Flow in game movement really is the secret sauce. From linking tricks in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, to chaining specials in SSW Tricky, to slo-mo diving over boxes in Stranglehold, getting movement just right can elevate a mediocre game into something special (hello, Wanted: Dead).

It can also turn a great game into an all-timer (hello, Suit For Hire).

There’s no attempt to obfuscate the inspiration for the premise here: this is John Wick: The Game in all but (legally out of reach) name. You are a ruggedly handsome man in an excellent series of suits tasked with clearing out an unfolding series of themed rooms, earning money for weapon and costume unlockables. A typical play session drops you at the entrance to a place – casino, pier, nightclub, etc – and your only target is that everyone’s a target. Everyone also wants a piece of you on sight, so then you shoot, dive and reload in the most stylish way possible until you’re the only one left standing.

Toronto developers Godmode Interactive display a great understanding of friction in their caveats to the destruction: you have seven bullets. That’s it. If you make a perfect shot, then you’re rewarded with a single dropped bullet which you can then reload at will. Make seven perfect shots within the combo window – bambambambambambambam – and your gun automatically reloads. Miss enough shots and you’re suddenly in peril, forced to kick and punch back into a position of power. Weaken enemies enough and you’ll get a prompt to perform a showman-esque execution which also regenerates bullets, and so the dance begins again. Grab an enemy’s gun and that stacks on top on your own, giving you some open bullet play before going back to your own gun. It’s a very precise loop that feels like it’s been honed with many adjustments over hours of playtesting, the result being a performance-based feedback loop that soon shows its addictive claws.

It that were it, that would be enough, but the joy just keeps coming. Unlockable handguns allow you to switch up your playstyle. Modifiers allow you to adjust danger and kill effects, all with slight bonus multiplier adjustments. There’s even an ability to play the whole game from the original overhead perspective or with the recently-added third-person made, and they’re somehow both perfectly realised (you can also switch on the fly if you add a button command in the option menu, and it feels like magic).

Feel is the key word here – not just the freedom of movement, not just the pumping soundtrack, but in how the whole game invites you to transition through dangerous space in the most graceful way possible. And when you get it right, it feels great. Suit For Hire has me by the throat, pushing me to be more beautiful, but also more than willing to let me kick back with infinite ammo and extreme ragdoll enemy death (highly, highly recommended). It’s this flow that elevates this game (that somehow costs less than a sandwich) into not just my game of the year, but one of my favourite games of all time.

Suit For Hire is available on Steam.