James Bond Fans Call 007 First Light Woke for a Twist the Films Have Used Since 1995

A woman gives James Bond an order. The internet loses its mind.

That, in short, is the row brewing around 007 First Light, IO Interactive's new spy game and the franchise's first proper outing since 007 Legends back in 2012. A clip from the opening minutes shows a battered Bond, fresh off a helicopter crash, taking instructions from M, head of MI6 and here played by Priyanga Burford. Cue the outrage.

Some corners of X have rebranded the thing "007 Woke Light". Others reached for the tired "License to DEI" gag. The complaint, stripped of its noise, is simple. Bond does what a woman tells him to do.

Here's the awkward bit for the angry crowd. The films have done exactly this for thirty years.

Judi Dench walked into GoldenEye in 1995 and ran MI6 for seven Eon movies straight, all the way through to Skyfall. In her very first scene she looked Pierce Brosnan's Bond dead in the eye and called him a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War. Nobody started a petition. The film went on to become one of the most beloved entries in the entire series. Moneypenny, meanwhile, has been played by a Black actress since 2012. None of this is new. None of this is some fresh agenda dropped into the game by committee.

And the funny part? One reply doing the rounds points out that Bond openly defies M later in the story anyway, because of course he does. Bucking authority is half his personality. The game knows this. The young, pre-00 version of the character at the heart of First Light is written as a reckless rule-breaker, a Navy airman recruited into MI6's 00 programme who hasn't yet earned his number. Rebellion is the point.

It also has not gone unnoticed that the game leans into Bond's old habits rather than scrubbing them. He flirts. He charms a blonde who throws herself at him in one mission, then a French maid in the next. So the "they removed everything that makes Bond Bond" line falls apart on contact with the actual game.

A cast pulled from prestige telly

The voice work is a big reason the noise feels so thin. Patrick Gibson, fresh off playing a young Dexter Morgan in Dexter: Original Sin, leads as Bond, his first ever game role. Lennie James plays Greenway, the gruff mentor riding Bond hard through training. Burford takes M. Kiera Lester is a reworked Moneypenny, here a hacker and field intelligence officer rather than a desk-bound flirt. Alastair Mackenzie handles Q, and reviewers have singled him out for blending the dry wit of Desmond Llewelyn with the younger energy of Ben Whishaw.

Musician Lenny Kravitz even turns up as an arms dealer called Bawma, though more than one critic felt the role was underused.

The reviews tell a different story to the comment section

While a slice of the audience screams about a female boss, the people who sat down and played the game came away happy. Very happy.

007 First Light sits at 88 on Metacritic across more than 70 reviews, with a similar number on OpenCritic. That makes it the highest-rated Bond game since GoldenEye 007 on the N64, which still sits untouched at 96. For IO Interactive, the studio behind Hitman, First Light is now its best-reviewed game ever, edging past Hitman 3.

Empire praised the origin angle, the training chapter, and Gibson's take, while flagging a plot weighed down by too much quantum-computer waffle. Others loved the close-quarters combat and the globe-trotting spectacle, drawing comparisons to Uncharted. The criticisms were fairly consistent too. The driving sections drag, and the game wobbles between wanting to be a stealthy Hitman and a loud action blockbuster. The main story runs somewhere around 12 to 17 hours.

The ending sets up more. First Light closes on Bond receiving his 007 ID card from M, the iconic theme swelling, and the words "James Bond will return" rolling across the screen. IO Interactive boss Hakan Abrak has confirmed the studio would happily make a follow-up if sales hold up, framing the decision around how the community responds. He's described First Light as the studio's most expensive project to date and floated the idea of a trilogy.

Why this game matters beyond the noise

There's a bigger picture here, and the timing is strange.

The Bond films are in a holding pattern. In early 2025, long-time producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson stepped back and handed creative control of the franchise to Amazon MGM Studios through a joint venture, reportedly worth close to a billion dollars. Sixty years of Broccoli family stewardship, gone. Amy Pascal and David Heyman are now producing, with Denis Villeneuve set to direct and Steven Knight on script duties for Bond 26. No actor has been cast. No firm release window beyond chatter about late 2027.

So for now, First Light is the freshest Bond going. A whole stretch of fans will meet this version of the character through a controller before any new face shows up on the big screen. A good game keeping the brand warm, building goodwill, while the film side sorts itself out behind closed doors.

Which loops back to the woke business. A franchise sitting at a genuine crossroads, with its biggest critical Bond success in years, and the loudest takeaway for some people is a woman holding a clipboard. The films answered that argument in 1995. The game just answered it again, and the scoreboard suggests most players never had the question to begin with.