I rewatched John Wick and I'm desperate for a vidya that captures the feel. Replaying Splinter Cell Blacklist which
actually pulls it off decently if you play aggressively. Sam uses center axis relock like John Wick does and has some fun hand to hand animations with the killing in motion mechanic.
It's too bad the game fuckin sucks. It has an early version of the problem every ubisoft game has now. It gives you too many tools and quantifies too many things and the systems underneath aren't robust enough to support it. After a few missions you have so many options that the basic gameplay loop has zero challenge and you can blow through anything, just like assassin's creed, far cry, tomb raider, that stupid mad max game, batman arkham whatever, shadow of lord of the rings, that game with the robots for PS4, not all of those are ubisoft but the "ubisoft formula" that started with assassin's creed and far cry has completely taken over triple-A singleplayer games.
So since they don't have good fundamentals, they're forced to use hacky solutions to maintain some challenge, which mostly means enemies that are immune to your special tools, or creating situations where you can't use your special tools. It's especially annoying in splinter cell because they set up a score mechanic where you earn points in Ghost (never get spotted, never interact with enemies), panther (kill everybody without getting spotted) and assault (fuck it, just shoot everything), and there's not enough stuff in a level to get a medal in more than one. But then because they've set it up that way, they can't give you any meaningful restrictions or constraints because they'd ruin the score process. One mission you're forced to play ghost for a section, which just makes it harder to get a medal in one of the more fun playstyles. Later in that same mission you have to fight your way through a squad of commando hitmen with no gadgets, no goggles, and no knife, once again ensuring that your final score is gonna be completely fucked up at the end.
And it's also really circumscribed and linear in a way that ruins the feel of proper commando operator shit. Patrols are designed so you almost never have to hide bodies or consider the long term, if a body is gonna be spotted it's usually within 30 seconds of taking the guy down. Missions are divided up into very obvious sections with no overlap between them, so you can go apeshit in one section with bombs and unsuppressed guns and then go to the next section and it's reset to normal. And even if you play normal, you know that nothing in the previous section will affect this section (like the aforementioned leaving bodies behind) which lessens the appeal of playing ghost since there's no risk of previous activity suddenly alerting the base. You know when you've hit the transition point and you know when you can expect to see enemies again, so there's no sense of danger in opening that door, because you know there's no enemies in that section. It feels really artificial and gamey. But that's in every stealth game now, so it's hardly a specific criticism of this game.
The game fuckin sucks, so why am I still playing it?