Today at gamescom, we finally had the chance to get our hands on the Nintendo Switch 2 version of 007 First Light. A total of five demo stations are available to visitors in Hall 9 at the Nintendo booth.
The demo starts right at the beginning of the game with the Iceland prologue and is limited to 18 minutes of playtime. Following the opening cutscene, that’s just enough time to make your way from the crash site on the beach and across the rocky landscape before reaching the research camp in the final moments of the demo, with Bond only just beginning to investigate the site before time runs out.
We were allowed to record our entire 18-minute demo session, which you can watch uncut above and use to judge the Nintendo Switch 2 version for yourself. There was one restriction: filming was permitted only as long as the complete demo setup remained visible, rather than recording the TV screen directly.
We have also removed the audio from our footage. The game’s sound was delivered through headphones, meaning our recording otherwise consisted almost entirely of background noise from the gamescom show floor.
We played the game on a TV using headphones and the Nintendo Switch 2 Pro Controller, which comes with a control scheme that should feel immediately familiar to anyone who has already played 007 First Light on another console.
Feels Like Home?
I’m primarily a console player rather than a technical expert on all the rendering techniques and graphical wizardry that tend to dominate discussions about PC gaming. What I can offer, however, is a fairly straightforward point of comparison: at home, I currently play 007 First Light on a base PlayStation 5 in its 30 FPS graphics mode at a 1080p output.
Interestingly, the targets outlined during yesterday’s gamescom dev talk with IO Interactive put the Nintendo Switch 2version in familiar territory. For launch, the developers are aiming for a 1080p output at a locked 30 FPS in both handheld and docked mode, using FSR/DLSS as part of the rendering solution.
Of course, matching those basic figures doesn’t make the two versions technically equivalent, with plenty of room for differences in areas such as textures, geometry and other graphical settings.
Still, my first visual impression of the Nintendo Switch 2 version was surprisingly positive.
Iceland Might Be Playing to Its Strengths
There is one fairly big caveat to that impression: the section chosen for the demo arguably plays into the Nintendo Switch 2 version’s hands.
Much of the Iceland prologue takes place between rocks with relatively limited sightlines. There are only a handful of enemy soldiers, and the section doesn’t feature any major firefights, large crowds or some of the more elaborate effects found later in the game.
In other words, this is probably not the section of 007 First Light that will push the Nintendo Switch 2 version to its limits.
Yesterday’s gamescom dev presentation gave us some useful context for what we saw. If we understood Executive Producer Cris Vega and Principal Core Programmer Kristoffer Hammarsköld correctly, IOI isn’t simply scaling down every aspect of the game for Nintendo Switch 2. While the memory budgets for rendering, textures and geometry are considerably lower compared to PC, the budgets shown for areas such as the game itself, animations, physics and audio were much closer or even identical.
Together with the targeted resolution and frame rate mentioned above, this suggests that IOI is trying to keep much of the overall experience close to the other versions while making most of the necessary compromises on the visual side. And that’s largely in line with our first hands-on impression: texture resolution appeared to be somewhat lower than what I’m used to seeing on PlayStation 5, but I didn’t immediately notice any distracting texture-streaming issues or obvious compression artifacts.
Bring On the Action
To really judge how well 007 First Light translates to Nintendo Switch 2, we’d love to see some of the game’s more demanding environments.
What will the huge, brightly lit halls of the Grand Carpathian look like when they’re filled with people? How will the Nintendo Switch 2 handle the firefight at the airport? And once we get to Vietnam, how much of that gorgeous view across Ha Long Bay will we actually be able to enjoy from The Pearl Hotel?
Those are the situations that should tell us considerably more about potential compromises in draw distance, geometry, crowd density, effects and overall image quality than the relatively contained opening minutes in Iceland.
For now, though, our first impression is encouraging. The compromises we noticed during the gamescom demo weren’t enough to fundamentally change the look or feel of 007 First Light. Considering the hardware it’s running on, the Nintendo Switch 2 version already comes remarkably close to the game we’ve been playing at home.
What do you think of the Nintendo Switch 2 version after watching our 18 minutes of gameplay? Did you spot any differences or compromises that we missed? And are you planning to play 007 First Light on Nintendo‘s new console? Let us know in the comments.
