![]() ![]() Some actions will also use up Focus, with the flurry of activity eventually getting to even John Wick – bear in mind, each level can take just half a minute or so of in-game time to complete! Takedowns in particular are a Focus-sapping move, and so a brief moment to shake his head a reset is sometimes in order. Even there, you have strikes that can knock off two of an enemy’s three pips of health, takedowns that throw them to the floor and let you choose the direction in which you then move, and a grappling push that deals one chunk of damage and can manoeuvre an enemy a few steps backward – great for neutralising them and moving behind scenery, or for an amusing pushed kill. Naturally, you’ve got the sharp double-tap of John Wick’s custom pistol, but in a pinch of time with multiple enemies coming at you, you might be better off quickly throwing it to stun one enemy and engaging in melee combat with another. Though you just have a gun and some fists, you have a lot of possibilities open to you. ![]() You see that visually represented along the top of the screen in a timeline that also features every enemy you can currently see and what they’re planning to do, letting you weigh up the threat, prioritise, decide, act, kill, move on. Every action you take or want to take has a time cost in tenths of a second, after which the game pauses for you once more, which includes setting yourself up to perform the action and then pulling it off. Instead, it’s more like you’ve hit pause while watching the films and pondered “What would John Wick do?” before hitting play and letting the action continue. It might look like a turn-based game, right down to the hex-based nodes on the floor that you move between, but it isn’t. John Wick Hex gives you all the time in the world. It might seem fast to us, but he’s got time to analyse and pull off every action. With the adrenaline pumping, with his senses keenly drawing in every detail of the world around him and the people coming to try and get him, the character of John Wick knows just what to do. Instead of presenting you with a whirlwind of close quarters gunfighting and melee combat, it slows things riiiiight down. John Wick Hex takes a very different approach. It’s no surprise that QTEs have become a crutch for so many cinematic moments in video games, but really they simply test your reflexes, they don’t make you embody that person. ![]() Not only that, but they’re trying to get you to feel like a special ops soldier without any of the training, like a swashbuckling archeologist without a degree, like a long-jumping plumber without… something. I don’t really want to wade into the whole ‘Dark Souls easy mode’ debate, but I think we can all generally accept that, while many of us will relish the challenge, action games, first and third person shooters, even humble platformers are actually pretty difficult to play. ![]()
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