IO Interactive spent years after the Hitman trilogy quietly building what could be the best James Bond game in thirty years, and as of today, you can play it. 007 First Light is out now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, with the Nintendo Switch 2 version delayed to Q3 2026. Review embargoes lifted yesterday, and the verdict is decisive.
Metacritic puts the game at 88 based on 50 critic reviews, with OpenCritic landing it at 89 and a 97% recommendation rate. For context, that makes it the highest-rated James Bond game in over three decades. Critics across outlets describe it as a stealth-action game with genuine Hitman DNA, an emotionally grounded origin story for a pre-00 James Bond, and production values that compare favorably to the films the franchise is named after. The gap since the last major Bond game was 14 years: Activision’s license expired in 2013 and nothing filled the void until IO Interactive secured the rights and began production on First Light.
The PC version supports DLSS 4.5 with Multi Frame Generation, NVIDIA Reflex, and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. AMD’s FSR 3.1 and Intel XeSS are also listed as upscaling options. Ray-traced global illumination and reflections are both available on PC. The recommended GPU targets are an RTX 5070 Ti or Radeon RX 9070 XT for the Extreme RT preset at 1440p, which places it in the demanding-but-achievable range for current mid-to-high-end hardware. Frame generation is DLSS-only for now, which is a notable gap for Radeon users that may or may not get addressed post-launch.
A few caveats. Some critics note that base PS5 and Xbox Series X performance involves trade-offs, and the game launched with known bugs that IO Interactive’s support team has been flagging on forums. IO Interactive has an excellent patch record from the Hitman trilogy years, so post-launch issues are unlikely to stay unresolved for long. But if you are jumping in on day one at the Extreme preset on PC, save frequently.
We covered the official launch trailer a few days ago. Now that it is in players’ hands, the real performance testing begins. We will be looking at GPU scaling across the RDNA 4 and Blackwell lineups as our coverage continues this week. For now: if you have been waiting for a proper Bond game, the wait is over.