BLACKWOOD Review - Max Pain

ScrambledAshton

5 minutes ago

9 min read

BLACKWOOD

PC/Steam

9/16/26

AttritoM7 Productions

https://youtu.be/pHiFj29kcCY

By day, Blackwood is an exciting new third-person action game that promises to give you the chance to feel like a proper John Wick. By night, it’s a complete pile of trash that is so broken and boring that you’ll want to hire an assassin to put you out of your misery if you decide to spend any money or time on Act 1 of this game.

I don’t relish being harsh about games. Lots of people have put lots of time into making them, so I feel compelled by my British nature to be polite and sugarcoat the misdeeds and mistakes of the independent games that come my way. Blackwood, however, has arrived on my lap at a time when I seem to have run out of the will to be kind, and thus I present to you what will certainly be my most brutal review of a game yet. So buckle up!

Blackwood promises a lot, and if you simply watched the trailer and looked at the screenshots, you may even (like me) feel quite excited at the prospects of what it could bring. You play as a ‘gun-for-hire’ turned DVD store owner, Anton, who must balance running a mildly successful video rental store with popping out and completing missions and contracts that require him to shoot, punch, and sneak his way through various locations and gangs of cap-wearing goons. You’ll juggle making enough ‘clean’ money to cover your rent and bills with saving up any dirty money you make to purchase new guns and attachments should you fancy making an upgrade or two.

All of this sounds great. You’re promised management sim elements spliced with fun gunplay and sharp and interesting beat-em-up melee combat. And it does, at least, attempt all those things. While I can (and will) list my issues with each and every part of this game, I feel I should first address the truly game-breaking bug that is so bad that I literally had to contact the devs to check I hadn’t activated the wrong build, because if this is how the game is going out…WOOF!

And while they have now rolled out an update, we ran out of time to sit through the hours of gameplay I lost to see if it is any better. But as it was, what you, my friends, need to know is that you categorically should not buy this game.

We almost binned this game’s review off because, unfortunately, a strange bug resulted in me having to start completely from scratch multiple times. The EXTRA annoying thing is, it wasn’t even consistent. One time I picked the next ‘Main’ mission and was sent back to the opening of the game, played through the whole thing again, watched the unskippable cut scenes, only to be plopped out into the opening moments with no money, none of my upgrades, and a real bitter taste in my mouth.

The second time, I ‘woke up’ into a new day with the opening morning cutscene playing and the same situation all over again, and then the final time, the real nail in the coffin, was after I had completed a random side contract, loaded back into the apartment, and watched the calendar reset to day 1. The glitch is so annoying, so game-breaking, and so inconsistent that the sudden cut to the opening cutscene choke slams you into the ground much like Anton with a faceless goon.

Perhaps, before it releases this week, the devs will fix it and you’ll actually be able to see more of this game than I did, but even if you can see more, I don’t know if you’ll really want to, because even without this game-breaking bug, Blackwood is still rubbish.

Let’s start with the main draw of the game, the 3rd person action, gunplay, and melee combat, the John Wick of it all, if you will.

In each mission, you’ll have access to one primary weapon (default being an AR of some kind) and a pistol. The gunplay is fun, for a bit, but it isn’t exactly dynamic and groundbreaking. The auto-aim is usually pretty good, so while in cover, you can just keep spamming the aim button to zip between different enemies and take them all out. You will run out of ammo for your primary weapon pretty quickly, but luckily you can pick guns off the corpses of fallen enemies that’ll replace it and give you a little bit of variety in your gunfights. There are a few environmental hazards you can activate while fighting, which can be satisfying if you manage to hit an enemy with a falling crate, but aside from the odd crate here and there, I didn’t notice much more than that…but to be fair, I did have to do the opening mission 4 times so…

There is a cover mechanic that can be a bit annoying; Anton doesn’t really snap to cover like you’d want him to, and when he does, he sometimes sits with his head still poking out the top, letting gangsters bounce bullets off of his dome till you wiggle him about to find a better spot. I also encountered some strange glitches within these gunfights; the screen would shake as if I was being hit with what can best be described as a mortar shell, and there would also be a sound as if I was being hit but taking no damage and showing no indicator towards who was shooting at me. The enemy AI is also a bit wonky in places; I’m not saying faceless goons are typically the brainiest bunch, but I’m not sure they’d all follow one another out of a door having watched the person before them each get shot, or just constantly fire into a wire mesh because the game thinks it can see me but it can’t shoot through it.

If you would believe it from my sort of mid opinion of the gunplay, it was actually the best bit of the game, because the beat-em-up melee combat is total wank. You have your usual melee situation, your dodge, parry, and smack buttons, and the enemies have an animation above their head that tells you when they’re about to punch you in the face, which is handy. I’d like one of those above my cat’s heads so I know when they’re about to pivot from being cute to totally fucking ripping up my shit. When you’re battling one guy at a time, it’s all rosy; you can judge the punches and send them flying with the crazy head humper finisher that makes me laugh every time.

