After seeing 30 minutes of the new Bond game, I’m more excited for the shooting than the stealth
Watch On
I didn’t expect to be attracted to 007 First Light on the merits of its third-person shooting, but if you ask me, the gunplay was the best part of today’s extended gameplay demo.
At the start of the video, Bond infiltrates a hotel in much the way Agent 47 from IO Interactive’s Hitman games might, spying opportunities for non-violent distraction and deception everywhere he looks: negotiate with a guard, climb a wall, light a pile of leaves on fire, turn on a hose, jump into a flower bed (not the most Bond-like behavior, but it worked).
Tyler Wilde, US EIC
This week: Made yet another Baldur’s Gate 3 character despite not having finished the game with any of the six characters he’s already made.
Once inside, Bond strolls around talking to himself and triggering little in-engine cutscenes, and you get the impression that there’s only one way the mission can really go. When the video segues to a car chase, it makes this explicit with the text “Inevitably…” on the screen.
In the chase, too, it seems clear that Bond is always going to be several car lengths behind his target, regardless of how many shortcuts he takes: He and the femme fatale must arrive at their target’s abandoned car to initiate the next part of the mission.
It’s no surprise that there’s a linear story here, and that your freedom is in the details of how you perform each specific infiltration and accomplish each objective, but not being a big stealth lover in the first place, I might rather just bust into high society parties through the front door and skip filler car chases if it gets me to the shooting faster.
I got a lot more interested when Bond finally got his “License to Kill.” The agent handles SMGs and shotguns with relaxed composure, chucking them at guys when he’s out of ammo and targeting exploding barrels and fuel tanks when he doesn’t feel like aiming. The pyrotechnics are suitably over the top—I hate when I blow something up in a game and it leaves nearby enemies standing, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem here—and the puffs of white dust where bullets impact bodies are a nice action movie special effects touch.
Things reach their silliest when Bond boards a plane and remotely hijacks it, banking it left and right to squish guys with unsecured cargo crates. (These criminals really need some workplace safety regulations.) Like the car chase, it feels like something you might see in a Call of Duty campaign: Fun for the spectacle, but too choreographed to stand out as a great moment of interactive play.
I wanted to go back to the regular gunfighting, and the video does give us a little more to examine: After the unnarrated clips of the first mission, there’s about 10 more minutes of narrated gameplay, revealing the many ways Bond can infiltrate a gala through social manipulation and distractions.
Of course, he eventually starts punching and shooting again. There’s a little Max Payne to the gunplay—you can enter Bond-vision to slow down time—and a bit of Sifu to the hand-to-hand combat, which sees Bond throwing enemies into bookcases and whacking them with improvised weapons. There are some cute Bond flourishes mixed in, too, like when he KOs a goon and then catches his flung sidearm without missing a beat.
While it’s obviously more Bond-like to stroll around being suave than it is to murder dozens of guys John Wick style, I’m hopeful that I can opt to go loud relatively frequently, because if you ask me, Body Count Bond looks like a lot more fun than Non-Lethal Bond.
