mondomarsupial

Beautiful art and sound design don't do much to hide a buggy (no, not in the obvious way) and lackluster example of the metroidvania formula. Progression is miniscule and largely involves abilities that act as contrived keys for nonstandard locks placed carelessly about the world rather than typically offering much in the way of new or useful traversal and combat potential. You know something has gone wrong in your metroidvania when the response to getting a new ability is "Oh, bother. Now I have to go rub this against a half dozen points on the map that I half remember if I want to beat this game."

Twice the game made in half the time as compared to its predecessor and it really, really shows. The writing and overall design in world, quests, and moment to moment gameplay has suffered drastically. Instead of a tightly focused RPG that takes you on a journey through a thoughtfully constructed world by showing and telling only what it needs to, it's a mass of uncomplementing sideshow attractions that utterly lack the previous game's thick atmosphere and sharp wit.

The core game would be solid if not for the major control issues it's plagued with. Dropped or somehow misinterpreted inputs are extremely common to the degree that when things speed up, it'll often ignore several consecutive inputs and end up placing blocks in their "default" position. I wish I could blame this on the joycons but I haven't experienced this with any other game in my library and I use my switch pretty frequently. All the same issues are just as present on my pro controller, too.

Legitimately one of the most poorly made video games I have ever played. Buried somewhere under utterly unplayable netcode, an embarrassingly bland sandbox, and a multiplayer devoid of content outside of the "micro"transactions that it bombards you with unendingly, there is a potentially decent game through some okay movement mechanics and gunplay, but with Microsoft adamantly refusing to give 343 the time and funding necessary to polish this game to any playable degree, it doesn't seem like we'll ever see it.

John Wick Hex has the bones **** turn-based strategy buried somewhere in there, but it just feels half baked in a whole host of ways. The UI is misleading and can be downright frustrating to use at times, with weird oversights like using ammunition having the exact same visual effect as losing health. Frequently, your ability to click on things will be blocked for seemingly no reason, leading to a lot of camera finagling and irritating, avoidable misclicks. The camera as a whole is just bad, with your only option of rotation being left and right. Zooming in and out slightly alters the vertical perspective of the camera, with zooming in all the way offering a marginally more flat view and zooming out completely being almost completely top-down. This camera system causes a lot of unnecessary frustration because it makes trying to figure out what counts as cover, what constitutes line of sight and what can be ducked behind an inexact science at best and an exercise in futility at worst. Adding to that annoyance is the fact that enemies will pretty frequently shoot you through cover that you just manage to make it behind, leaving a bullet trail straight through the cover you made it to, because accuracy isn't static or primarily determined by line of sight. Your ability to hit shots, and the ability of your enemies, is random, skewed slightly by things like distance and stance. This is a bad move for a turn-based strategy for obvious reasons, but far worse is random enemy placement and type. You're guaranteed the same number of enemies in any given level, and a set number of those are bigger variants of the standard enemies, but the placement and type of all the standard enemies is randomized, meaning that you can come into a level at a major disadvantage because you're being rushed by a half dozen melee enemies, with one ranged enemy at the back that can fire straight through his allies to hit you, because friendly fire isn't a mechanic. I'd imagine this is intended to allow a more reactive style of gameplay, but this puts a lot of potential for planning and, well, strategy out the window. On top of this is the poorly implemented timeline mechanic, where the idea is that you can see the next moves of your enemies and plan ahead accordingly, but all it shows you is the action they're currently in the middle of when it's time to make your next move. Enemies act somewhat predictably but sometimes they wait and reposition at odd times and sometimes enemies you haven't seen yet will come out of the woodwork during a longer action to interrupt you, and it all just contributes to an overarching feeling of not having enough information to plan any cogent course of action. TL;DR John Wick Hex could be decent, but it's bogged down by too many design oversights and issues of clarity in its mechanics to work. It's in a bad enough state right now that I don't think it'll get anywhere good unless it's worked on consistently for a few months. Until then, give this one a miss.