After watching a 007 First Light presentation, it’s safe to say it looks like Uncharted meets HITMAN. We also interviewed a developer from IO.
At Gamescom 2025, IO Interactive gave press and content creators a behind-closed-doors presentation of its highly anticipated upcoming game, 007 First Light. The booth was certainly a looker, especially with a shiny Aston Martin placed in front of it to remind everyone how big this brand really is.
Inside, we were shown footage from one of the game’s early missions. After just a few minutes, it was clear that the Copenhagen-based studio was doing things quite differently from its HITMAN series. There’s a decidedly more cinematic style to everything, which is far from surprising given that we are talking about James Bond, one of the most iconic movie characters (even though, of course, he originally appeared in Ian Fleming’s novels and short stories) of all time. Every character has more flair, starting with Bond himself, who is immeasurably more charismatic than the glacial Agent 47. At this stage, he’s also a lot more brash and cocky than we’re used to in the movies; that is because IO Interactive and the licensing partners have decided to go with an origin story that’s going to explore how Bond becomes a double 0 agent in the first place. In the mission, Bond is assigned to keep watch outside of an important event, but he cannot help himself and goes inside after noticing some odd behavior from certain guests.
The gameplay eventually shows some of the gadgets available to Bond at this point in the game, but what’s quickly obvious is that this is not going to be anywhere near as open-ended a sandbox as HITMAN. In fact, it appears to draw a lot of similarities with Uncharted-style games, which is why I came up with the headline. There are even big setpieces akin to what we’re used to from Naughty Dog’s games.
There’s nothing wrong with that – I loved the Uncharted games, and so did millions of people, if the sales are anything to go by – and this is going to be multiplatform, unlike those titles. It’s just that HITMAN fans should be aware this will be quite a bit different from the usual fare they’ve come to expect from this studio. Visually, the game looks great in the latest version of the Glacier engine, although character models aren’t quite as good as what we’ve seen recently from other engines. I noticed frame rate slowdowns at least a couple of times, but 007 First Light is still in Pre-Alpha, so that is to be expected.
After the presentation, I was able to chat for a bit with IO Interactive’s Senior Licensing Producer Theuns Smit. As a reminder, the studio is targeting a 2026 launch on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X, and Nintendo Switch 2.
Can you explain what your role entails?
As you would expect from a licensed IP like James Bond, we have a great collaboration between IO Interactive and our partners at Amazon and Metro Goldwyn Mayer. This means that everything that goes into the game, we collaborate with them on that, so there’s submissions and reviews and approvals and all of that. It also means that, as we’ve been crafting this experience, we have been granted access to the consultants who have been working on this IP as well, collaborating together on all of that. I help keep track of things that are moving in, getting approved, and working with our brand partners. James Bond is synonymous with working with Omega, Aston Martin, Land Rover, these folks were all equally and extremely excited to partner on this, and I just help manage those interactions.
