IO Interactive Ends a 14-Year Bond Drought With an 87 Metacritic

007 First Light landed at 87 on Metacritic Tuesday, the highest critical aggregate any James Bond game has carried since the Nintendo 64 era of GoldenEye 007 in 1997. IO Interactive shipped 1.5 million copies inside 24 hours, the fastest start in the Copenhagen studio’s history and Bond’s loudest commercial reentry to consoles since the franchise’s last release, 007 Legends, in 2012.

Reviewers spent four months braced for a worst case after slim review-code windows and a December delay. The aggregate, paired with day-one sales, settles the question of whether a 26-year-old Irish actor in his first lead role and a Danish studio with no prior license work could carry the most expensive spy in cinema. The follow-on question, whether IO Interactive’s pitched trilogy gets greenlit, sits with Amazon MGM Studios.

The First Bond Game in Twenty-Nine Years to Hold the GoldenEye Comparison

Every Bond game released after 1997 has been measured against Rare’s GoldenEye 007 and most have lost the contest visibly. 007 Legends, the last attempt, scored in the low 40s on launch, and developer Eurocom shut its doors within months of release. The 14-year gap that followed was the longest the franchise has gone without a tentpole game since the Atari era.

IGN’s Luke Reilly, reviewing on PlayStation 5, wrote that the new title is the best Bond game I’ve ever played, while conceding it does not share the seismic importance of 1997’s GoldenEye 007. That careful phrasing is the polite version of what the score sheet shows. First Light is not threatening the 1997 game’s cultural footprint, but it has cleared the bar that turned Bond gaming into a graveyard.

• 87 Metacritic aggregate on PlayStation 5 and PC, 89 on Xbox Series X|S, based on 57 critic reviews at publication.
• 1.5 million units sold in the first 24 hours, IO Interactive’s fastest-selling launch ever, according to the developer.
• 95% of reviews positive, 5% mixed, zero negative on the Metacritic tracker.
• Zero Bond games between 2012 and this week.

How First Light Plays

A Younger Bond, Without a Hollywood Likeness

The protagonist is a 26-year-old recruit working through MI6’s training program, voiced and modelled on Patrick Gibson, an Irish actor whose biggest prior credit was the Netflix series The OA. The likeness is not built off Sean Connery, Daniel Craig or any other screen Bond, the first time a playable 007 has been visually original since 2001’s Agent Under Fire. Lennie James plays the Bond’s mentor, John Greenway; Lenny Kravitz voices a villain named Bawma; Gemma Chan voices Selina Tan. The theme song, also titled First Light, is performed by Lana Del Rey and produced by composer David Arnold, whose Bond scoring credits stretch from Tomorrow Never Dies to Quantum of Solace.

Pacing Borrowed from Hitman: Absolution

The combat loop is recognisably a Hitman descendant. Encounters favour observation, disguise switches, gadget-led stealth and one-shot fistfights over the cover shooter template Activision used for Quantum of Solace and Bloodstone. IGN’s review explicitly traces the formula to 2012’s Hitman: Absolution, the most curated and linear of IO Interactive’s catalogue, calling the inheritance patiently paced.

Locations, Gadgets, and the Engine Beneath

The campaign moves the player through Iceland, Malta, Vietnam and Antarctica, with an Aston Martin Valhalla driveable across two missions. Under the hood is IO Interactive’s proprietary Glacier Engine, the same toolset that runs the World of Assassination Hitman trilogy, augmented for ray-traced reflections, dynamic global illumination, and a new volumetric smoke system that the studio has been showing off in pre-launch developer diaries since January.

Where First Light Lands on the Bond Scoreboard

The historical context is the part of the story most outlets are skipping. Stacked against every major Bond game since the franchise migrated off the N64, First Light is not just a critical win for IO Interactive, it is the first time a non-shooter studio has been handed the license and converted.

