John Wick was a game-changing action movie. Defined by tight fight choreography, fascinating worldbuilding, and intense bisexual lighting, the series is maybe most notable for the finest gunfights in American cinema. It seemed natural to make a John Wick video game, given how intense the relationship between guns and gameplay has become. And yet, how would you make it stand out? There are dozens of styles of first- and third-person shooters. But none capture the implacability of Baba Yaga. What John Wick Hex asks is: What if it wasn’t a shooter? What if the game mimicked Wick’s inhuman precision… by being a tactics game?
John Wick Hex came out in October of 2019 on the PC. In 2020, ports have trickled out, initially on PS4, then on Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. While this will be a review of the game itself, it will also necessarily be a review of its port. Specifically, I played John Wick Hex on the Nintendo Switch. I can’t speak to how the game works on the PS4 or Xbox One, though I suspect the ports are quite similar.
“Why bring us here?”
Hex, a powerful crime lord, has a grudge against the High Table. His father had risen to the highest echelons of power within the High Table — and had fallen as far as possible. To prove that the High Table doesn’t have the power to enforce its laws, Hex has kidnapped Winston and Charon (Ian McShane and Lance Reddick reprise their movie roles). He plans to execute them on the steps of the Continental, a public statement of the weakness of the High Table. The only problem? John Wick, their most feared assassin, trails close behind.
You play as John Wick. Fight your way through a variety of locales — warehouses, hostels, museums, and more — to try to track down Hex before he can execute Winston and Charon. You don’t speak. You don’t make choices. This is John at his most heartless; the game opens with the simple timestamp “Before Helen.” Unlike McShane and Reddick, Reeves isn’t back to voice his iconic late-career hero. That’s okay. There isn’t much that needs to be said.
“All I want now is for him to die, and you both to watch.”
You enter each level with a custom pistol and an extra clip. That’s it. And reloading, unlike in most games, throws away unused bullets, forcing you to be conscious of your ammo without spamming reload after every use. Instead, just like the movies, you just pick up whatever weapons the goon you just killed had. But each weapon is finicky, and you have to learn their ins-and-outs. Shotguns take a long time to use but put out remarkable damage. Carbines are accurate and powerful. SMGs put out a ton of damage, but they have low accuracy.
You learn to prioritize enemies both by distance and by what weapon they’re carrying. A guy with a carbine can destroy you, but what do you do if there are two other people between you? You learn to use the geometry of the levels, rolling and weaving between pillars to isolate people for a takedown and a follow-up strike. It doesn’t take many direct hits to take you down, so you learn to be aggressive and flexible quickly.
A phenomenal addition is the timeline. The top bar is your actions. Walking one hex over will take .5 seconds; aiming your custom handgun will take .8 seconds. Aiming the revolver will take 1 second. But beneath that, you have the timelines of each enemy on screen. You might have two foes in front of you, one with a carbine and one unarmed. But the one with the carbine is slower; you have 1.5 seconds until he turns and fires. The unarmed guy will punch you in .7 seconds. So you prioritize. I found understanding the system difficult initially, but once I just started playing the game and paying attention to it, it immediately made sense to me. It’s a great way to add a more strategic layer over the game’s core tactical element.
“Jonathan will find this place. You must know that.”
There is very little — too little — customization. Between missions, you have a limited number of gold coins to spend on upgrades. You can stash weapons or bandages in upcoming levels. Weapons rain from the heavens here, however, so that’s useless; you’ll only ever do bandages. You can also visit the tailor to get more personal upgrades. For instance, you might upgrade your health from 10 to 14, or make dodging take less Focus. Unfortunately, these upgrades aren’t permanent. Each mission (a set of 5-7 levels), you start over from scratch. It seems like a weird choice. It’s not like you know what the mission ahead needs. You can’t plan for it. So what does removing your bonuses achieve?
Furthermore, it doesn’t seem like you earn coins for any real reason. Without replaying entire missions, it is hard to say for sure, but if I was earning coins for particular actions, the game didn’t tell me. So, a seemingly set amount of coins that vanish if you don’t use them give you temporary bonuses? The game has a fairly limited set of actions you can perform already (hit, push, parry, takedown, shoot, throw gun, roll), the inability to improve those actions over the course of the game definitely drags.
