The Best Bond Game Ever Is an Indictment of Every Bond Game Before It

The verdict first: 007 First Light is the best Bond game in twenty years, and the perfect scores are not inflation. IO Interactive built a 14-hour spy thriller that actually holds together, with gunplay that is satisfying without being constant and a young Bond who reads as Bond. Patrick Gibson does the hardest thing in the franchise, which is play the part without impersonating the men who played it before him. Buy it.

Now the part the reviews keep underselling. “Best Bond game ever” is both true and an indictment. The phrase only means anything because the high-water marks behind it are GoldenEye in 1997 and Everything or Nothing in 2004, with two decades of forgettable tie-ins filling the gap. Winning a race nobody else finished is still winning. It is also fair to ask why the race was empty.

The answer is not a shortage of talent. It is the license. For years the people who controlled Bond handed him out in pieces to studios working on movie deadlines, and the games shipped to coincide with a premiere rather than to be good. The constraint was never the developers. It was a rights structure that treated the game as merchandise.

What changed is who walked in the door. IO spent a decade making Hitman, which is to say a decade building the exact engine, level design, and stealth grammar a Bond game has always wanted. They came to the table with leverage and their own technology, and the result is the first time the franchise let a studio finish the thought.

Reviewers can feel the difference, which is why so many of them rush to deny the obvious comparison.

Gibson isn’t doing an impression of any other Bond; he’s entirely his own man.

True of the actor, and true of the game. The tell is that everyone needs to say it out loud. You only insist a thing is not Hitman with a Bond skin when the skeleton underneath is visible and excellent, and when twenty-five years of bad Bond games trained you to expect a reskin.

So the scores are honest and the celebration is slightly misplaced. The story is not that someone finally made a great Bond game. It is that it took the studio that got tired of asking permission.