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007 First Light – Part 1-2

We may have compromised the intelligence-gathering initiatives of MI6, but in doing so we’ve saved at least a dozen people and earned ourselves a meeting with the woman in charge.

What awaits us in 007 First Light?

Streamed on my Twitch.
You can find Andre on his Twitch channel.

This will be the first and only time you will hear me acknowledge that whole nonsense around 007 First Light being “woke” because women and people of color are major characters with agency in the plot. It is a nonsense critique that only needs to be acknowledge so that it can be dismissed in the same breath.

And while many people smarter than I have spoken about this sequence, it is important to highlight how effective it is at tutorializing the game in a way that is both effective and engaging. Turning a training montage straight out of cinema into a playable tutorial is such a perfect encapsulation of this games ethos: Creating something approximating a playable Bond movie.

It is a simple and effective idea that is extremely difficult to pull off due to what is required to the context of a video game. The fact that it is executed near flawlessly here is a credit to the development team at IO.

As a player, this solves one of the primary weaknesses that in-game tutorials can often have: They spend too much time explaining simple mechanics before allow us loose to test them out and experiment. Tutorials can often be slow and boring, where this keeps me in the action so that I’m always learning through practice.

(It was also useful as a refresher since it’s been a few months since I last played this game.)