007 First Light review scores land: best Bond game in 30 years, with a catch
The review embargo on 007 First Light lifted on May 26, and the verdict is decisive: Metacritic puts the game at 88, OpenCritic at 89 with a 97% recommendation rate. That makes it the highest-rated Bond game in three decades and one of the best-reviewed releases of 2026 so far. Pre-orders automatically upgrade to the Deluxe Edition and unlock 24-hour early access starting May 26, with the full launch on PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X|S on May 27, per LagoFast. Standard edition is priced at $69.99 in the US and £59.99 in the UK.
The Bond they got right
IO Interactive — the Copenhagen studio behind every mainline Hitman game since 2016 — developed First Light in partnership with Amazon MGM Studios. The game fills a 14-year gap: the Bond video game licence went dark in 2013 when Activision lost it, and no major title followed until now.
Patrick Gibson, known from Dexter: Original Sin, plays a younger, pre-00 James Bond in an original story that critics say grips from the opening and holds through the credits. Supporting characters are consistently noted as memorable, and the narrative draws no meaningful complaints across the reviewed outlets. Gameplay borrows the structural DNA of Hitman — mission sandboxes, multiple routes, social stealth — but reviewers describe it as more forgiving and faster-paced. One critic called it "a coloring book rather than a blank canvas," meaning the missions are designed to be engaging without demanding the obsessive planning Hitman sometimes requires.
The performance gap
The praise is real, but so are the caveats. On a base PS5 in Performance mode, edge-rendering blurs noticeably — the PS5 Pro handles it cleanly. On Xbox Series X, Quality mode suffers significant frame-rate drops; Performance mode holds 60 fps but at a visible cost to image quality. PC scales with hardware, as expected: mid-range rigs will need to dial back settings, while high-end GPUs can run ray-traced cutscenes at full fidelity.
Switch 2 owners will wait longer. The version was delayed indefinitely — pushed to Q3 2026 at the earliest — with optimization cited as the reason.
Worth it now?
If you're on PS5 Pro or a capable PC, the answer from critics is clearly yes. On base PS5 or Xbox Series X, the performance trade-offs are real but workable depending on your tolerance. Bugs are present at launch, though IO Interactive has a strong post-release patch record from the Hitman trilogy. At $69.99, this is a full-price game that, by the numbers, earns that ask — frame-rate asterisks included.
