007 First Light’s opening perfects the art of the video game tutorial

Opening moments of games can often feel long and slow, and may even be boring as the game must teach you how to play it first thing. They’re a necessary evil, but there’s a new high bar, as the new James Bond game 007 First Light might have perfected the art of the tutorial.

Like so many of its film counterparts, 007 First Light opens with an exciting set piece. Bond, who isn’t yet an MI6 agent, is in a helicopter on a mission as a Navy Aircrewman. His helicopter is shot down, and he’s the lone survivor who must now rescue scientists held captive by a mercenary group. The opening mission is heavy on stealth, but its paths are mostly linear as 007 First Light teaches you the ropes. You can’t even fire a gun here, as all the weapons the mercenaries drop are biometrically locked, showing that 007 First Light is about more than just shooting your way out of sticky situations.

Once that mission is completed, players are treated to an opening number from Lana Del Rey, whose smooth vocals are a perfect match for the franchise. Bond is sent off to MI6 training in Malta with a few other recruits for the newly revitalized 00 program. Once he arrives, cue the montage.

You quickly bounce between tutorials for various gameplay mechanics, like driving and melee combat. Bond arrives, immediately gets into a royal rumble to teach you the fighting basics, then transitions to a driving sequence around the island for a 35-second lap, and then follows that up with a parkour course so you can get a feel for the game’s movement.

Each bite-sized moment in the montage adds a new wrinkle to the controls, like learning how to use R1 and Square together (on PlayStation 5) to shoulder charge a foe in a melee bout or how you can shoot an enemy’s hands to disarm them. The montage isn’t long, and by the end of it, you’ll have a firm grip on everything. And it just makes sense to breeze through controls that aren’t much different from any other third-person action game. Get a load of this, y’all: When driving, you use the right trigger to accelerate and the left to brake. Square serves as a handbrake. Simple stuff!

Image: IO Interactive

Of course, not everyone might be familiar with expected controls like that. (This could be a kid’s first game ever!) If the montage tutorial section breezes too quickly on by, there are always detailed explanations in the menu to explore, complete with short GIFs that demonstrate the various controls and actions. (Side note: Every game needs this! It would make revisiting old save files more approachable when there’s, say, a new expansion on the horizon.)

The tutorial ends in a drag-out brawl between Bond and fellow recruit Monroe throughout the Malta base, and you’ll be an expert in the game’s hand-to-hand fighting by the time the two knuckleheads survive a fall that definitely, totally should have killed them. Bond still has more to learn, and you’ll make a pit stop at Q’s lab for some fancy tech gadgetry. But in the span of 10 minutes, you and Bond have both quickly gotten up to speed on how to dominate 007 First Light.

The game’s fantastic opening hour succeeds in making learning the rote basics fun. I’ll take an action movie montage — especially in a game starring Bond, James Bond — over a boring ol’ “start the game as a kid version of the protagonist to learn the basic controls” opening sequence (looking at you, Uncharted 4).