve cleared an area only to find my path blocked because I haven’t killed every single enemy, so I have to backtrack and find that one machine-gunner who’s hiding behind a box in a far corner.
I would’ve liked less of marksman Bond and more sharp-talking, brash Bond. There are, after all, better third-person shooters than First Light – but I can’t think of another game where you can waltz towards enemies dressed in a turtleneck and collared jacket and ask: “Oi, you lads got a faulty coffee machine?”
