Spirits of Light

007 First Light is finally here, and it's clear that IO Interactive is already planting the seeds for Bond's future.

Confident and charismatic, James Bond's long-awaited return to games is the best since GoldenEye.

IO awkwardly welds together two schools of game design.

The magic of 007 First Light is in the bluff. When IO Interactive's young James Bond is caught out yet again trying to sneak through some restricted area, he has numerous ways to resolve the situation. Gadgets. Fists. Guns. Whatever's lying on the nearest surface. But the most novel, and in some ways most satisfying, is simply to blag it. Pressing Circle (on PlayStation) will cause Bond to blurt out some impeccably improvised lie, stunning guards into second-guessing their suspicions and opening a brief window for Bond to slip by. Read more

While 007 First Light is the first actually good James Bond game in quite some time, developer IO Interactive has been making well-optimized PC games for years. It’s not surprising, then, that 007 First Light runs extremely well, at least once you clear its somewhat steep system requirements. The game requires just an AMD Radeon RX 5700 or a GeForce GTX 1660 to run, but its recommended spec is an RTX 3060 Ti or a 6700 XT. That’s quite a difference, but I will say that after testing the 3060 Ti at 1080p, it runs incredibly well, although the low VRAM means you’ll probably want to turn down the