Conclusion

007 First Light is IO Interactive's first game outside the Hitman franchise in over a decade, and it is a strong debut for the Bond license. I really like the action-adventure experience that they delivered. There's varied gameplay—stealth, melee combat, ranged shootouts, driving sequences, and investigations are all woven into the global spy thriller setting we all love so much. Importantly, and because some of my friends asked me, the game does not follow the established movie timeline—it is not an adaptation of the events starting with Dr. No, or any other film. Instead, IO Interactive has created a standalone background story set in a modern-day reimagining of the Bond universe. You meet familiar characters like M, Q, and Moneypenny, but they are entirely new interpretations, and the villains, locations, and plot are all original to this game, but feel very Bond-like. This gives IO Interactive creative freedom to tell their own Bond story without being constrained by decades of the films, and there's no way to get that right anyway. In my opinion this was a good decision, and it works well—the game feels authentically Bond without being derivative. The game takes you from Iceland to Malta, London, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Antarctica, each location with its own distinct visual identity and gameplay flavor—this environmental diversity fits the Bond theme perfectly. The story follows a young James Bond through MI6's Double-0 training program and into a conspiracy—like every good Bond movie. The campaign mixes IO Interactive's signature open-ended infiltration levels—where you can go stealth, loud, or improvise with gadgets—with more linear narrative-driven set pieces and cinematic chase sequences.

The game is very well-made and definitely does not feel like a reskinned Hitman, which was one of my biggest worries. The story is engaging with genuine Bond-style twists and turns, and the writing nails the humor—Bond's quips land well and feel natural. Using Q's gadgets is fun and rewarding, and during infiltration sections there are almost always multiple paths to reach your objective. Unlike Hitman, however, 007 First Light guides you along a mostly linear path, which I personally liked very much—it fits the story-driven concept of the game and keeps the pacing tight. That said, Hitman hardcore players looking for the same level of sandbox freedom and replayability will likely be disappointed.

Graphics
007 First Light runs on IO Interactive's Glacier engine, the same technology behind the Hitman Series. The graphics are solid but do look a little dated for a 2026 release—the engine is showing its age compared to what we have seen in recent Unreal Engine 5 titles. Facial expressions in particular are poor and lack the nuance and subtlety of modern standards. I'm also shocked by how poorly female hair is rendered when running at native resolution without DLSS, and it seems like no one cared enough to address it, more on that later. Cutscenes are of higher quality than in-game rendering, but still fall short of what the best-looking games deliver today. What is impressive, however, is the attention to detail. The maps are extremely well-designed—artists have placed light sources and shadows with great care to achieve an overall striking effect despite the technologically weaker engine. God rays are used tastefully throughout, and reflective surfaces are placed deliberately to enhance the atmosphere. Textures are good across the board with no complaints. Indoor scenes stand out in particular—they are filled with small props and details that keep environments interesting, which is a welcome contrast to the barren, low-quality interiors seen in many other games. Floors are pretty flat most of the time though, and the level of detail is not consistent—some levels clearly received more polish than others.

Shader Stutter & Accessibility
Shader compilation happens on first launch or after a GPU/driver change and takes around three minutes. After that, gameplay is smooth with no noticeable shader stutter during normal play.

The game offers three difficulty levels: Novice (easier enemies, more resources), Intended (balanced, recommended for first playthrough), and Purist (tougher enemies, scarce resources). There are also accessibility options including Reduce Light Effects and Flashbang Dark Effect toggles to make intense visual effects more comfortable. The field of view feels a bit too narrow to me, and there is no option to adjust it anywhere in the settings—a notable omission. Dialog lines during gameplay cannot be skipped with the spacebar like in many other games, which can be annoying during replays or when you want to move past story beats quickly. Some sections of the game are also quite slow-paced—lots of walking and talking. I ended up using Cheat Engine's speed hack at 1.5x, to make these segments much more enjoyable without breaking anything.

