First Light (on 6th gen consoles at least)
- Reviewed for Gamecube
- Also Available on PS2, Xbox,
- Released 2001
- Developer – EA Redwood Shores
- Publisher – EA
With the upcoming release of 007: First Light, I thought it a good time to go back and look at some Bond games from yesteryear. My first Bond game was Goldeneye: Rogue Agent which felt like a terrible starting point, so why not start with the first time Bond graced the 6th generation of consoles – Agent Under Fire.
New Era, New Face
Initially envisaged as the PC version of The World is Not Enough, development stretched on long enough that EA made the decision to transition the game to its own story. It also meant that the developer’s rights to Pierce Brosnan’s likeness had expired so the decision was made to use a new actor – Andrew Bicknell – who provided his face, voice, and full motion capture for the game.
In hindsight, it’s obvious this game was retooled from The World is Not Enough as a lot of the locations you visit are directly lifted from that game’s plot. Graphically too, the game doesn’t hold up as well as other early 6th gen titles, likely because of it’s extended production.
Clone Saga
As touched on above, the story is a brand new, original plot written especially for the game. It’s not borrowed from a film or one of Fleming’s books. In a word, it’s serviceable in the way that most Bond plots tend to be. It’s a way to whisk you from place to place, set-piece to set-piece. It’s a shame really, because the plot primarily revolves around 8 World leaders being replaced with evil clones, and it could have been a wonderfully silly Austin Powers style take on a Bond plot. Unfortunately the game plays it completely straight.
The game begins with you rescuing a CIA agent, Zoe Nightshade from a submarine hanger in Hong Kong. After a bit of a chase sequence, she’s killed and Bond sets out on a jet setting journey to Bucharest, Switzerland, and a series of ships, underwater bases, and oil rigs. The locations then, if you haven’t guessed already, are pretty samey. Outside of a couple of nice skyboxes you’re mostly inside underground enemy bases and levels are, for the most part, pretty unmemorable. I think this is a trap a lot of Bond games fall into, forgetting that the appeal of Bond is that he visits a lot of exotic locations and instead having us fight and sneak around waves of goons in bland hallways.
Shifting Gears
If the locations for the levels are samey and uninspired, the game at least gives us plenty of variety in the mission structure. Typically no two back-to-back levels offer up the same kind of gameplay. One mission might be your bread and butter first person shooting, then you’ll have a stealth mission, then a driving level, then an on rails turret section. Some of these mission types are better than others (I still find it unbelievable how prominent on rails turret sections were for two whole console generations) but on the whole the variety is welcome.
The two driving missions are a particular highlight with semi-open city environments to drive around and blow stuff up in. One particular late-game turret level did have me tearing my hair out on Agent (medium) difficulty, with a lack of in mission checkpoints meaning I had to play through nearly the entire level 4 times in a row.
Guns and Gadgets
Let’s talk about the bulk of the gameplay though. The average level sees you, as Bond, running around in 1st person, gunning down henchmen, hacking terminals, sneaking around and generally doing James Bondy things. The gunplay is about what you’d expect for a game of the era – there’s a heavy lock-on with the aiming that stops it from being too frustrating, and you can hold the left trigger to manually aim when you need that extra bit of accuracy. Enemies can be ruthlessly accurate on Agent difficulty, and I found a swift run-and-gun strategy was the best way to deal with threats the majority of the time; only taking a slower approach with cover for boss fights or more difficult late-game encounters.
Notes on Completion
I completed the main story on Agent (medium) difficulty getting every gold medal in the process. I also played several multiplayer matches in both 2 player and 4 player variants.
There are 17 different weapons to use in game, (although I’d be hard pressed to remember most of them) alongside grenades, mines, and trusty Q-Branch gadgets such as the Q-Laser and Q-Claw. The gadgets again help to break up the gameplay a little bit, although I wish their use was a little more open ended. For the most part you can only use them when the game directs you to.
The Gamecube controller really doesn’t lend itself too well to shooters, and I found myself wishing I was playing with a PS2 or Xbox controller multiple times throughout my playthrough. In terms of technical performance though the game runs at a mostly smooth 60fps on Gamecube, only sometimes dropping during larger firefights. I’m told the game runs worse on the PS2, which was the original version of the game – the Gamecube and Xbox ports came afterwards.
A View to a Killstreak
Multiplayer is where the game really shines. Here, in the various 4 player split-screen modes everything comes together. Even in 2026, we had a blast with Agent Under Fire. Here, the clunky-by-modern-standards controls aren’t a hinderance – something you fight while enemy AI whittles down your health and armour – now they’re a shared annoyance, a reminder of the times before Call of Duty homogenised what the control scheme for every 1st person shooter to come after would be.
There are 12 multiplayer maps to choose from, over 5 different game-modes. Game-modes include standard deathmatch; protect the flag (like capture the flag but the aim is to grab the flag and hold onto it for the longest time); the iconic Golden Gun mode where the titular Golden Gun kills in a single shot; Top Agent where one player has increased health and damage output; and a bomb defusal mode. There are 11 multiplayer characters total, with 5 available from the start and 6 more unlockable through the campaigns medal system. Also unlockable through this medal system are modifiers such as low gravity, extra maps, and weapons.
Working on my Bond Moves
Getting those platinum medals though, is far from easy. First you have to earn the gold medal for the stage by beating a score requirement. Score is earned through high accuracy, low damage taken, killing enemies, completion time, and by completing ‘Bond Moves’ – contextual actions that usually revolve around using your Q gadgets.
The system gives the single player campaign some much needed replayability, and score targets for the most part aren’t too hard to earn on Agent difficulty. However, that only gets you the gold medal. Gold medals unlock cheats and such for the single player mode. To get the platinum medal for those multiplayer unlocks you need to play through every level again, beating the score target once more, while also shooting a number of 007 symbols hidden in each stage. Luckily, you can use all the gold medal unlocks to help you along with this – but you’d have to be really dedicating to unlocking everything to play through the entire game a minimum of 3 times to get all the unlocks.
It should also be noted – in the Xbox and Gamecube versions you can add bots to your multiplayer matches, but you can’t in the PS2 version. In general the PS2 version is by far the inferior way to play the game.
Okay, but is it any good?
Overall, I did mostly enjoy my time with Agent Under Fire. The campaign takes around 4-5 hours to beat which feels about right. Any more and it would start to wear thin. There’s plenty to see and do in the multiplayer modes, but realistically in 2026 and beyond it’s probably not going to hold your attention for more than a few games. I know my review’s probably made for a pretty negative read – but if you can get past the controls, you will get a good deal of fun out of this one.
The game does feels dated in a way that earlier Bond games like Goldeneye don’t – I think that might be down to playing quite similarly despite being on newer hardware. It’s also by far the worst of the Bond games on the 6th generation consoles (discounting Goldeneye: Rogue Agent as you don’t play as Bond in that one) with the sequel – Nightfire – improving on a lot of my issues with this game.
| Pros | Cons |
| Lots of mission variety | Graphically pretty poor |
| Well paced campaign | Story and characters aren’t very interesting |
| Great multiplayer suite | Reminds of better Bond games |
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