Striving for Light

007 First Light, the new James Bond game, releases on May 27, but people who paid extra got to start playing today. Some have already beaten the game and posted all of the game's cutscenes on YouTube, including the final sequence. We won't spoil the specifics, but the ending involves a major moment for James Bond and teases what he may do next in a sequel. That there would be a sequel to First Light should not come as much of a surprise, as the developers at IO said they envisioned a trilogy of Bond games. “I don’t want to speak too big about it, but I just hope we’ll do a thing that will defi

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

IO awkwardly welds together two schools of game design.

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

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