JOHN WICK HEX
Introduce foes to six sides of pain
Baba Yaga is back, and this time he’s got… leg cramp, we guess? He now walks in a zig-zag pattern between enemies thanks to the hex-grid nature of this tactical take on the highlychoreographed action of the Keanu Reevesled movies, on the hunt for a villain who, coincidentally, is also named Hex.
Turning a movie series known for its deliciously over-the-top action into a strategy game might seem counterintuitive at first, but in practice it makes a lot of sense. You could never match Wick’s reactions in real-time, so instead everything is slowed down, time frozen unless Wick’s performing an action: reloading, moving, or flipping a guard upside-down.
All these actions are displayed on a timeline at the top of the screen, alongside a chunk of enemy actions. So, one after the other, you clip together moves to ensure you will just undercut the next enemy out to get to you. 1 Force of nature that he is, Wick always has the advantage, even against heaps of enemies. As a default he’s always slightly faster, and moving through his fog of war he’ll stop immediately when he spots a new enemy, so you can always react to a previously unseen threat.
When you finish a level, 2 you get the option to replay what you did in one fluid motion, which ends up a little stiff thanks to the gridmovement and somewhat limited moveset. But you quickly get the hang of how to use each move, and soon you’re reacting quickly to each challenge rather than taking a while to figure out your next move. When you hit that rhythm,
John Wick Hex sings, but it doesn’t delight as much as the movies. Oscar Taylor-Kent