IO Interactive drops Hitman and makes a Bond game. Not a reskinned Hitman: a Bond game. Uncharted, Arkham, social stealth, gadgets. The previews are promising but the doubt about the writing remains.
Alexandrosse
IO Interactive spent the last decade perfecting Hitman. Three games, one engine, a sandbox puzzle formula that nobody has really managed to copy. And now they're making a James Bond game that is deliberately not Hitman.
007: First Light releases late May. The three-hour press previews dropped last week. The consensus is more nuanced than one might have hoped, and more promising than some feared.
The comparison that comes up systematically in every preview is Uncharted. Not Hitman. A linear Bond game with spectacle sequences, cinematic gunfights, and a corridor structure punctuated by open moments. Some levels offer sandbox zones with multiple possible approaches. Others push you through a narrative corridor. The two coexist without one undermining the other, according to the journalists who played it.
The Hitman comparison doesn't disappear entirely. Social stealth is there: not the classic Agent 47 disguise system, but the ability to charm guards, bluff your way into restricted areas, talk yourself out of a tense situation rather than shooting. Bond isn't Agent 47. He doesn't need to vanish into a crowd. He needs to be the most confident person in the room, and the game seems to have understood that.
The combat blends Hitman and Batman Arkham according to several previews: hand-to-hand with a dedicated system, improvisation with environmental objects, slow-motion with firearms. Moments where anything can become a weapon. Boss fights described as "Mr. Freeze-style" by IGN, meaning confrontations with their own internal logic rather than bullet sponges.
Lenny Kravitz plays the main villain. The kind of casting that divides before you've even seen the character in action.
The most enthusiastic previews come from Gamespot, which talks about potential "game of the year if the rest holds up", and VGC in the same register. This isn't marketing language: journalists who spent three hours with it came away convinced the game found its own identity, neither a reskinned Hitman nor a generic Uncharted.
The alternation between open sequences and linear moments works on paper because it matches what Bond is in the films: cocktail scenes where everything plays out in conversation, and car chases where everything escalates. The game doesn't seek rhythmic consistency. It seeks to be Bond, and Bond isn't consistent in rhythm.
The social stealth in particular seems well executed. Where Hitman punishes every mistake and invites a save reload, First Light seems to lean into improvisation: you've been spotted, you now have other options to get out. Charm, distraction, brute force depending on what's available. That reading is more Bond than any other design choice they could have made.
The writing. IO Interactive has always been a remarkable game design studio and an honest-at-best writing studio. The story of the Hitman World of Assassination trilogy is functional, not memorable. Hitman Absolution, their last attempt at a linear narrative game, suffered precisely from what we risk finding here: solid gameplay embarrassed by a story that can't match its own ambitions.
Bond demands writing that works. The best films in the franchise don't hold up because of the technical quality of the action scenes. They hold up because of the dialogue, the character dynamics, the way the villain is built. A few previews already slide in phrases like "you're not playing this for the story", which is rarely a good sign at three hours in.
The other concern, quietly raised by PC Gamer, is linearity: when action sequences chain without breathing room, the game loses sight of what distinguishes it from a standard action game. The best moments in the previews seem to be precisely the ones where the player has latitude. The weakest, the ones following objective markers.
It's worth naming what makes this preview difficult to read objectively: part of the community wanted Hitman with a Bond license, and didn't get it. That expectation was never fed by IO Interactive, who have been consistent in their communication. The game they're making is the one they announced. The disappointment in that equation isn't the studio's.
For those arriving without presuppositions: a linear Bond game, stealth-action, with targeted sandbox elements, creative boss fights and social charm, is exactly the kind of game this license deserves. Everything or Nothing in 2004 attempted something similar and succeeded. IO Interactive has twenty additional years of experience and a considerably larger budget.
The question isn't whether the game will be good. The question is whether the writing will hold. Answer: late May.
We wore out our GoldenEye 007 and The World Is Not Enough cartridges on Nintendo 64 like every kid in the 90s. Twenty years later, we can't wait to see what IO Interactive prepared.
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