John Wick Hex

John Wick Hex is not what anyone expected, and that is exactly the point. Instead of a third-person cover shooter, Bithell Games built a timeline-strategy game where every move, shot, melee takedown, and reload occupies a fixed slice of real-world seconds on a shared action bar at the top of the screen. You queue an order, the game plays it out, pauses the moment a new enemy enters your line of sight, and asks what John Wick does next. It sits somewhere between XCOM-style tactical pause and Superhot's time-moves-when-you-move philosophy, without cleanly being either. That hybrid identity is both its biggest selling point and the source of most of its friction. The resource loop is tighter than it first appears. Focus governs melee takedowns, parries, and reloads, so every fancy close-quarters move costs something. Ammunition is genuinely scarce: each weapon carries a fixed magazine count and any unspent rounds are lost the moment you reload, which forces constant weapon scavenging from downed enemies. Throwing a gun to stun someone before rushing in for a takedown is not just stylish, it is often the only move that fits on the timeline. The pre-mission staging area, where you place stashed weapons and healing items at specific checkpoints before entering a level, adds a light resourcing layer that strategy players will enjoy prodding. The perk shop between stages exists but is shallow; some bonuses (large health top-up) are vastly stronger than others (extra dodge range), and nothing carries over between chapters, so there is no long arc of character growth to manage. The timeline readout is the real design achievement here. Every visible enemy's queued action appears on the bar, letting you calculate whether a pistol shot at 1.5 seconds beats an incoming punch at 1.3, or whether a parry at 0.5 seconds opens the gap for a takedown chain. When three enemies funnel into a corridor and you thread a solution through the timeline with a second to spare, the game genuinely delivers on its premise. The fog-of-war system, developed with input from the films' director Chad Stahelski, keeps off-screen threats punishing and forces forward momentum rather than corner-camping. That said, the AI occasionally spawns enemies mid-action in ways the timeline does not telegraph clearly, and health is so scarce that arriving at a sub-mission with two hit points is not unusual. Boss encounters after the first one collapse into a parry-takedown-shoot loop with little variation. Presentation is cel-shaded graphic-novel, which suits the license well and runs cleanly even on mid-range hardware. Ian McShane and Lance Reddick reprise their roles as Winston and Charon, and Troy Baker voices the antagonist Hex. John Wick himself is mostly silent, which is a sensible call given the budget. The post-level replay feature is the most polarizing element: conceptually great, showing your decisions compressed into a real-time action clip, but let down by canned animations that clip through scenery and body-double movements that look nothing like the films. Most players stop watching after a few levels. The campaign spans roughly seven chapters and around nine hours with no multiplayer and limited replayability beyond chasing cleaner runs, though the combination of fog of war and adaptive enemy behavior gives each attempt some variance. For the strategy-minded player who has bounced off pure action games: this is approachable. The interface gives you full information on visible enemies at all times, the game pauses whenever a decision is needed, and there is no time pressure on your thinking, only on John's execution. The tutorial is more text-heavy than ideal but the systems click within the first Chinatown sequence. If you respect the timeline and manage focus carefully, the game rewards you with exactly the sensation of being an efficient, cold-blooded problem-solver. If you expect the kinetic spectacle of the films replicated in real time, you will find a game that is interesting but structurally unable to deliver that rush. It is a smart licensed experiment that runs out of new ideas about two-thirds of the way through, leaving you to appreciate the mechanics on pure repetition.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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