Bond's latest adventure nails the campaign but stumbles badly when it tries to extend the experience beyond the story. The Tactical Simulation mode, or TacSim, is meant to offer the kind of replayability that made Hitman a phenomenon. Instead, it reveals just how much the developers relied on narrative momentum and set-piece variety to carry the main game.
The best moment in TacSim comes from a single level called The Garden Party, a London museum heist that demands precision repetition. Crouch through doors, zap cameras, smoke-bomb guards, vault ledges, choke an unsuspecting sentry, wait in a bush for the right moment, and sprint for the exit. After 20 attempts, nailing the perfect run feels genuinely satisfying, good enough to crack the global top 250 on the leaderboard. It's the kind of focused stealth challenge that works.
Everything else falls flat.
TacSim splits into escalations and operations, basically campaign levels chopped into pieces and reassembled with new objectives. Kill everyone in a shipping yard. Push eight guards off a mountaintop. The structure itself is sound, the kind of thing IO Interactive has built masterfully in Hitman. But First Light's sandbox levels lack the scale and architectural complexity that make Hitman's endgame so compulsively replayable.
The skeleton is barebones. Five escalations, two of which are just reskinned tutorial sections. Two operations. That's it. The Garden Party aside, most aren't worth revisiting even once.
Take the mountainside escalation where your entire job is to grab guards and throw them off cliffs. In the campaign, this was one tool among many, deployed sparingly for flavor. Stretched across a whole level, the mechanic falls apart. Guards can't be grabbed silently from behind, so every grab triggers an alarm and turns nearby enemies hostile. Steering a full-grown guard toward the edge while holding them plays like wrestling a refrigerator through mud. The difficulty tiers don't help either: kill eight enemies, then ten, then twelve without them firing back. It's the same tedious mission three times over.
A shooting-focused escalation exposes another weakness. First Light handles gunplay competently during the story, but TacSim spawns enemies all around the player, making every fight feel sloppy and chaotic. Finding cover from threats in front and behind simultaneously turns into a fiddly mess.
The operations hold more promise. Clean Infiltration, set in a Slovak laundry room with hanging sheets and electrified washing machines, starts strong. Threading between guards, figuring out the safest order to deal with them, working out sightlines. But the moment you collect all three target documents, the game breaks its own rules. Every guard goes weapons-hot and four heavily armed military units spawn at the only exit, smashing the entire stealth fantasy. Suddenly the level demands gunplay, ruining the satisfaction of a cleanly executed silent approach.
Design decisions outside the missions make things worse. A mode supposedly built around speedrunning doesn't display elapsed time or offer any in-game clock, so players never know if they're setting records. Unlocks arrive glacially. Successful runs earn currency for upgrades and gadgets, but failed attempts (and there will be dozens) earn nothing. New players start with zero equipment, infinitely less powerful than they were five minutes after finishing the campaign.
The hub area is pointless, forcing players to navigate separate terminals to pick missions, select loadouts, and swap gear. Every mission restart wastes two minutes shuffling between menus. This should be a simple dropdown.
More content is planned, though the next addition is Valhalla Protocol, a driving-focused mission. Given how poorly First Light handles vehicle combat, that's not encouraging. After a genuinely excellent campaign, TacSim doesn't offer enough to stick around. It never comes close to Hitman's all-you-can-eat appeal.
Author Emily Chen: "TacSim proves that a great campaign and great endgame are completely different beasts, and IO's team hasn't figured out how to deliver both in the same package."
Comments