For the antihero in Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale, 9/11 was a recent headline—something M brings up in casual conversation because it happened just five years prior to the events of the film. The James Bond we meet in IO Interactive’s 007 First Light, however, would have been about one year old, a toddler at most, when the World Trade Center fell. I say this not because 9/11 holds some grand significance, in Bond’s world or mine, though MI6 spends a lot of time talking about terrorism and doing their best to stop it. It’s simply the starting gun that marked the dawn of the twenty-first century, and it’s a little strange to have a Bond with no memory of that surreal, televised day in history.

Instead, Patrick Gibson’s Bond is one who casually makes use of the cryptocurrency market, or relies on a quantum A.I., to achieve his objectives. (The game even acknowledges the reign of King Charles III with the occasional reference to “His Majesty.”) I’ll be blunt: I’m no fan of A.I. or crypto, and it didn’t thrill me to see those being treated, early on in the game, as whiz-bang, age-defining tech. This is a series where Bond himself might employ a laser watch or jet pack or an amphibious car, while technologies like gene therapy and orbital weapons are typically reserved for the villains in this globe-spanning drama. Still, it’s fiction, and I can look past these kinds of things in a story all about rooting for the imperialist government and its shadow army. I can enjoy a Michael Mann film without considering a career as a jewel thief. And James Bond works on a similar frequency, now more a figure of myth—author Ian Fleming died more than six decades ago—than any sort of direct commentary on the merits of western espionage. “Boys and their toys,” as Jimbo puts it.

If you want to unlock a deeper understanding of 007 as a character, you could do worse than a critical viewing of Casino Royale, or Daniel Craig’s five-film run in general, though a quicker, simpler route might be a close reading of Gladys Knight’s excellent 1989 title track, “License to Kill.” Like the movie, it refers to Bond’s carte-blanche authority to dispatch legitimate threats standing between his and MI6’s counterterrorism mission, and the lyrics are simple enough. But 007’s never-ending war for peace has an interior component, too, and when Knight sings about going for the heart, she’s also critiquing and exploring the character’s murky relationship with women—with love, romance, sex, and tragedy. Because Bond is, in so many ways both good and sinister, an avatar for our larger cultural understanding of masculinity. And, thankfully, our concept of masculine identity has evolved quite a bit since the grim days of 1964’s Goldfinger.

007 First Light

IO Interactive

I’m no purist when it comes to matters of canon. The Hannibal Lecter in Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon is not Brian Cox’s Lecktor in Manhunter; the Anthony Hopkins version of the killer seen in Silence of the Lambs is its own separate incarnation; and Mads Mikkelsen’s eponymous Hannibal is yet another fresh, unique take on that mythology, designed and scripted for a third artistic medium. In a symbolic sense, the character of James Bond has died many deaths, slain and then reborn in the context of a given story—but also, in the literal sense, reimagined or resurrected through the work of various screenwriters, directors, and actors. Great myths get retold and repurposed.

Gibson’s Gen Z Bond is a charming new Double-O, to be sure, with countless layers of animation, art, performance, writing, and so on working in harmony to make you believe in this version of the character the same way you buy a Brosnan, Connery, or Dalton in a tailored suit. But, where so many of the James Bond games of the past sought to emulate the movies’ interpretations of the character, IO Interactive’s First Light presents a wholly new James Bond—not just for a new age bracket, but for the medium of video games. Thanks to the Daniel Craig era, I think a lot of Zoomers do care about Fleming’s world-famous spy, but the people who see movies at the theater aren’t always the same ones playing games or delving into the history of classic films, and the generation that grew up playing split-screen deathmatch in GoldenEye isn’t getting any younger.

It makes sense, then, that the game’s developers could see an origin story, with a fresh-faced twenty-six-year-old James, as the safe bet. It’s more interesting than it sounds on paper, and they’ve succeeded in crafting the character as a video-game protagonist first and foremost; forcing the player to go through hours of training as a total novice in the world of spycraft does give you a sense that Bond’s accomplishments are somehow yours. But when you open with such a grounded approach, the more spectacular sequences test the limits of your belief: it starts off feeling like Hitman or Splinter Cell: Conviction, naturally, but it can also turn into Arkham Knight or Rise of the Tomb Raider at the drop of a hat. The early training montages are charming and fun, but do we need long stretches of Bond as a greenhorn in gym shorts before we get to the narrative meat? I’m torn. For better and for worse, this stuff is the story—getting recruited by M for one dumb, heroic stunt you pulled as a Royal Navy aircrewman; navigating bitter rivalries and a teacher who doesn’t particularly like you; befriending your eventual roommates, the mythically named Cressida and the guy she “fancies,” Monroe (a possible nod to Matt Monro, who sang the theme for 1963’s From Russia with Love).

