IO Interactive has released a free DLC Extended Operations pack for 007 First Light, with a new TacSim missions, 00 difficulty mode, New Game+ and more.
Let’s start with the more exciting side of the update. The new TacSim puts you behind the wheel of the Aston Martin Valhalla, which was only teasingly used during the main story mode. There’s four missions using it, set at night and during the day, and making use of its extensive arsenal of weaponry. There’s also a new TacSim mission set in The Pearl location, which tasks you with infiltrating a deeply guarded villa to retrieve classified documents. The mode in general allows for greater freedom of weapon choice, after this update.
Then there’s New Game+, available after completing the campaign on any difficulty, and allowing you to resume from any completed checkpoint with all the outfits, gadgets and progression from the first go through. If you want, you can step it up to the new 00 difficulty mode, with enemies reacting faster, guards swapped for tougher variants, gadget use easily spotted, and combat timing ramped up.
And there’s the new Photo Mode, which does what you’d expect from a modern game. Freeze the action at any point and take full control over the camera positioning and processing to get the shot that you want. You also have character posing, for that extra little touch.
And finally there’s two gameplay additions:
- Improved weapon handling animation fidelity, giving even more precision to Bond’s movement and weapon behaviour when being handled
- A fan-favourite method to dispatch enemies in the game, being thrown off a ledge, is no longer exclusive to Bond’s opponents, with the spy now also subject to the move, so players will need to stay on their guard.
007 First Light has been a big hit for IO Interactive with over 4 million copies sold as of August. An origin story for the world-famous spy, the studio adapted and expanded on their established expertise with Hitman and took off in a new, more cinematic direction. However, it’s not a one-and-done kind of release, with a year of content and updates having also been announced. Still to come is the Bawma mission, expanding on the character played by Lenny Kravitz.
There’s also the delayed Switch 2 port, now expected in March 2027.
In our 007 First Light review, Jim said, “007 First Light is an incredibly well-executed action adventure blockbuster with a truly engrossing story, slick presentation, and layered gameplay systems. It marks a major evolution for IO Interactive, thrusting the studio into that coveted top tier of video game developers. It also has us excited for the team’s future projects, whether that’s more Bond or a return to Hitman at some point down the road.”
Source: press release