IO Interactive has released a new gameplay overview trailer, called Rules of Spycraft, for 007 First Light, and showcased a slew of new features players can expect at launch.
First Light is the first James Bond video game in over a decade, and it looks to be a blend of some of the best features from the franchise’s past. There’s also a noticeable mixture of elements from other stealth games, with Hitman being an obvious inspiration, that should provide a deeper layer of gameplay for players to experience.
That starts with the new Tac Sim missions, which the new 007 First Light trailer dove deep into. Tac Sim is a new mode led by Dr. Selina Tan that lets you complete missions under specific conditions and with different restrictions, forcing you to dig into your bag of tricks as an MI6 agent. You’ll have access to several types of missions, all of with varying tiers of difficulty that come with new challenges and rewards.
Your performance in these missions will then be pitted against those of other 00 agents across the world. Tac Sim features an online leaderboard that showcases the best results for each mission from the entire player base. There’s no word yet on what the top performers on the leaderboards might get as a reward for being the top agent in a particular Tac Sim mission. For all players, though, completing Tac Sim missions earns you XP that you can spend on upgrades for Bond in 007 First Light.
This might remind you of Hitman’s Escalations mode, which is basically the same premise as Tac Sim. If IO Interactive follows the same roadmap as Hitman and its Escalation Contracts, though, we can expect even more Tac Sim missions to arrive post-launch.
Regardless of what Tac Sim mission you’re grinding through, though, you’ll need to make use of some of the new mechanics 007 First Light has to offer. The Rules of Spycraft trailer showcased a few of these, but the one that looks the most intriguing is a time-dilation feature.
This was an incredibly popular feature from previous James Bond games, namely the 2003 hit “Everything or Nothing,” widely regarded as the best title in the franchise. The time-dilation feature allows you to slow down time during the middle of combat and target specific areas of an enemy to ensure you inflict the most damage possible. Time dilation could also be a factor in certain parts of the story that require you to dodge objects or bullets, but the trailer didn’t go into that aspect of the feature.
Finally, the new trailer hinted at some post-launch content coming after the release on May 27, 2026. While nothing was made official, the trailer stated that “At IO Interactive, the launch of a game is only the start.”
You can expect plenty of updates and new content to be added down the line, and this might even include a multiplayer mode in 007 First Light. The Rules of Spycraft trailer ends with a cryptic statement: “Finally, one last unwritten rule might be that an agent is never as good as when surrounded by allies, a team ready to give its all in the field, and companions to defend. But we’re pretty sure you’ll figure out this part yourself when the time comes.”
