As a convenient and natural way of human-computer interaction, gesture recognition technology has broad research and application prospects in many fields, such as intelligent perception and virtual reality. This paper summarized the relevant literature on gesture recognition using Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) millimeter-wave radar from January 2015 to June 2023. In the manuscript, the widely used methods involved in data acquisition, data processing, and classification in gesture recognition were systematically investigated. This paper counts the information related to FMCW millimeter wave radar, gestures, data sets, and the methods and results in feature extraction and classification. Based on the statistical data, we provided analysis and recommendations for other researchers. Key issues in the studies of current gesture recognition, including feature fusion, classification algorithms, and generalization, were summarized and discussed. Finally, this paper discussed the incapability of the current gesture recognition technologies in complex practical scenes and their real-time performance for future development.