From beginning to end, there’s a joyfulness and a boyish innocence to IOI’s new iteration of the character, which surprised me. And perhaps it’ll be just the shot of adrenaline and relevance this franchise needs some fourteen years on from Activision having its Double-O license revoked. It’s pretty refreshing and encouraging to see this new James act flirty with women, in a way that celebrates the character’s sexuality rather than shying away from his messy history, but only in mutually consensual, more or less appropriate ways. Following a big bloody shootout late in the game, Bond asks a much older man whether it was as “good for you” as it was for him, and Moneypenny (Kiera Lester) gives them both shit for it. “We’re bonding,” insists Greenway (Lennie James), who’s charged with training the new lineup of British secret agents. As ever, this young Bond is said to have a certain natural magnetism with everyone he meets, and even M—the boss’s boss—is not immune to it. (The new M is portrayed by actress Priyanga Burford, who appeared briefly in No Time to Die, and she does an outstanding job here.) Gibson’s Bond is earnest, he breaks rules and makes stupid decisions, and the story generally rewards him for these choices anyway because his heart is in the right place. But not always.

When things inevitably go south, and it’s time to put that Double-O license to use, First Light risks feeling like every other triple-A blockbuster, from Batman: Arkham, Red Dead, and Resident Evil 4 to Quantum Break or whichever Naughty Dog title you last played. Fortunately, its immersive-sim interactivity and stealth movement are still available to you when all-out war begins, so things never become dull or repetitive for my tastes. The game packs an unbelievable amount of variety into its level design, and the controls are just unconventional enough to keep you from coasting on muscle memory. You’re not flying on autopilot; you’re James Bond. You can hack into your surroundings; try to bluff and manipulate your way out of confrontations; fire nonlethal shots or explosives from your Q-Watch; slow time around you as you assess the field and choose your shots. You can engage your opponents in old-school, rhythmic fisticuffs, or toss a champagne bottle or brick at someone’s head when things get especially hairy. One of the game’s very best tricks comes when Bond runs out of bullets: you can throw your spent weapon at an enemy’s face, charge into them, perform a takedown maneuver, and suddenly you’ve got that guy’s weapon in your hand, no reloading necessary.

IO Interactive’s 007 is undeniably at its best when it slows things down and remembers that espionage can often be boring—but James Bond and the mythical underworld he inhabits, with its sometimes quaint, sometimes sci-fi Cold War trappings, almost never is. There’s a lot of colonialist baggage here, the images of torture and death you invariably find in a Bond film, and the specters of chemical warfare and other would-be Armageddons. But there’s a Zen-like wisdom, as well. If we have to live in this harsh reality, why not enjoy an ice-cold cocktail in the sun? Why not make love to a beautiful stranger in paradise while you can? Who says a man can’t appreciate the gleaming, obscene form of an Aston Martin supercar or the growl of its overpriced engine? These are hedonistic fantasies, true, but this one, like the Craig pentalogy, goes far deeper.

The environments here, and particularly the vast interiors, ooze with care and intention, many of them cast from the same black, gold, and occasionally red palette. It’s color-graded and lit like a film, recalling the heightened mood of Roger Deakins’s compositions in Skyfall again and again. Few video games of this scale would attempt anything like this, but with the right talent (Remedy’s Control) or budget (Red Dead Redemption II), it’s within the realm of possibility. We’ve been starved for a good, meaty spy game, as I was reminded during the parts of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War that weren’t awful, and it’s nice to be able to luxuriate in MI6 headquarters, this or that gala event, or even some billionaire’s hi-tech corpo-fortress. MI6 also has an underground network of tunnels, prison cells, and offices Moneypenny refers to as “the Null Space,” and the devs pull a lot of the Bond-as-Odysseus threads from Skyfall and No Time to Die into this story. He’s a guy who fights his share of Cyclopes, he wears an Omega Seamaster watch, he was in the navy, and he spends a fair bit of time in Hades; death is his stock-in-trade. In First Light, he puts out one foe’s eye and slays another with a trident.

There’s such a wealth of memorable characters here that it’s a shame we don’t spend more time with them: rocker Lenny Kravitz in the role of Bawma the Pirate King, Northwest Africa’s answer to Immortan Joe; Jessica Rhodes’s Cressida Bright; and Raquel Cipriano’s character, whose first name might hold some significance for longtime Bond fans. But the story takes care not to overstay its welcome. My first playthrough took seventeen hours, and I’m eager to revisit each and every one of the game’s locations in the near future.

By the time the credits rolled, my earlier irritations about A.I. showing up in the story mostly faded, and I was left grinning, satisfied, and pondering a handful of questions about where things might go in the planned sequels. The game assures us that 007 will return, but one thought I kept having as I found my way through IOI’s First Light was: Bond is back. The days of GoldenEye on the 64, Nightfire, and Bond-ified Call of Duty clones on the Xbox 360 are as distant as the Cold War itself. This is the finest licensed game I’ve played in years, surpassing Jedi: Survivor and Miles Morales just enough to establish a league of its own.

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