007 First Light’s TacSim Mode Is a Shadow of Hitman’s Brilliant Endgame

I've been sneaking through the same corner of a London museum for two hours, crouching behind display cabinets as I memorize guard positions, patrol patterns, and camera locations. I restart whenever I'm spotted and, through repetition, I've honed my silent route between the three data discs I need to grab to complete my mission.

Open the door from my starting spot, zap the camera, smoke bomb the guards and steal the first card. Through a vent, vault a ledge, choke the guard carrying the second. Hop outside, over some scaffolding, drop into the courtyard garden. Crouch in a bush beneath a window – the names Gamgee, Samwise Gamgee – as I wait for the guard carrying the third card to walk by. Pounce and head for the exit.

After what must be 20 attempts I finally nail a clean run and shoot into the top 250 of the global leaderboard.

This is 007 First Light's Tactical Simulation challenge mode, or “TacSim”, at its best. This specific level, called The Garden Party, is perfect for stealthy speedruns: it's small enough that you can understand it within 30 minutes, but mazey enough to reveal new hiding spots a couple of hours in. Slowly mastering it failure-by-failure has been a delightful digestif for the main story, and I've enjoyed it as much as any individual slice of the campaign.

The trouble is, it's the only bit of TacSim I actually like.

The mode is split between escalations (challenges with three unlockable difficulty tiers) and operations. These are single standalone missions, including The Garden Party, with modifiers that will presumably change over time. One makes enemies hit harder, another disables your Q-lens, so you can no longer see enemy outlines through walls.

It's essentially 007 First Light chopped into chunks and jumbled – small sections of campaign levels remixed with new objectives. Kill all the enemies in a shipping yard you passed through during the story; throw eight guards over the railings of an alpine research centre you see towards the campaign's climax. By completing them you earn a leaderboard spot and points to spend on new weapons, gadgets upgrades, and outfits, including the ludicrous Day of the Dead one (as worn by Daniel Craig in Spectre's prologue) I'm wearing in the above screenshot.

It's a fine philosophy, but it's at odds with what makes First Light special.

The campaign bounds forward, carried by its cheeky tone, jump-cutting between stealth and set pieces. It understands when to embrace Hitman – building up slowly in social stealth sections – and when to abandon it for bang-bang action. TacSim wants to secure the same replayability as Hitman but lacks the big sandbox levels and flexibility that make developer IO Interactive's masterpiece so moreish.

The way escalations morph between difficulty tiers isn't particularly imaginative. That's not to say it can't work, of course. Extra modes of any game don't necessarily need to match the main campaign, and IO is the master of this stuff. In many ways, Hitman looks completely different today than it did at launch, and that same dev team has a whole roadmap planned for TacSim. But I'm not convinced its skeleton is sturdy enough to carry the weight of an entire endgame.

It's barebones. It comprises five escalations, although two of them are essentially repeats of campaign tutorial sections, and two operations. With so few levels to choose from, the strength of TacSim rests on how good they are individually and The Garden Party aside, they're just not.

One of the escalations is pure shooting. First Light is a competent third-person action game but it often places enemies all around you, making firefights feel sloppy and random. The same is true here: you spawn with enemies in front of you, and enemies up high to the left. Trying to find cover from both is fiddly. It emphasises speed but it's too easy to rush ahead of the action, getting shot from the front, behind, and to the side.

In another escalation, your challenge is to push guards off a mountaintop platform. The main mechanic – grab a guard, run towards an edge as you're holding them, steering them left and right, and shove them over – was just one of many tools in Bond's belt during the campaign, meant to be pulled out sporadically. When you zoom in on it for an entire level, though, it feels shaky.

You can't grab guards stealthily from behind so every time you do, they shout, your stealth indicator turning red to show you've been spotted (nearby enemies, thankfully, are deaf). And steering guards towards the edge after you've grabbed them is like trying to move a fridge through a lake of porridge.

The way these escalations morph between difficulty tiers isn't particularly imaginative either. In the shipping yard you need to kill eight enemies to complete the first tier, 10 for the second, and 12 without enemies firing a shot for the third. The lack of significant difference between these challenges makes it feel like playing the same mission three times over.

Every mission in TacSim has a long list of sub-challenges, such as finishing the level without being spotted, crushing five enemies with an object, or only killing enemies with a shotgun. But only the most hardcore completionist will care because the core missions simply aren't solid enough to justify playing dozens of times. Even as much as I love The Garden Party, I feel no need to go back to it and rampage with a 12-gauge.

Operations definitely hold the most promise: they are the most sandbox-y, the most like Hitman.

Alongside The Garden Party is Clean Infiltration, set in the laundry room of a Slovakian hotel, where hanging sheets obscure guards' vision and washing machines are deadly electric traps. Your task is to collect three notes and escape. It's a tight space with little room for error and, at first, I enjoyed figuring out key sightlines, working out the best order to dispatch guards or sneak by them without raising the alarm.

But as soon as you collect all three notes, all the guards inexplicably go weapons free and four heavily armed military brutes spawn at the exit, blocking your path. You can pull out your gun and blast away – bringing guards running from all angles – or try to muddle through with your gadgets. Unless you've already dispatched every guard in the place, then, the chokepoint that finishes the level just isn't built for stealth, and it ruins all the satisfaction of a well-planned silent run.

Outside of each mission, some of the design decisions in TacSim are baffling, too. It's a mode all about speed but it doesn't tell you how long a successful run took and there's no in-game clock timing you, so you never know if you're set to break your record.

Unlocks arrive too slowly. You only get points after a successful run so if you restart it – and if you're anything like me, you will do that over and over until you get it right – you earn nothing. You'll need to play for several hours before you unlock a single gadget upgrade.

You start completely naked, without even the most basic gadgets from the campaign. If you've just finished the story you're infinitely less powerful than you were five minutes ago. Good luck escaping that laundry room!

And there's simply no need for its explorable hub to exist. You have to interact with separate terminals to select missions, pick your loadout, upgrade gear, and select an outfit. Every time you quit a mission to start another you waste two minutes shuttling between them. This should've been a menu.

More missions are coming, and if they're all as good as The Garden Party then I'll eat my words. But the next TacSim is a driving-focused mission called Valhalla Protocol, and I'm all full up on floaty cars and their wonky shooting, thanks very much. In fact, after completing its excellent campaign, I think I'm all full up on 007 First Light. It'll never match Hitman's delicious all-you-can-eat buffet.

Our 007 First Light Guide has all the Essential Tips and Tricks you need to survive your first assignments, plus 6 Tips for Mastering Stealth so you can stay out of sight. There are plenty of achievements to unlock and collectibles to get your hands on, so check our guide to All Collectible Locations to make sure you don’t miss out. For a helping hand with your missions, head to our in-progress Walkthrough, and our guide to all the Safe Combinations and Keypad Codes.

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