Just finished my first playthrough of John Wick Hex, which took a pretty daring approach to a well-known property.
While most people would assume a John Wick game would be some fast-paced third-person action title with a large budget, this game eschews twitchy action for careful tactical plotting and execution instead, and has a heavy indie vibe to it. The visuals have a neon graphic novel style to them, and the animations and rag doll physics can get janky at times, but the voice acting is top notch (Ian McShane and Lance Reddick voice their characters from the films and Troy Baker is the antagonist).
This game is often incorrectly described as turn-based. In fact, everything plays out in real time in the game world, but you have all the time you want to choose your next action. Events then play out until your action completes or gets interrupted, or until you spot a new enemy, at which point the game pauses again while you decide what to do next. So while it has a little turn-based feel to it, it doesn’t have the command latency or causality problems that a true turn-based game would have.
The levels have a hex grid overlaid on them which dictates where people can move. (The antagonist is also nicknamed Hex, so there are your two reasons for the title of the game.) Since all positions are equidistant from each other and have 6 neighboring spaces, it makes it easier to reason about what’s going on, and allows for a lot of people and obstacles to potentially surround you at one time. As the game plays out you’ll see a timeline at the top of the screen that shows how long your potential actions will take, as well as how long the current actions of all visible enemies will take. This lets you plot your tactics, e.g. do you have enough time to close the gap with an enemy and parry away their gun before they shoot, and will doing that leave you open to being shot by another enemy before you can break their line of sight? This is a pretty cool setup that I haven’t seen executed in quite this way before (X-Com: Apocalypse in real time mode is one of the few analogs I can think of). I also love that one of the fastest actions you can do is throw your gun at an enemy to stun them. It’s a huge risk/reward move, because getting stuck without your gun can be an awful experience, but sometimes it really is the best option to avoid getting shot or cornered. Also, when you complete a level you can watch your playthrough in real time with a more dynamic camera, which looks a little janky but is fun.
The early levels of the game are very short and easy, as you rarely encounter more than 1 or 2 lackeys at a time, and they’re easily dispatched. While I was initially dubious about the game mechanics, the game design really started to shine about halfway through as it became more common to be facing 3-5 enemies at a time with nastier weapons and a lot more health. This really forces you to use all of the melee attacks available to you, as well as the environment itself, to stun enemies and break line of sight with enemy shooters long enough to take them out one by one. This can turn into a furious ballet at times, which really captures the essence of the combat from the films.
Boss encounters are interesting because these enemies are much better at dodging ranged fire, so you have to get up close and personal and beat the tar out of them to reduce their focus meter, and ideally lay them out stunned on the ground so you can pump them full of lead while they’re dazed. In many of these cases lackeys will keep appearing out of the wings too, so you have to stay on your toes.
Levels have spawn doors throughout, which I thought might feel cheap in practice, but it actually keeps the tempo of the game moving. You need to take people out and keep pressing forward or else more enemies will keep spawning in and you won’t get anywhere. Also, you see people spawning a second or more before they can act, so they’re sitting ducks if you’re positioned properly and can take a couple of shots at them.
Most locations also allow you to plant guns or bandages in specific levels before you get started, or pay for stat enhancements, so there’s some minor meta-planning involved. Then the game judges you on a variety of statistics at the end of each location, and there are titles you can earn if you accomplish certain feats (beat the location without using any bandages, use more than X types of weapons, have a shooting percentage above a certain level, etc.), so it encourages replay if you want to see how much you can hone your craft. You can also turn on expedited mode, which enforces a time limit of 7 seconds to make each of your moves rather than giving you unlimited time to plot.
I got this game on super-deep discount for $4, so it was a huge steal for the value it offered. I’ll probably play through it at least one more time, maybe in expedited mode, or maybe trying to do a no-healing run. If you liked the John Wick movies and are looking for something a bit different, you may enjoy this game a lot.