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.

I only played this game because I saw the 4th movie and I wondered if there were any videogames.

After getting the platinum trophy, I can say that I had a lot of fun with my time with the game. Expedited mode is definitely the way to play it, the quick decision making gets you in the zone and it becomes very satisfying when you survive situations that were stacked against you, which is very John Wick.

The game can get very hard when you are trying to get all of the names, mainly because the different locations contain multiple stages that you have to ace one after the other, with health, ammo, weapons and focus carrying over. The difficulty can get very frustrating at times, with the last 2 locations having some of the worst moments (specially the bank). Mercifully, you don't have to get every name in a single run, so you can save the speedrun one for later.

Overall, this is a great little indie game, that can get challenging at times, depending on the mode you play. I can see why people wouldn't like it; turn based tactical gameplay is not for everybody and fans of the movies maybe would prefer an action game.

A fun-enough tactics game that I don't think I'll feel a need to go back to. Lots of missed opportunities for creativity and more polished execution in the pre-deployment planning phase, the gunplay/weapon mechanics (when my ammo runs out I can't find a pencil to use in any of these offices?), and especially the end-of-mission replays (which have so much potential given the source material, but I didn't end up with a single one that looked cool, largely due to the choppiness/repetitiveness of the animations). Really tedious dialogue, but then again that's faithful to the John Wick franchise.

John Wick Hex has a lot going for it but it also misses the mark in a few categories. Immediately one flawless element is the aesthetics. The fantastic music and solid visuals establish a powerful tone. Combined with the shadows that fill in on the fly based on line of sight and the colour palettes of the various unique levels, every set piece was brought to life.

In terms of the strategy and tactics, there are a lot of well thought out elements. The hex grid, represented by dots provides the amount of options in each action that you need when playing a tactics game that only has one controllable character. The timeline as a turn based/real time hybrid is a great idea. Straight forward at first but requires a deeper understanding on the harder levels. The balancing of resources between ammo, focus and time is a captivating trio.

Narratively, John Wick Hex isn't doing anything special, but neither do the the movies so this didn't bother me. Having two actors from the movie was a nice touch and Troy Baker kills it as Hex. It's clear the scope was kept small but the use of smaller voice roles or dialogue from Wick (Keanu or otherwise) could have been nice additions to flesh it out.

I had a good time with this game but there were a few things that kept it from reaching that next level for me.
1. Difficulty curve is way off, second half of the game is way too easy.
2. There were multiple times that it bugged out and I had to restart a level, losing my progress. This is years after release on PC, still these issues remain.
3. There is a lack of layering. After the tutorial, the only new things are weapons and enemy types. No new mechanics beyond I guess elevators, not that that has a major effect on gameplay.
4. The cinematic replay is cool but the janky movement kind of ruins its potential. I wasn't compelled to use it after the first 2 or 3 levels.
5. The cutscenes are also bugged. Spoken dialogue not lining up with the subtitles, making the visual novel cutscenes hard to read and get invested in.

Ultimately I would love to see some of the concepts here refined in either a sequel or a spiritual successor, or even another indie dev inspired by it. Still this was an enjoyable playthrough with a nice runtime. I'll take this any day over any of the movies and is a cool addition to the world of John Wick.

Enjoyable and fitting base mechanics. Dull story but good dialogue and well acted by some of the actors from the films (I'm pretty sure John never says anything though).

Needs more combat options, early cutscene shows you doing things it would be really nice to do like grabbing a guy with a gun and using his gun to shoot someone else and throwing a guy into another. A mode that makes you act in five seconds is pointless, as there is no reason to take that long and the delay would likely come from menu navigation, finding the write place to click to move, or adjusting the camera. Pistols, the carbine, and the bullpup shotgun are the only good weapons. For some reason you awkwardly continue to fire any machine gun long after a target has died (you stop shooting with other guns) which make the guns more of a hazard to use than anything else, revolvers and regular shotguns take too long to aim. Odd level design choice where enemies keep coming out of spawn point doors or behind you from areas that you have cleared, turning what should be a faster more exciting game where you quickly get through areas engaging multiple enemies into a dull slow paced affair where you keep clearing the enemies behind you or the solo opponents stumbling out of doors. Most of the levels allow you to spend coins for different tailored suit upgrades, some of which are obviously better than others or you can use coins to stash weapons and healing supplies in levels. The coins are too limited to get many suit upgrades, most weapons too useless or plentiful for storing weapons to matter, and the game too easy for you to need more than the starting two bandages. Replays are nice but the camera and hex movement grid make replays look awkward. Too few animations and too many that look unfluid and glitchy. The walk speed and hex movement everyone is in always looks weird. The game is buggy, at one point just showing an end mission cutscene as a black screen and the menu and moving options froze up multiple times forcing me to restart levels that I had almost finished. Too much of a puzzle game where you are just exploiting enemy movement patterns rather than a John Wick game.

