Stage of Light

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

007 First Light has been a big success for IO Interactive, which developed and published the James Bond game, but now that Amazon owns the franchise, what's going to happen with a potential sequel? That question remains unanswered, but now Amazon Game Studios boss Jeff Gattis has shed more light on the situation and strongly suggested that a sequel is a matter of when, not if. Speaking to IGN, Gattis first clarified his original comments, saying he never said that Amazon Game Studios would publish "the next one." Earlier in June, Gattis said a potential First Light sequel would be "done by MGM