Review: John Wick Hex Puts You in a Not-So-Kinetic Baba Yaga’s Shoes

This is a game where the triumphs come from tiny marvels of efficiency and careful planning rather than kinetic skill.

John Wick Hex
Photo: Good Shepherd Entertainment

A traditional third-person shooter feels like the logical foundation for a John Wick game. And just like the films, there’s enough going on beneath John Wick Hex’s surface to elevate it above most games where the relentless shooting is the only point. The latest from developer Mike Bithell both functions as an opportunity to embody the Baba Yaga at his most unrelenting and as a deconstruction of everything about how he operates while he’s on the job. Nonetheless, while there’s immense value to this approach, there’s also a nagging sense that John Wick has lost something in the transition from the big screen.

It helps that John Wick Hex managed to find a narrative conceit to divorce itself from the ongoing narrative of the films. The game takes place some years before John Wick met his wife and left the murder business behind. A supercriminal named Hex (voiced by Troy Baker) has kidnapped Winston and Charon (Ian McShane and Lance Reddick, respectively) from the Continental Hotel, putting High Table’s power in check, and John—sporting Keanu’s likeness but not his voice—has been sent on a globe-trotting mission to take out Hex’s network of underlings before coming for the man himself at the Continental. Freed of the ongoing pressure of the films to find new ways to keep John tied to his former life, the game’s narrative is instead something of a running conversation between these three powerful figures on the forces that put John in that position to begin with. It’s not pushing a new twist to the narrative, but it works to give us a new appreciation of what’s already there.

That ethos also applies to the gameplay, which eschews the immediate thrills of a twitchy first- or third-person shooter for the constant deliberation of a grid-based strategy game. The lifeblood of it all is the timeline, stretching across the top of the screen, representing how long it will take John and any enemies in range to complete their actions. The key to everything is being able to take enemies off the board before they get a chance to react, and players get all the time they need to coordinate the exact dance of death required to eliminate everyone in range without taking hits. Both ammunition and health are scarce commodities, which also factor into the budget, as does Focus, the stamina stat required to pull off physical maneuvers such as close-quarters combat and rolling. Two shots from a gun will kill most enemies, but will that leave you short on bullets and too far away when other enemies come into view?

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As a translation of all the things we know John Wick has done, the game is a weak facsimile. The cel-shaded minimalist noir art style is reminiscent of Suda 51’s brilliantly subversive Killer7, but the game’s minimalism results in the loss of visual stimulus we associate with the John Wick universe. There’s only so many times you can watch John perform the same judo flip to take down close enemies before you start wanting for something more impactful, given the much more innovative and diverse range of combat arts we see him utilize on the big screen.

Indeed, we never see the same takedown twice in any of the films, and it doesn’t seem like it would have taken much for this game’s engine to replicate that lack of redundancy. While landing shots with a gun feels suitably punchy, more often than not, the sheer kinetics of every stage feels more like a studio pre-visualization of a fight scene from the films than the definitive experience that allows you to inhabit a hitman at his most unstoppable. Even when, at the end of each stage, you get a stitched together composite of your run, without the pauses to sift through your menus and select options, the game comes off as cinematically broken.

There are games out there that deliver that experience on a gameplay level, most notably Superhot. John Wick Hex approaches that game’s design ethos of time moving when you do from the opposite direction: as a strategy game executed with action-movie sensibilities, where thought and deliberation can be strung together to create scenarios where your opponents don’t even get the chance to fire back. Every action costs more than just the wherewithal to press the right button at the right time. This is a game where the triumphs come from tiny marvels of efficiency and careful planning rather than kinetic skill.

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Score: 
 Developer: Bithell Studios  Publisher: Good Shepherd Entertainment  Platform: PlayStation 4  Release Date: May 5, 2020  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Strong Language, Violence  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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