A few months ago, we got our first look at 007 First Light, the first James Bond video game in over a decade. Now that we know we’ll be playing a young 20-something Bond on the path to earning his license to kill and 00 status, developer IO Interactive has given its latest project a fuller reveal ahead of its March 2026 launch.
First Light contains a blend of action and stealth gameplay with moments of opportunity for Bond (voiced by Patrick Gibson of Dexter: Original Sin) to be a sneaky secret agent or go in guns blazing. In the footage shown, we see his first mission as a 00 recruit to help apprehend rogue agent 009 at the Grand Carpathian. After leaving his post as a driver to check out a rogue bellhop in the hotel, Bond gets into an offscreen brawl with 009 that transitions to a high-speed car chase. With French intelligence agent Charlotte Ross in the passenger seat, Bond goes after his man, later playing a gun-toting distraction so Ross can stop 009 from taking off on his plane.
With “License to Kill” briefly flashing onscreen, Bond shoots, explodes, and punches his way through 009’s forces, occasionally using his Focus slo-mo ability or throwing spent weapons at his enemies. (He can even shoot guns out of enemies’ hands, which is cool.) Eventually, he gets on the plane before he gets in it, but once he’s aboard, he takes control of the flight system to more easily reach the cockpit… which ends with him being flung out of the plane and desperately looking for a parachute while in freefall. Luckily, he’s got two goons to help him out there.
In the second part of the reveal, we see Bond infiltrate the upper level of a Kensington gala. Like IO’s Hitman games, 007 First Light lets players listen in on conversations to find various opportunities to accomplish their objective, from simple sneaking around to taking on someone else’s identity. Gadgets from Q let Bond distract or trap enemies and scan the environment to be more stealthy, and fistfights are your standard Arkham Asylum-esque array of punches, kicks, and parries. But if you’re good enough, you might not ever need to get into a fight, at least unless the game decides it’s absolutely time for a guns-blazing set piece.
All this sounds like a good ol’ spy time, and it’ll hopefully come together strong when 007 First Light releases on PlayStation 5, PC, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X|S on March 27, 2026.