I’ve been waiting a long time for a new James Bond game. When IO announced they had the license for the series, I was interested. Combining James Bond and Hitman sounded interesting but I didn’t want it to be Hitman with a new skin. Then I saw the first trailer for 007 First Light as an origin story and thought it was odd.

I got a chance to play the game after seeing all these high scores and it highlights what’s wrong with gaming. The first is reviewers will give most meh games great reviews. They’ll say they weren’t paid then say they got free review copies, a trip to go play the game earlier and the company that made the game is paying for ads on their site. 

Some reviewers and players are calling it game of the year, and the best Bond since Goldeneye. I wonder, have these people ever played a Bond game before or seen the movies? Even if you didn’t, the game has many issues. Players are one of them, many think that because a game gets high scores, sells well or has a high player count it means it’s good. The game was going to sell decently because of the name. Established franchises get higher scores a lot of times.

How is the game? They took unused maps from Hitman, made them more linear and added unnecessary stuff. They changed the cover and movement from Hitman and it feels worse. There’s a clunky feeling to it and I thought it was the controller at first. The AI is somehow worse than in Hitman, you can walk around people without them seeing you. The fighting feels forced and shoehorned into the engine and is about dodging and parries when you see a color. They should’ve just used the one from Hitman and added some more moves. The driving sections are meh and the cars don’t have a sense of speed. In Hitman you can go into a room and when you get close to something, you will get a prompt to pick it up and look at it. In this you walk into the room, and you can instantly see everything you can pick up. Then there’s a whole detective mode that you can go into. 

The story is another issue with the industry. Devs want to reboot or make prequels to popular franchises. 007 First Light is a prequel to the series and shows how he became a double 0. The story is generic and the characters are not that good. The writing feels like it was done by people who don’t know Bond. At the beginning, they make sure to tell you M is a woman before you meet her, when M was a woman for almost 20 years in the games and movies. If you didn’t know this was a Bond game, you wouldn’t suspect it was. The new Bond feels more like if Tom Holland was cast as Bond, just a generic young guy.

The other issue I have is with long term fans of James Bond. Some are out here saying it’s the best Bond since Everything or Nothing. That was a better game but still a meh one, but it sold people off of star power and the name. First Light sold off the name, the wait between games and games the devs made. Nightfire was the last good Bond game, and we think the best.

Is the game woke? It doesn’t matter because there are many issues with it before you get to that. There’s some people who call themselves anti woke arguing over it. These people have praised anti woke games that were still meh games. Just because a game isn’t woke doesn’t mean it’s going to be good, it just doesn’t pander.

I wish the new Bond game was a Hitman reskin, because it would be a better game. How did this game cost so much, but uses maps from Hitman made linear? Most of a game’s budget is marketing, and I haven’t seen much marketing outside of some Youtube ads. Where did the money go? The praise of the game shows gamers’ standards will go down as long as you show them high scores, familiar characters and good graphics.