For a game that tries to be both Uncharted and Hitman, it has a bunch of hits and misses. As a stand-alone 007 title it's surely enjoyable.

007: First Light

If you want a better story, visuals and action set-pieces, perhaps try the now nearly 10 year old Uncharted 4. If you want better stealth and sandbox gameplay, nobody does it better than Hitman World of Assassination. But we're here for a 007 game, and that's exactly what this is... Cue the music!

There's a whole bunch of different locations we visit throughout the game, beautifully designed and populated; something IOI is known for.

Performance is good, but it sacrifices a lot of visual fidelity on the base PS5. The game runs at like 720p(!) in performance mode.

Other than pixelated visuals and aliased hair (not a problem for 47), performance is good straight from launch version 1.007.

Who'd have guessed a "tech" company billionaire and AI would be the villains of this title!

Story is mediocre, feels very generic. But hey, as with the books and films, it takes place across different locations.

From streets, buildings and sewers of London to tropical islands, luxury east-European hotels to pirate shipwreck coves and polar quantum bunkers.

All the locations are filled with a huge number of NPCs, although number of "opportunities" to explore is lacking in number.

The NPCs, though are generated with diversity in mind, rarely if any do they "repeat" in one map.

Behavior of NPCs however could be improved. Civilians and enemies both don't really react like they would on a Hitman for example. Knocked-out enemies do not get up, there's no way to 'hide' a body (or yourself), and cover systems can be improved.

Hand-to-hand combat is very good. So refined, in fact you'd almost prefer it over the lackluster gun-play! Throwing a gun at an enemy can be better than shooting it sometimes for example. I'd say it would be more fun if gunplay with the enemies were handled a bit better. I died a whole bunch of times to the multi-enemy swarms.

Gadgets is another bit of a weak point. Not having a bunch of gadgets is not an issue, but their usage is not handled as well as it could have been.

47 had a way more useful selection of gadgets!

Main "bad guys" are just billionaire tech bros, I mean, no shit Bond. A story around the pirate king might have been more interesting.

The mission around getting $100,000 to enter an action is fun, but about as realistic as a PMC with hundreds of heavily armed goons in the middle of London.

Yeah, fine, Bond can't kill till enemies shoot, but why isn't the taser usable!

NPC dialog is thing hasn't changed from Hitman, and for the better.

They've improved the ambient audio by a lot. Sound effects are well done, quite realistic weapon firing sounds.

Ah that's where the processing power was gone!

So, how would I rate this? Environments, 10/10. Music and audio, 10/10. Combat and story?

Quite fun overall. Sadly there's no chapter-wise collectible tracker, making the hunt more annoying without a guide. The "restart checkpoint" also needs work, relying on it after accidentally breaking stealth, for example, will restart the whole sub-chapter!