But more than 2 guys and you’re gonna be grumpy, because unlike the polite English folk I am surrounded by, there is no waiting for their turn at all. Which is fine if you fancy realism, but incredibly annoying if you get 3 enemies doing the same animation at the same time; you’re very quickly getting minced up. The only way to combat that is by kiting them around so they’re always in front of you, and you can always see the punch bar, which is easier said than done when certain areas don’t give you the room to move. It is entirely your prerogative if you want to get done in by a group of men at once, but me personally, I like my male action in a more 1v1 situation.

What I am about to say is perhaps the biggest shock to me; my least favorite part of the game (aside from it being borked) is the DVD store running. I’ve played games where the specific purpose of the game is to run an old-school DVD rental store and loved every second, but Blackwood’s DVD store running is SO boring, SO long, and SO buggy. Every day you can go to work with Amelie in the store, trying to make your rent up, keep the shelves stocked, and stay popular so that the police don’t start to suspect your business is a front for the nefarious deeds you’re up to.

All pretty self-explanatory, you’ll buy stock of DVDs, paying extra for immediate delivery, stock the correct shelves with the correct genre of movie, restock the popcorn machine and the magazine racks to up your organization score, clean up any spillages or dusty messes to keep your cleanliness up, and recommend movies to confused customers. Easy, right?

Well no, every customer who comes in is going to get immediately confused and require a recommendation, and they will give you exactly 4 seconds to notice the pop-up, run over and recommend before they make a beeline for the front door and cost you valuable customer service points, which will go down if you don’t help them…but not up if you do…so godspeed getting that stat any higher than it starts. Recommending movies also requires you to have familiarized yourself with the game's entire catalog, which you can do only when rummaging through the shelves, not in the recommendation pop-up, because clients want a specific genre and a specific quality and if you’re off base…well they’re going to be well grumpy.

Aside from the most impatient customers you’ve ever seen, the other issue to contend with is that your stock of DVDs will randomly change and I am 100% sure not intentionally. I went from having almost fully stocked shelves and an inventory of just purchased stock to suddenly having all new DVDs in my pocket and a significantly reduced DVD selection.

Even without the bugs my main issue with the ‘daytime’ sections is quite how long they go on for, your shop is open from 9 am-7 pm, which is 20 real-life minutes per day and boy do you feel every second of it. You can pop out and do a mission while the day is ongoing…but it broke when I did that so no idea how that affects your score for the day.

The plot of the game?…sigh…wish I knew, couldn’t get past the first story quest, but basically, we follow Anton Blackwood in 2012 New York running about the city as a registered gun for hire, I would assume there is some double-crossing and perhaps a little bit of a love story between him and Amelie…dunno though…and the way the game is launching, even if you played the whole current release you’ll probably not know the whole story as this is just Act 1, with Act 2 coming in March and Act 3 in September 2027…and as you can tell I am so very excited for the next installment.

It looks good, I’ll give it that…well for the most part, there weren’t any visual glitches and the 3D environments are at least pretty impressive, but the cutscenes have some of the jankiest mouth and face movements I’ve seen in a while and there are about 5 character models for both gangsters and customers so we’re pretty limited on scope, which I would forgive if the rest of the game was fantastic but in this particular scenario, not one part of this game comes even remotely close to making up for the mess of the rest.

I’ve already mentioned some audio glitches from within gunfights, but the other thing I think kind of stinks is the voice acting. I’m not sure if Anton’s voice actor is just giving us absolutely no energy or variation because he has been told to perform it that way or he is just kinda phoning it in, but either way…it was BLAND.

SO overall, as I am sure you can probably tell I LOVED Blackwood…no but for real, I wanted to enjoy this game, and perhaps if it wasn’t quite so broken I could’ve overlooked some of the jank here and there and had myself a good little time. But that is my optimism seeping out after being negative this whole review, because really, even without the glaring issue I had, the game isn’t very good.

There’s nothing new, dynamic or interesting about the gunplay, the melee combat is more annoying than anything else and the DVD store sections feel completely unnecessary in this type of game and are in and of themselves also completely all over the place. Nothing in this game feels polished, nothing even feels like it’s had a good ol’ spit shine, it feels completely half-arsed. I hate to look at things with a glass half empty, but with this being only Act 1 (no clue how long it actually is due to, ya know, the bug) I don’t see many players making it to March for the second part let alone waiting a whole year for the final act.

Blackwood is broken, and bad, and that is the highly lethal combo that is leading me to give my first EVER Indie Krampus.

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