Having run credits on 007 First Light - and I don't think there's another ending in here somewhere - my feeling is that they stuck the landing and that I want to know what's next in an unreasonable amount of time. Sometime late next week, perhaps. No? That's probably not going to happen? Alright. Well, I had to try.
This strip covers a common occurrence in game, where people somehow can't detect the murder of someone they see in the breakroom every day even when it's happening around twenty feet away from them. One way to interpret this is as a paean to the smooth criminality of Bond, and we might as well go with that. I think the game is excellent but there are a couple things that are worth going into.
In some ways… in most ways, 007 First Light's gameplay is Uncharted whenever it isn't Splinter Cell. But since nobody is making either of those games anymore, I feel like it's okay to do. I saw people talking about how short the game was, but this was twenty hours for me and I didn't take my time with this - I remember beating the first Uncharted game in, like, six.
But, yeah; there's some borrowed "verbs" for lack of a better term here, and those inspirations aren't made opaque in any way. It succeeds in having a very Bond story and execution, plus a well-acted, fun script. The question is this: as the embodiment of cool and arguably the definitional super-spy, how do you take those normal, borrowed-feeling moments and elevate them? And then how do you do things with how player interactions are presented cinematically while retaining the ability to understand what is even going on? Ultimately, we're gonna shimmy along stuff. How do we shimmy at the apex?
I think they know what is coming next, and not just because they read the second act of Campbell's "Hero's Journey." I like how legible and clean everything is, I know what I'm supposed to do at all times, but there's a couple ways to take things from here and frankly I wonder if they're crazy enough to do so.
(CW)TB out.
