Spokane felt weirdly empty for the long weekend. I’d been expecting full bars and packed streets, but many of the bars were closed for the holiday and everywhere felt like it was missing half of the normal crowd. I spent some time sitting by a pool with Brigid and my mother.
Brigid and I went out with some friends at Jade on Friday night. We beat them to the bar and were the only ones in the place for a half hour or so. Brigid scoured the Internet for news of Taylor Swift’s wedding. I talked politics with the bartender, whose name I’ve learned twice, but regrettably forgotten. Bartender names are slipperier than most to me, because I only ever learn them when I’ve been drinking.
For the fourth of July, we sat out with a view across the river and watched all of the unsanctioned fireworks displays going on around West Central. Some people had clearly gone out to the rez and gotten themselves some serious artillery. A few be shells from somewhere down in the valley went off more or less at eye level with us, but the night ended with no fires that we could see.
I finally got around to playing 007: First Light. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect going in, and yet it still ended up being exactly what I expect. It hit all the plot beats of a Bond movie and at times felt like a movie with some controls bolted on to justify calling it a game.
The plot and characters were enjoyable. The plot touches on modern technological anxieties, but with quantum computing filling in for AI. The father/son villain duo are morally dubious and psychologically damaged, respectively, neatly filling in two of the three Bond supervillain archetypes. There are casual flings and a plot-involved love interest with inscrutable motives. All the things you might come to a Bond film for are well represented in the game.
The gameplay is pretty evenly divided into the three pillars of a Bond film: sneaky spycraft, gun/gadget fights, and driving. Of these, IOI did a great job with the first two. Their history on the Hitman games meant that the stealth/spy sections had a good amount of exploration and diversity, but they toned down the openness a bit to guide the player into a few different paths for each section. As someone who loves, but is terrible at, the Hitman series, this felt like a well-balanced compromise.
The combat sections are always lopsided against the player, but thanks to the overwhelming power of Q’s handy gadgets, they never feel unfair. They reward cheating and cheap tricks and it’s incredibly satisfying to solve the problem of a bevy of mercenaries charging your position with a well-timed laser from your wristwatch to the explosive piping they’re running past. As someone who’s always hewed to the mantra “if you don’t care enough to cheat, you don’t care enough to win”, these were, by far, my favorite parts of the game.
The weakest section is the driving. It’s so weak, in fact, that the game would have been massively improved by turning all of the driving portions into cut scenes. The controls are mushy, the routes are all pre-set, and you’re basically on a rail with little to do. One of the sections is literally driving to drop your friend off at the pub, and it’s no more boring than the later scene where you drive a speedboat armed with cannons.
I think the developers knew this weakness, ultimately, because they gave up opportunities to do more of it. There are several parts of the plot where it seems like they’re foreshadowing a chase scene (e.g. by showing you a fancy car owned by the arms dealer whose base you’re infiltrating) that then never materializes. The one time this telegraphing does pan out, you only get to drive the fancy, gadget-armed car in an enclosed arena for a minute or so, before the plot takes it away from you again.
Ultimately, First Light is a ridiculous, Bond-flavored romp. The story is good and if you’ve ever liked a stealth game or the Bond franchise, you’ll likely find a lot here to love. Just don’t go into it expecting to fly through the streets of Paris in your tricked out Aston Martin, or anything.