The pattern reads as a license that punishes shooter studios and rewards developers willing to slow the camera down. Everything or Nothing, the 2004 third-person caper that holds the previous post-GoldenEye high score, was the last entry built around mission design rather than firefight throughput. First Light continues that tradition by leaning further into stealth than any prior 007 game has dared.

Why the Hitman Studio Was a Defensible Bet

IO Interactive won the license in November 2020 with a pitch that ran against type. According to Christian Elverdam, the studio’s chief creative officer, the Hitman track record of rewarding non-violent solutions was the spine of the sales pitch to Eon Productions, who had grown frustrated by the action-shooter template Activision applied to the brand. The Eon producers, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, granted the license to a studio that pitched a spy game where the gun is the last resort.

We’re able to stand on the shoulders of ourselves.

That line, from Hakan Abrak, IO Interactive’s chief executive, in an interview with PC Gamer, captures the studio’s defence against the worry that a first licensed project would force IO Interactive off its strengths. Five and a half years on, the bet was that taking on outside IP would not require abandoning the systems-driven design philosophy that made Hitman 3 critically successful. The 87 aggregate suggests the bet held.

The structural change underneath is harder to see in a review. IO Interactive owns the underlying engine, the publishing rights, and the development pipeline. That gives the studio negotiating leverage against any future license partner, leverage that Bizarre Creations and Eurocom never had when they were riding Activision-funded production. The economics of First Light look closer to a first-party Sony or Microsoft project than to the work-for-hire structure that ate the last decade of Bond gaming.

Where the Five Percent of Mixed Reviews Are Pointing

The 95 percent positive tally hides a consistent complaint that the few mixed reviews share. Critics who pulled back from full endorsement keep landing on the same charge, that First Light plays it safe. The strongest dissents point at structural choices, not execution failures, which is a meaningful distinction for what IO Interactive ships next.

• Linearity over sandbox. Reviews note the game leans on Hitman: Absolution’s corridor structure rather than the open-mission design of the World of Assassination trilogy, narrowing replay value.
• Set-piece familiarity. Multiple critics flag that the boss encounters and chase sequences read as competent blockbuster pastiche rather than risk-taking design.
• Stealth abstraction. The non-lethal pathways exist but funnel toward the same outcomes, with player choice less consequential than IO Interactive’s marketing implied.
• TacSim only partially tested. The harder TacSim difficulty mode arrived too late in the review window for several outlets, including IGN, to evaluate fully at publication.

Amazon MGM’s First Game Test and the Trilogy Pitch

The license that IO Interactive signed in 2020 has changed hands underneath the studio. Amazon MGM Studios took full creative and production control of the James Bond IP from Eon’s Wilson and Broccoli in February 2025, making First Light the first 007 release of any kind under Amazon’s stewardship. The sales curve from this week is the first commercial data point the new licensors have on what Bond is worth in the gaming column.

That matters because Abrak has been explicit, in interviews dating to 2024, that the studio sees First Light as the first instalment of a planned 007 trilogy. The character was designed to age across multiple games, the engine was built to extend, and Patrick Gibson was cast as a 26-year-old precisely so that a sequel could move him through a recognisable career arc. None of that survives a green light decision Amazon MGM has not yet made public.

The Switch 2 version, still slated for the third quarter, has not posted numbers because it has not shipped. The PC release on Steam’s pre-purchase and launch page is where retail attach rates will be most visible to publishers watching from outside the platform-holder ecosystem. The 1.5 million figure that IO Interactive disclosed on its own newsroom bundles digital and physical, console and PC, and is the metric that will sit on the table when Amazon MGM and the Copenhagen studio next meet about a sequel.

If the second-week sales hold without a hard cliff, and the Switch 2 port ships clean in the third quarter, the trilogy conversation goes from pitch to negotiation. If the curve breaks the way Quantum of Solace’s did in 2008, the franchise gets one more bullet point on a long ledger of Bond games that opened strong and closed quiet.