In 2014 the first “John Wick“ took theaters by storm, revitalized the career of Keanu Reeves, and brought stylized actions films back into the cultural zeitgeist. The character of John Wick combined marital arts and gunplay in a thrilling way. It spawned a number of sequels and spin-offs but never really entered into a realm that it seemed tailor made for, video games. Sure, we had John Wick Hex, but that was more of a tactical game, and the VR titles were limited in scope. All that is going to change.
The New John Wick Game Announcement
In last week’s State of Play from Sony, a provided a number of announcements. We already discussed how Konami came back in a big way, but there was another announcement about a full-fledged John Wick title with Reeves reprising his role. The game is being developed by Saber Interactive. While no gameplay footage has been shown yet, there’s still reason to be optimistic it could be worth the investment.
Stylized action games have been successful in the video game landscape for decades now. Some franchises have towered above others, with Devil May Cry coming to mind as one of the first. Similarly there’s Bayonetta and even the Batman: Arkham serries. One that seems like it could tie closer to John Wick though is the martial arts focused title, Sifu. If you take the combat engine from that and include gunplay, you come to an area that perfectly matches the on-screen action of the film franchise.
Can Saber Interactive Deliver?
This is where we’d love to see Saber Interactive take their upcoming John Wick project. The lore is there from what the films have established and the gameplay elements have been forged by other franchises. Reeves no stranger to video game acting either as he was a prominent part of Cyberpunk 2077. The only potential sticking point is that Saber Interactive doesn’t have a strong track record of internally developed titles. They’ve published some strong titles that were developed externally, but they’ve done far less internally.
There’s still plenty of reason to be looking forward to John Wick. It’s practically tailor made for games and we’ve been lacking a title with some good “gun-fu.” If this were 20 years ago when companies were still pumping out tie-in titles, we’d have had a John Wick game by now. Granted, it probably would’ve been lackluster but we’d still have something. We’ll continue to monitor progress of the game and provide updates when we have sone gameplay to analyze.
