Go watch the trailer for BLACKWOOD and try telling me it doesn’t look slick. Running a struggling DVD store by day and getting into gun-fu by night is such an inherently cool premise that it’s surprising no studio had tried this particular combination before AttritoM7 Productions. The studio may be a newcomer, but it has already demonstrated its potential with the tactical FPS Zero Hour.
Unfortunately, BLACKWOOD’s execution falls well short of its premise. The game is rough around the edges, plagued by technical issues, and, more importantly, fails to capitalize on its two biggest selling points: its DVD store management and its stylish gunplay. Both mechanics ultimately feel underdeveloped, leaving the game’s promising concept frustratingly unrealized. BLACKWOOD has all the ingredients of a cult classic, but beneath its slick presentation is a game that struggles to live up to the considerable potential of its own premise.
New York noir
BLACKWOOD is the story of John Anton Blackwood, a seemingly normal, edgy young man and proud owner of a struggling DVD store in 2012 New York. Softspoken (so low it’s hard to hear at times) and a big movie buff, even having a giantass tattoo of a film reel on his upper arm, Anton leads a quiet life. That all changes by night when he transforms into an edgy young assassin taking lives and beating people up for whoever pays the most. It isn’t much, but it’s an honest living. The best compliment I can give the story is that it’s barely there. I never expected an avant-garde level of storytelling from BLACKWOOD, but what’s on offer here is just a set of awkard cutscenes with plenty of unintentionally funny moments sporting questionable voice acting and a main character who straight up looks like Robert Pattinson from The Batman, minus the charm.
BLACKWOOD is an episodic game (sort of). The story is split into three arcs, and the game that’s launching today will contain only the first arc of an ongoing story. Players who purchase BLACKWOOD at launch will receive the future Acts as free updates as they are released, with Act 2 currently planned for March 2027 and Act 3 for September 2027. Despite the studio claiming that it’s not an Early Access title, the gameplay sure makes you feel like it is. In my honest opinion, BLACKWOOD would have fared much better as an Early Access game anyways.
This is business
Having a bad story is the least of BLACKWOOD’s worries. The game’s two major gameplay hooks, the store management and the combat, both feel incredibly unsatisfying and unfinished. The DVD store first. Each day in the game starts with Anton waking up, and you’re immediately given the choice of going to the store to run it personally or just skip it altogether and go in for the assassin missions. In his absence, his female staff (whom he has a crush on) can manage the store for him. If you decide to stick around and do everything yourself, you’ll find that there’s barely anything that requires player involvement.
The only thing you actually have to do is order DVDs across various movie genres using the in-game internet and stock them on the appropriate shelves. Everything else is automated. You can approach customers and recommend movies, work the billing counter, or perform the occasional chore, but these activities amount to little more than glorified busywork. Watching Anton mop the floor or restock shelves isn’t exactly riveting gameplay. Oh but you can feed and pet the cat. Yay. Meanwhile, increasing the store’s popularity and turning a profit is practically effortless.
You can order additional equipment, such as a coffee machine and a popcorn machine, but neither adds much to the management aspect. The game occasionally tells you to refill these machines or repair broken bulbs, but neither task ever came up during my playthrough. With so many excellent management sims on the market, it’s baffling that BLACKWOOD settles for such a bare-bones approach instead of learning a thing or two from its contemporaries.
Gun-Fu gone wrong
The second major gameplay hook of BLACKWOOD, and the thing most people are waiting for in the game, the John Wick-esque gunplay is underwhelming at its best and downright unfun at its worst. Anton does not feel good to control at all. Controlling Anton feels like driving a pickup in a NASCAR race. The cover system is very unresponsive, and a majority of the movement animations look very choppy.
I could have passed a blind eye if the gunplay was any good. Unfortunately, it’s not. I did not expect this level of unsatisfying gunplay from the makers of Zero Hour. The weapons (of which there is a decent variety) feel off to shoot with underwhelming sound effects and unreliable hitboxes. Shotguns get the worst of it. There are plenty of times when your shots do not connect or stop upon hitting fragile materials like glass. This does not apply to the enemies, and they’ll shower you with bullets with pinpoint accuracy. Phantom hits are pretty common as well.
The one area where BLACKWOOD actually delivers is its takedowns. These five-second-long glory kills look as though the bulk of the development budget went into motion-capturing them, leaving mere pennies for everything else. There’s an impressive variety of executions, each tailored to different situations, and you can even create your own choreographed takedown sequences for fun and giggles. But even these flashy animations can only carry the game so far. At the end of the day, they’re just instant-kill cutscenes that you can trigger whenever you get close enough to an enemy. And, like any game before it (*cough* Rogue Warrior *cough*), they eventually wear out their welcome.
Can of worms
Then there’s the myriad of other problems, like the game looking like it came straight from the PS2 era most of the time. I’m not one for visual fidelity, but everything in BLACKWOOD sticks out like a sore thumb due to the lack of a distinct visual identity. We all love to give crap to Unreal Engine these days, but one has to agree that Unity is not the ideal engine to make such action-heavy games on. Character models can even look downright creepy and uncanny valley at times. The less said about clipping and visual artifacts, the better. I also experienced this weird bug where the performance of the game would keep dropping with each checkpoint restart.
If you want more gameplay, then BLACKWOOD has driving missions too. Except that Anton’s car controls are worse than vanilla GTA IV, and every object in the game world acts like video game physics does not apply to them. I lost count the number of times the game forced a restart on me just because I hit a small pylon during a chase mission. Then there’s the Arkham-inspired melee combat that’s hands down the worst interpretation of the system thanks to unresponsive controls, poor hit feedback, and the impact of hitting wet paper. Everything is just…raw.
Add a lackluster save system to the mix, and you’re in for a world of pain. While BLACKWOOD frequently saves checkpoints during assassination missions, they seem to reset when quitting the game. Progress is saved permanently only once at the start of each day, meaning a crash at any point can cost you an entire day’s progress. I learned this the hard way when I quit midway through an assassination mission, expecting to resume from the previous checkpoint, only to find myself back at the very start of the day. All the progress I’d made managing the store until evening? Gone. One other time, the game had me do the same story mission on two separate days—and it was the awful car chase one. The game is filled with infuriating design flaws that make an already repetitive gameplay loop even more frustrating.
The silver lining
Is it all bad? Well, mostly, but the most painful thing is that the team clearly had passion for the project. I hate to crap on the little guys, but BLACKWOOD is such a missed opportunity. You can see the love and care of the team had in the myriad of DVD box art, their descriptions (even if some look suspiciously AI-generated), the GTA IV-like internet browser, and the various customization options in the form of new outfits, tac-gear, weapons, and attachments. But passion alone doesn’t make a good game. The foundation is there, but it’s shaky at best, leading me to my previous assessment that BLACKWOOD would have fared much better as an early access game. Maybe a few updates can fix some of its most glaring issues. Only time will tell.
Real Talk
BLACKWOOD is a game that works in concept but doesn’t translate well to good gameplay. Even for a purveyor of all that is jank, it’s a tough sell. There are janky games that are fun to play, and there are ones that are not. For now, BLACKWOOD falls into the latter category.
FINAL SCORE: 50/100
