John Wick Hex

Genre: Turn-Based Strategy-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

John Wick Hex, released in 2020 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch (and delisted from the Nintendo eShop in 2025, though you can still find the game in physical form), is a Turn-Based Strategy-RPG where players control the titular ultra-competent hitman as he stalks crime lords as he hunts down the kidnappers of Winston and Charon years before the events of first film in the Keanu Reeves-starring franchise.

While many who saw John Wick could see its massive potential as a videogame, I think few at the time would have envisioned it as a slow, methodical Strategy-RPG where players take their time planning out every step, every dodge roll, and every bullet they fire from John Wick’s gun. Perhaps the idea here is to give players insight into the way John Wick himself sees fights.

What this amounts to is players moving John through hex-based environments, and freezing the action whenever an enemy comes into sight, with players choosing every move John does, plotted out against a timeline showing your actions and enemy actions. Judging the situation, you can instruct John to take a few shots, crouch and possibly roll behind cover, take a few steps back to safety, use melee attacks on nearby enemies, or “refocus” to take a moment and recharge the meter you use for some of the aforementioned moves.

In practice, it’s not always easy to judge when an enemy will be in range for a melee attack, or to time out whether you have time to dodge behind cover before an attack, which hurts this game’s strategy element a bit. Also, the game places some pretty odd restrictions on John, such as an inability to hold more than one gun at a time, or even take clips out of enemy guns to take a refill with you – every time you run through a gun’s 6 to 10 shots, you need to scurry to a spot where an enemy dropped one to rearm yourself. I suppose this keeps the action dynamic, but it seems a bit silly to think the world’s greatest hitman somehow can’t manage to hold two handguns at once.

I also feel like this game is let down by its presentation. John Wick Hex uses a 3D presentation that one could generously describe as “stylized”, but really it just looks bad. Simple-looking character models that only loosely resemble the film characters, clunky animations, and atmospheric music that’s neither memorable nor does much to build atmosphere. And what’s a real shame is that while the game does include a feature to play back the fights in real-time, in theory giving us something that looks like the action from the films, in reality the visuals are so ugly and the animation so clunky that it looks like a sub-par recreation an amateur made in a 3D modeling software.

At the very least to the game’s credit Ian McShane and the late Lance Reddick reprise their characters here, and do a decent enough job voicing their characters, who are static and don’t move at all as they speak. And while Keanu Reeves is nowhere to be found here, we do at least have veteran voice actor Troy Baker playing the game’s villain Hex, though I honestly don’t think this is one of Baker’s better performances.

Despite all my criticisms, there is a sort of slow, calculating enjoyment to be found in planning out John Wick’s moves to devastate enemies, though this action can get repetitive over time. However, in the end, the gameplay frustrations and lacking presentation combine to make this a pretty disappointing videogame take on a film I suspect many players were excited to see in videogame form. It’s still enjoyable, but even within this game’s misguided vision I think this could have been executed much better.

tl;dr – John Wick Hex is a Turn-Based Strategy-RPG that has players controlling each and every move the Keanu Reeves character makes as he fights his way through enemies. It’s not the sort of game I suspect fans of the film had in mind, but even putting that aside, this game has issues with some frustrating design choices and repetitive gameplay, along with a poor presentation. This can still be fun if you’re okay with slower and more thoughtful gameplay, but even within that narrow vision this game could have been done much better.

Grade: C+

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