BLACKWOOD In Progress Review – Double Life, Half The Depth

BLACKWOOD is a gritty third-person shooter by AttritoM7 Productions where you play as Anton, a contract killer by night and a seemingly ordinary DVD store owner by day—though in 2012 New York, it’s hard to say which profession people would be most surprised by. Essentially, you play as John Wick if he worked a nine to five, with the gameplay split between daily store management and nightly contracts. It’s an interesting premise for sure, but I question whether systems with such a jarring dichotomy were built with enough depth to stand on their own, or whether they serve as a crutch for one another. Currently, only Act 1 is available, with Acts 2 and 3 planned for 2027, so this will be treated as an in-progress review based on Act 1 alone. Anyone who buys BLACKWOOD at launch will receive the future acts as free updates.

The store management side of things feels somewhat bare-bones, giving players just enough agency for it to be called a store simulator. You can order new DVDs, stock shelves, and set prices. To increase your store’s rating, you also have to clean the store and upsell customers. Exciting stuff, I know, but there’s a reason retail simulator games have been so popular. BLACKWOOD seems to have missed the memo on those reasons, however, because the daily store aspect feels more like set-dressing than it does a fully fleshed-out system. There is a modicum of thinking involved, since stocking movies on the wrong shelf or setting prices absurdly high hurts your rating, and taking too long when suggesting movies upsets customers. Ultimately, though, the place mostly runs itself, and there’s little you can do to actually make it feel like your store. Everyone who plays BLACKWOOD will have the same four shelves (Action, Adventure, Horror, and Romance), and there’s little reason not to just stock them with all the same highly-rated movies for each category. You can’t even decorate, despite the Steam page saying that your store is “where you live, decorate, and roleplay a ‘normal’ existence.” Being able to actually add personal touches to the store would at least help make the system feel more rewarding.

Overall, I’d say that the store has little point beyond artificially padding out BLACKWOOD’s playtime (and petting the cat). After the first five minutes of a shift, you’ll usually find yourself just standing by the door, waiting for the next customer to walk in. I suppose that’s fairly accurate to the retail experience of a DVD store in 2012, but it isn’t exactly engaging gameplay. While it’s briefly entertaining to watch the AI break down as multiple customers try (and fail) to use the front door at the same time, the management mechanics lack depth for what is supposedly a foundational part of the game. The only reason to invest time into the store is to earn clean cash, but beyond buying civilian weaponry, clean cash is mostly just used to further expand your DVD selection. That said, so long as you keep things stocked, you can largely ignore the store if you only care about earning enough for rent, and you can even ignore stocking if you want to make your cashier Amelie do it instead. For maximum profit and ratings, though, be prepared to spend most of your day just kind of standing around.

Night-time is where all the action is, giving a welcome respite from the tedium of the day. There are main story contracts you can follow where Anton deals with the fallout of his most recent job, having stolen a USB drive with sensitive info from a local crime boss. The cinematics for these are done well, even if some of the characters themselves dip into uncanny valley territory at times. There are also side contracts you can accept, ranging from hit jobs, to underground fight clubs, to honest stunt work. The combat itself is very run-and-gun, with the ability to dive, roll, and slide into the fray. The slow-mo dive in particular seems heavily inspired by Max Payne, and the contextual takedowns scream John Wick. It’s actually quite impressive just how many different takedowns there are based on location and weaponry, even if they somewhat trivialize the game. There’s little reason not to just spam takedowns on every enemy you encounter if you’re fast enough to reach them, since you’re invincible during the animation and there are no prerequisites besides running up to an enemy and pressing ‘F’. It’s a shame, really, because the gunplay itself is quite fun and there are a fair few options to modify guns to suit different scenarios.

While the gunplay shows promise, melee combat is in a bad state, especially when it comes to parrying. Some enemy attacks have their parry window tied to the wind-up, while others are timed to just before impact. Worse, an enemy will sometimes initiate an attack from outside your parry range, but still slide forward enough to actually hit you after the parry window has concluded. You can just dodge these attacks, sure, but the dodge feels quite slow itself, and it isn’t particularly helpful when you find yourself pressed up against one of the many invisible walls in BLACKWOOD. The final boss of Act 1 was probably the worst offender for janky melee combat thanks to his unblockable attacks with split-second wind-ups, a boss which I struggled to beat with strategic dodging and parrying but absolutely trounced by spamming punches. Anytime Anton found himself in a brawl, I wondered why he wouldn’t just take out his handgun instead so he could be done with it. I guess even a hitman for hire has some sense of honor.

While the combat has some technical issues, BLACKWOOD’s main problem is an overall lack of content. There are only a handful of story missions in Act 1, and not many more side missions to go with them (which are generally short and simple). Somebody beelining for the end could easily finish Act 1 in a few hours, with about half of that time dedicated to cutscenes and store management. Having a game with two distinct modes of play isn’t inherently a bad thing, but they have to add up to something worthwhile or be able to stand on their own. As it stands, there is some mild interplay between both systems, where dirty cash you earn at night can be laundered into clean money, but for the most part your double lives remain separate. There aren’t even ways to upgrade your ability to launder cash, nor any risk to laundering it in the first place (it just happens automatically). Maybe future acts will dive more into the tension with Anton’s double lives, but Act 1 treats the dichotomy as more of an afterthought.

If there was a running theme to this review, it would be missed potential. BLACKWOOD tries to do a lot, but just winds up feeling empty. For instance, your DVD store sits on the ground floor of your apartment building, but aside from a brief interaction just after the tutorial where your neighbor’s son asks for a specific movie, the building is a ghost town. You never interact with—or even see—another tenant, aside from the occasional muffled conversations behind closed doors (and that one couple that’s always arguing). While I’m not expecting everyone to just hang around outside their apartment all day, the total isolation feels unnatural, too. Given that you have to trudge up two flights of stairs whenever you want to sleep to trigger the next day, it’s a major missed opportunity to not have more ambient neighbor interactions, even if brief, to really make the place feel lived in.

BLACKWOOD shows some promise, and the developers clearly have lofty ambitions for it, but I can only judge the game as it exists today, not based on what it might look like a year from now. If BLACKWOOD was in Early Access, perhaps there would be more room for leniency, but developer AttritoM7 Productions has insisted that this is not an Early Access title. That actually worries me, because it suggests that the various half-baked systems aren’t going to be revisited or expanded upon, and that we’re just going to be given more of the same going forward. And unfortunately, I don’t think more of the same is going to be enough in this case.

Austin reviewed BLACKWOOD on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and will not be changed.