This is borderline a 3. I did actually enjoy the game despite its flaws: even though the animations are janky and the controls are clunky, there is a real level of finesse here required to get good at the game. You slowly learn to get into a groove in how you approach and deal with rooms. And it feels good to clear levels without taking a single point in damage. It's a pretty interesting system overall, with the time mechanic. It makes you consider how to approach each room. Each weapon feels somewhat useful. The machine guns are total garbage, but the shotgun and carbine are powerful and have excellent range. But the pistol is generally good too because it's fast and accurate.

I also gotta highlight the soundtrack, it is pretty dope. That's the same guy who composed games like Journey and the incredible Banner Saga Trilogy. Austin Withory (might be spelling that wrong) is just such a talent.


Ok so here's where the game is total bullshit. First of all the presentation of the story is absolute garbage. These "cutscenes" are just still images of the character models standing in rooms and posing. It's clear they just refused to apply any kind of budget towards the cutscene. You know what game told its story like this? Aquaman Battle for Atlantis, and if you know how that game turned out... what's very likely here is that they spent most of their budget getting the actors from the film back (not counting Keanu) and then also paying for Troy Baker for his 54954th role in a game. The "story" that's here is not even worth mentioning, but I do need to highlight how the ending in particular is terrible, both of the final cutscenes are not even a minute long COMBINED. What??? Feels absurdly anticlimatic and hollow once you beat the game.

This game feels really restrictive and frustrating in many ways. You get to apply upgrades before a level begins: each level is a gauntlet of stages where your health and weapons carry over. So you can buy upgrades like getting more health or more accuracy before the level begins. But you can also leave yourself items in specific stages, like a full assault rifle with an extra clip, or an extra bandaid. But you're given such little tokens to actually get these and buying either takes the same currency. At most you're allowed maybe 2 upgrades max and it feels too restrictive. I would have preferred if these were upgrades we could have permanently once we buy them.

Because my goodness the enemy placement in this game is so dickish. There are literal "spawn" doors just littered throughout the map. And in the last few levels it borderlines on spawning infinite enemies. And it happens at the worst time. I'm talking when you have to deal with 3 at once and then as soon as you take down one another one just pops out immediately: this gets even worse when the enemy coming out of the door is a guy with a gun. There are many, many instances where you are just in an unwinnable position no matter how well you play, if you move too much to the left you'll get shot. Too much to the right and you'll get punched.

The difficulty curve is so bad too. You have some of the hardest levels in the game, then the boss at the end of the levels are a total joke. You just do a takedown like twice and shoot them and they die. They are ALL the same type of boss. The final boss in particular was a total joke. And the level before that was the most bullshit and tough out of them all.

This is a very rough game. It is unpolished and could have used more dev time. But what's here isn't that bad. Theres a lot of potential for this to be great.

As it is now, I have now beaten it, and will never come back to it again, a one and done experience.

If you like experiencing pain and simply hate yourself, this game is for you! This game puts John Wick in a strategic jacket where every move needs to be calculated because every move you make, takes you x amount of time and in that time, an enemy could shoot you, hit you, you could be just out of sight, you could be just in sight, you might a millisecond too late to kill your target before he kills you, it's madness.

I want a third / first person John Wick game as much as the next person but for the moment, this is the best we got unless you consider fortnite to be the closest you can get due to the john wick skin.
I was quite surprised with how much fun this game can be if you're not going for the platinum trophy or play on the harder difficulty where you have to make a move every 7 seconds, in the easier difficulty you have infinite time.
It is quite the challenge to make a decision that could cost you a good run and hold you back from getting the Baba Yaga name in any level within those 7 seconds but once you get it, DAMN, that feels good.

At times this feels like playing chess but with a murderous man named John "They killed my dog" Wick and a bunch of sorry men & women ready to take a whooping (and maybe whoop mine) and I must admit that it does make me appreciate strategic games a bit more, especially gamers who are good at these type of games, I envy these people.

Again, I would love a third person, action packed Triple A game within this universe which is in development too btw for god knows how long until release but for now, I think I can live with this game existing and making me grow gray hairs at least 20 years too soon (not even joking)

An interesting spin on turn-based tactics. I think the thing that makes me not want to return is how it approaches difficulty. To clear later levels, I am doing tedious micro-managing that doesn't gel well with the thematic framing.

In John Wick Hex it is easy to do badly, difficult to do well. The "John Wick" part of this framing makes me feel it should be easy to do well, but then difficult to do extremely well. If in development instead of framing the difficulty as "did you beat that guy and mange to take minimal damage with your current focus?", it was phrased "how many of those guys did you beat with your current focus?", we would have gotten something more fun.

Having a xx% hit chance against regular goons in a John Wick game, just feels wrong.