These are small problems, but they are noticeable. Tie the coins to gameplay to make them feel weightier. And make the tailoring upgrades permanent, or at least find a reason to make ‘stashes’ worthwhile. As it is, this element of the game is the least successful at adapting the feel of the films.
“A pleasure to see you again, Mr. Wick.”
I threw one guy to the ground, but didn’t have time to finish him off. Two more rushed into the room. I emptied my pistol, double-tapping one. The other was about to fire; I threw my gun at him. While he was stunned, I punched the first guy as he stood, grabbed his 9mm, and took too shots at the stunned enemy. Then I did a 180, ducked a shot, rolled towards the guy who appeared behind me, and punched him. I stood quickly, took him to the ground, and shot him twice while he was dazed. It felt exactly like playing a perfectly choreographed fight. It felt like nothing else I’ve ever played.
Adapting film is hard. There are so many shooters; how do you make yours feel special? How do you feel like the protagonist of a film? John Wick Hex is a deeply flawed game… but it also captured the feel of the films flawlessly. Not just in its action, but in the way the missions are often 5-7 levels long. You don’t heal between them, so if you take a rough hit early on, you stay hit unless you find time to use a bandage. That means the missions often get progressively more challenging as you get more beat up, mimicking the bone-deep exhaustion that Reeves’ ends so many set-pieces in during the first two films particularly.
Perhaps the game’s biggest issue is the replay feature. In it, the game eliminates the turn-based decision making. You see the level you just played as a single, fluid action set-piece. Unfortunately, the game does nothing to smooth the gaminess of the section. You see enemies clip from laying to standing because the game doesn’t have an animation to attack an enemy on the ground. You see John move along the hex-based grid in a deeply unnatural path. Rather than feeling like an action setpiece that you just co-directed with the game, it looks like… well, an extra janky spectator mode, lagging as it follows a great FPS player.
“It’s all fallen apart.”
John Wick Hex looks good and plays smooth, even in handheld mode. The art, a gritty, neon-infused bit of cel-shaded cartooning, is simple but evocative. The game relies on challenging you with a few well-placed enemies rather than oceans of baddies, and most of the time, a ‘fog of war’ effect blanks out most of what you can’t see, so you rarely have more than a few figures on screen at once. And because you only have a single character to control, this was a smooth and engaging port to console. Some strategy and tactics games struggle with the joystick; this one absolutely does not.
That said, the game crashes. A lot. Like, at least a few times per mission. Most of the time, the crashes happened after I died, so it just meant a longer-than-usual respawn. But every so often, the game would shut down on a particularly strong run, or in one case after I’d beaten a level, forcing me to replay the entire challenging section. I’ve never had a Switch game crash anywhere near this often. I didn’t encounter any other bugs, but this one is bad enough to warrant a mention.
“It’s done. I’m done.”
In a way, John Wick Hex is like Hotline Miami had a kid with X-Com. It isn’t the instant classic either of those games were, sadly. It tries to do too much with too little. And yet, that ground — a solo tactics game, picking up and discarding weapons as you move through cramped, hostile levels — is fertile. John Wick Hex is deeply and profoundly flawed. It also might be a genuinely great game, beneath it all.
Because, in the end, it accomplishes exactly what it set out to do: It makes you feel like John Wick. It finds a new way to illustrate explosive action and choreography, not as the result of fast reflexes, but as the result of thoughtful planning. This exact game, with a few of the rough edges polished off and a more considered progression system, could have been an all-time great.
But it’s still worth the experience. John Wick Hex is a genre-bending gem. It has more than its share of problems, but it also does something truly unique: It asks players to reconsider what kind of games are best suited to the experience of a great action story. And if it is a little less than the sum of its parts, well, those parts still have plenty of value on their own. I don’t know if or when John Wick 4 will come out — but I know that I want another one of these when it does.