Upscaling, Frame Generation & Ray Tracing
Upscaling support covers NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR—Intel XeSS is not available. We checked the game executable and confirmed that FSR is version 3.1.5 (not FSR 4), compiled directly into the binary rather than loaded as a separate DLL, meaning it cannot be user-overridden. DLSS ships at version 310.6.0—the very latest available—bringing full DLSS 4.5 support with Dynamic Multi Frame Generation up to 6x. This is a stark contrast in vendor treatment: NVIDIA is a first-class citizen with the cutting-edge SDK, AMD gets an outdated upscaler, and there is no frame generation, despite FSR 3 supporting it, and Intel is shut out entirely. The native TAA implementation is notably poor, producing a low-resolution, grainy, and jittery image—interestingly, previous Hitman titles using the same Glacier engine did not have this issue. It looks like the game is rendered at lower resolution, despite selecting "native." If you want a better image, you should use DLSS. The visual difference between TAA and DLAA is huge, even DLSS Balanced mode looks noticeably better than native TAA, so we strongly recommend using DLSS. Even FSR Quality (there's no FSR DLAA equivalent) looks better than native TAA.

There is no hardware ray tracing at launch, just some shader-based systems. IO Interactive and NVIDIA have announced that path tracing along with DLSS Ray Reconstruction will be added in a summer 2026 update. I still think that NVIDIA did a good job with developer support, making this the first game to ship with native x6 frame generation support, even if path tracing didn't make it in time for launch. The settings menu is a little bit strange, especially from such an experienced developer. There are no quality presets—you have to configure each graphics setting individually, and the settings menu does not even show the current value of each dropdown without hovering over it.

Hardware Requirements
007 First Light is a demanding title, though not as brutal as recent Unreal Engine 5 games. At 1080p Ultra, you need at least an RTX 3070 (69 FPS), Arc B580 (63 FPS), or RX 9060 XT 8 GB (79 FPS) for good framerates—the RTX 4060 (53 FPS) and RX 7600 (56 FPS) fall a bit short. At 1440p Ultra, you'll want at least an RTX 4070 (62 FPS), RX 7700 XT (60 FPS), or RX 9060 XT 16 GB (56 FPS). Close but not quite there: RTX 3070 Ti 8 GB (50 FPS), RTX 4060 Ti (45 FPS). 4K Ultra is very demanding—the RTX 5090 reaches 93 FPS at native resolution without upscaling; the RTX 4090 manages just 70 FPS. Upscaling is essentially mandatory at 4K for every card except the RTX 5090. Comparing 8 GB and 16 GB variants of the same GPU, there is virtually no performance difference at 1080p and 1440p. At 4K, however, 8 GB models show measurable drops—the RTX 5060 Ti 8 GB falls 15% behind its 16 GB counterpart, and the RX 9060 XT 8 GB drops 14%—indicating VRAM limitations at that resolution. Intel Arc A770 performance is terrible across all resolutions and crashes at 4K, while the Arc B580 performs reasonably at 1080p (63 FPS) but struggles at higher resolutions and there are some small visual artifacts despite the newest game-ready drivers.

Upscaling and frame generation is always an option, and especially on NVIDIA, where everything has first-class support, you can easily double your FPS with minimal impact. Things aren't so rosy on AMD and Intel, but FSR 3 "Quality" offers a decent performance boost with not too much of a compromise in terms of image quality.

Settings Scaling
Settings presets have a surprisingly small impact on performance. Dropping from Ultra to High gains just 4%, Medium nets 16%, and even Low—the lowest available—only improves frame rates by 28% over Ultra. This is not how settings scaling should work—and our screenshots confirm it. While there's a small visual difference between Ultra and Low, that's not nearly enough. There should be serious visual tradeoffs in return for significantly improved FPS—this lets people mix and match, so they can make the right choices for their personal preferences.

VRAM
VRAM usage is substantial, but not over the top. At Low settings, the game uses 5.5 GB at 900p, scaling up to 7.2 GB at 4K. Ultra settings push usage to 8.2 GB at 900p and 10.7 GB at 4K. Enabling DLSS Frame Generation x6 on top of 4K Ultra adds another 850 MB, peaking at 11.5 GB. In practice this means that 8 GB cards handle 1080p and 1440p just fine with no serious performance penalty, but at 4K, VRAM becomes a bottleneck—8 GB models drop 14–15% behind their 16 GB equivalents. Cards with 12 GB provide comfortable headroom for all resolutions at Ultra, while 16 GB and above accommodate everything including frame generation.