It would help a lot if more animations were added, especially ones that could logically flow into each other or if the game came with a map editor and the ability to share them as some of the areas worked really well and having more like that would make for some good areas.

Mission Replays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yebGnnycAU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ndc3SHp13A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2vt4FciqhI&t=2s

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.

A simple enough game that doesn't take too long to beat, but doesn't add too much in that short runtime either. John Wick Hex is very stylistic in both graphics and gameplay, and I did enjoy the neon aesthetic that harkens back to the movies. Where the game begins to fall apart for me is in the mixed bag of a gameplay system. At times, when it worked, it really worked, and I honestly did feel like I was choreographing these action segments with ease. This was helped by the option to view back your gameplay in a more cinematic style, an addition I really appreciated. However, those moments felt a little sparse compared to the moments of clunky movement and awkward positioning, which oftentimes brought more frustration than enjoyment. Moving on from gameplay, the voice acting was overall very good, an obvious standout would be Troy Baker's performance as Hex. The writing of the dialogue felt reminiscent of the Wick movies, and that was always enjoyable, but these cutscenes served more as a scene setter than anything else, considering the length of the game, the little emphasis on the story is understandable. Overall, John Wick Hex is a game where, when it works, it is a genuinely fun ride, however, this experience is marred by a lot of clunky gameplay and the story is too sparse to separate those unenjoyable moments.

John Wick Hex não é exatamente o jogo que quase todo mundo normalmente gostaria de ver dessa franquia de filmes tão fda e recém renomada, que mesmo que sua proposta de ser um jogo de estratégia encaixe com o tal personagem pelo seu jeito de agir tão milimetricamente perfeito contando cada bala em ação e usando quase que tudo ao seu redor (até mesmo um fcking lápis nos filmes) para lhe dar uma grande vantagem na hora do confronto com seus inimigos, o que todo mundo gostaria era uma pegada bem mais frenética ao que vemos aqui. Tudo é muito simples ao qual eu pessoalmente gostaria de ter visto mais mesmo em um jogo como esse, tão simples que às vezes realmente traz aquela sensação de que falta algo ali, mas claro tendo uma visão um pouco menor ao qual ele é que é a de ser um jogo Indie estratégico, ele ainda que não seja meramente perfeito não deixa tanto a desejar, já que sua história (que se passa antes dos filmes) ainda que não tão bem aprofundada é interessante e funciona muito bem para nos prendermos na narrativa do jogo, sem falar na sua gameplay que em que a cada mapa terá que ser feita de maneira perfeitamente calculada já que você só terá duas bandagens por dígamos cinco estágios seguidos nesses mapas em que não terá retorno de vida e nem mesmo a recuperação de suas balas ao avançar nesses tais estágios até o fim desses mapas do jogo, fazendo com que você sempre aborde uma jogada bem mais inteligente, usando cada bala para cada inimigo potencialmente mais perigoso (armado) e os mais indefesos (mais corporais e sem armas) serem abordados de maneira mais física e mais segura pelo "Baba Yaga" que traz toda aquela imersão na história e na jogatina desse jogo. Claro que dependendo do preço que você for pegá-lo, vale a pena jogá-lo e gastar algumas boas horas jogando ele, mas lembre que não é para se esperar nada de grandioso como é visto nos filmes do John Wick, pois toda a proposta aqui é mais a de ser de fato um jogo simples e trazer um bom desafio aos que adoram jogos desse gênero...