It’s IO, so you’ve got a hint of what you’re in for. Crowded spaces, plenty of beautiful women to stare at to stay in character, social stealth, and a bunch of given options for each approach. It borrows a lot from HITMAN including its very level design philosophy and, well, its assets.

Even though it’s not as rich as HITMAN, it’s a respectable kind of familiarity. I won’t lie: the first two or three missions made a weak impression and bored me a bit, since your gadgets and tactical options are limited. Hell, I think it took at least three hours to fire a single bullet, which made me fear it was taking the “scenic” route like Mafia: The Old Country. The cinematics are there, and as gorgeous as they are, you know exactly where IO excels. Luckily, they mostly deliver on that front. Props, too, for making the tutorial actually interesting and part of the story.

To get the obvious out of the way, it’s part Uncharted, part Watch Dogs. I really like some dumb action and hold Tomb Raider (2013) and Uncharted 4 in high regard, so you know where I’m coming from. The close combat is a dodge or block until you land a combo type of deal, nothing groundbreaking, and it can be frustrating in certain contexts. But the character animations (backed by contextual environmental stuff) are very rich and seamless.

Animations and cinematics aren’t the only rich parts, though. The content is quite rich, too. From chase sequences to driving a car, blowing up places with your “toys,” and infiltrating locations while deducing how to get in or out, First Light is a fantastic blend of espionage and action. Nothing it does is truly perfected, and it must be said that the series will obviously continue, so IO has more than enough time to cook, but it’s all solid. The shooting is solid, very similar to Watch Dogs (1), with a focus ability. While it's often easy to land a shot and secure a kill, the flood of enemies can be overwhelming. That's where are gadgets are perfect to use, and although the game is slow to hand over some of its best arsenal (like the missile pencil or your go-to service pistol with silencer and EMP additions) until the last quarter —or even second to the last mission— there are more than enough tools to provide fun and creative takedowns on the fly, delivering a high tempo.

NPCs react adequately to some of your actions (like colliding with them), though they’re quick to return to their routines or in other words the very stuff they are prompted to do. These interactions also bleed into moments where you need to acquire a key item: you sicken someone with a dart or outright blind them, then pickpocket. It gets repetitive and a bit cartoony, but it’s easily forgivable given the game’s other strengths.

One thing that stands out in 007, while the game bounces between being a traditional third-person action shooter and a stealth experience, Bond must keep decorum in public spaces. When confronted by an enemy, Bond isn’t licensed to kill unless they pull a gun — and you know they will. You’ll probably realize the game will end with a bang, too, but that’s just how the drill goes. I don't think of it as a major issue though it wouldn't be my first choice.

The jokes land well, and almost all the characters are charming. Villains are kinda ass but they play their part. The story is more of a setup for what’s to come, with many things still kept in the dark, so I don’t want to judge it too harshly. Still, I feel the game wouldn’t lose much if certain parts or characters were cut even though they already quite done it. Minor spoiler: I’m particularly frustrated that Cressida is taken out of the story so early.

While Bond could still be described as a bit of a Gary Stu, his reckless, impulsive nature —often pointed out in-game— and his inexperience are shown adequately, though not to the point of breaking his old-fashioned womanizer/cocky charm. Bond is the only guy who could infiltrate a place by climbing a ledge to a pool and then say he was “testing the waters.” That lands perfectly with the actual stuff you are doing in-game. IO made sure to keep everything that makes the character and his universe tick.

It's performing mostly well, until smoke enters your screen, which both dips the frame rate and looks kinda off for some reason.

With some light but fun puzzles and platforming, 007 will fill a certain void. But the lack of higher player agency and replayability are the two most important things to work on in the upcoming sequel.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
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So, shortly after writing this review, I went for the medal times. Playing for time is definitely the way to go: it squeezes the most out of your moveset (trying to manage stamina while combining moves) and maximizes the fun. Plus the secret gauntlet level was pretty neat. My thoughts on the collectathon part remain the same: it's boring and painful to search for the last three yarn balls you somehow missed.

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I haven't played Fabraz's Demon series, so I can't compare Bubsy 4D to those earlier games, though it clearly draws inspiration from them. And the last time I saw Bubsy (not Paws on Fire, I don't really know about it, The Woolies Strike Back which I acquired through PS Plus) it seemed like a worse Giana Sisters knockoff.

Bubsy 4D looks like a kid's platformer, and believe me not in the pejorative sense, and not like today's Outright/Gamemill titles. It's a decent entry for an ill-conceived franchise and a reasonable starting point for 3D collectathons. That said, I found its environments unengaging both in their actual level design and specifically how they look.

You have a furball mode ("big chungus"), wall clinging (upgradable to wall staying), a forward leap, and air floating. These let you recover from mistakes and cross large gaps easily. However, abilities can be inconsistent: the ball mode can be unpredictable when bumping into trivial things, and the cannon (that I would completely remove from each and every level) often misfires as it's relatively hard to adjust the depth. Worse, furball mode sometimes glitches out entirely, leaving you unable to move until you die and restart from the last checkpoint.

After each fall (to the ground) Bubsy always goes flat and remains incapable to move for a second or two, super annoying.

There are moments where the cam adopts a top-down view or the game turns into a 2.5D platformer and some of them are genuinely better than the 3D parts.

As far as the game's overall structrue goes: Each of the three worlds has five maps with identical collectible counts and a medal for beating the trophy times. Speedrunning tricks exist from what I could see from the sparsely available videos (e.g., furball into log bumps launching you across sections), so I bet there are and will be some mad stuff, I am not a leaderboard guy and chasing even just the medal times is tricky due to the jank. The combat exists and is just there... Best to ignore it completely when you can.

Blueprints let you upgrade abilities and unlock fast travel between checkpoints, encouraging exploration and making traversal tad bit easier, though I personally ignored them until world 3. You have 3 health bars and respawn at the last checkpoint upon failure which isn't quite enough to punish the player during their initial playthrough. There is a 9‑lives mode (which I'm sure will be annoying for most people) that, to me, should have been used in each level to design the levels around an overall attempt constraint. As it currently stands, it's a barebones collectathon that you can chill with its music while scouting and routing the maps and your second (and further) attempt will be for 100% completion.

It's mostly a very inoffensive game that is simply mid. The camera is pretty modern, and the controls are responsive enough to mess around while rolling as a ball or leaping around. But they are most definitely nowhere near modern Mario or Sonic level of polish (not to mention Sonic is another mascot who struggled a lot with 3D for a good amount of time with a bigger budget). You may as well imagine this is the Sonic Adventure 3 you never got.

There are tank controls available, but Bubsy himself will tell you not to turn them on, and if you don't trust him, trust me instead: don't do that. My main concern with the game is that levels get fairly repetitive fast, despite there being only 15 of them (plus three bosses on top, which are okay-ish). I couldn't really bring myself to speedrun the game or collect the remaining stuff.

Unless you were already longing for Bubsy, wait for a deep discount or it to get bundled (which both seems inevitable). You're not really missing much notable by skipping it right now. It benefits from modern platformer know-how but remains clunky. Still, maybe this is Bubsy's second wind. Just maybe.

--I would have a playlist dedicated for speedrunning by both the dev team and players if I were Fabraz--

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
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