BLACKWOOD Review

A Video Store by Day, a John Wick Cosplay by Night

BLACKWOOD's pitch is genuinely great: you play Anton, a DVD rental store owner in a lovingly rendered 2012 who moonlights as a contract killer. By day you stock shelves, recommend movies to fussy customers, and pet the shop cat. By night you're doing balletic takedowns on armed men in warehouses, all set to a soundtrack that leans hard into needle-drop nostalgia. Developer AttritoM7 Productions, previously known for the PvP shooter Zero Hour, is chasing something like Hotline Miami crossed with Max Payne crossed with a cozy management sim, and the ambition is obvious in every trailer beat and every piece of concept art plastered around the DVD store.

The John Wick influence isn't subtle and isn't meant to be. Weapon customization stations let you physically pick up attachments and bolt them onto guns on a table in front of you, an idea clearly borrowed from The Last of Us Part II's crafting animations, and when it works it's one of the most satisfying tactile touches in the game. Takedowns, when a target is isolated, play out as quick, brutal, invulnerable animations that make Anton feel like the most dangerous man in the room. On paper, and in the opening ten minutes, BLACKWOOD looks like exactly the kind of confident, mid-budget action game that's been vanishing from the market for a decade.

The problem is that "on paper" describes most of what BLACKWOOD actually delivers. Underneath the premise is a game that is, at launch, closer to an ambitious tech demo than a finished product, and the gap between the vision and the execution is the story of this review.

Great Ideas, Half-Built Systems

Take the gunplay first, because it's the strongest thing here: weighty weapons, a satisfying moving reticle, and takedowns that make you feel powerful even on higher difficulties. It's not perfect — hit registration is inconsistent, enemies occasionally spawn or reposition without footstep audio, and the "no punishment for executing anyone" balance means there's rarely tension once you've cleared the first enemy — but it's the one pillar of BLACKWOOD that mostly stands up.

Everything else wobbles. Melee combat, which the game forces you into for entire missions including its only boss fight, is broadly agreed by players to be the worst part of the experience: parry and dodge windows that don't match the animations, an unblockable boss combo that stops your inputs cold, and hitboxes that register damage before the swing animation has even started. One reviewer needed 37 attempts to clear the sole boss fight by exploiting a movement glitch rather than engaging with the intended system. The lone driving mission fares no better — floaty handling, immovable street furniture that stops your car dead, and a sense that this mode exists because the pitch document called for one, not because anyone particularly wanted to build it.

The DVD store, meanwhile, is the game's other half, and it's shallower than the marketing implies. Running it mostly means recommending movies within a strict time window before customers get annoyed, and clearing clutter you often can't see clearly. There's no way to check how the store is performing mid-shift, and multiple players report opaque swings in the customer-service score for reasons they can't identify. One mission of story content unlocks per in-game day, and a day doesn't advance until you've spent a solid chunk of real time doing chores, which means the ratio of "being a hitman" to "restocking DVDs" skews heavily toward the mundane half of the double life the premise promises.

Bugs are frequent and varied: NPCs clipping through walls, enemies vanishing mid-fight, a mission that dropped one player into an unrecoverable black void, ambient audio that doesn't spatialize correctly, and a save system that only writes progress when Anton goes to sleep — meaning a bad run, a crash, or simply forgetting can cost you an entire in-game day of chores and missions. Performance reports are wildly inconsistent too, ranging from a locked 120fps at 4K for some players to persistent stutter and ghosting (particularly with DLSS enabled) for others, with no HDR support and a thin settings menu that doesn't let you separate mouse and look sensitivity.

Act One of Three, Sold as the Whole Story

The most consequential issue with BLACKWOOD isn't a bug, it's a business decision, and it's the one thing nearly every player review — positive and negative — brings up unprompted. The game is structured as "Act 1" of a planned three-act story, with Acts 2 and 3 slated for roughly March and September of the following year. Act 1 currently contains four main story missions, most completable in ten to fifteen minutes each, alongside the DVD store loop and a handful of side contracts. Total main-story playtime for the "complete" release is commonly reported at around one hour.

AttritoM7 has been explicit and public that this is not Early Access. A community FAQ statement quoted repeatedly in player reviews reads: "BLACKWOOD is not an Early Access game. Act 1 is not an unfinished version of BLACKWOOD... you are playing one complete part of the whole game." Some players report that Steam discussion threads asking why the game wasn't released as Early Access, given the acts still in development, were locked and that users pushing the question were banned. Whether or not that account is fully accurate, the developer's own framing is on the record, and it has not landed well: a large share of the audience, including several players who otherwise enjoyed their time with the gunplay, describe the release as functionally indistinguishable from an early-access build sold at full early-access pricing without the label — and without the goodwill that label tends to buy a developer when things are still rough.

That framing colors everything else in this review. A buggy, thin, unpolished build is a normal and forgivable stage for a game to be in. Selling that build as a complete, standalone $24.99 product while insisting it isn't early access is a much harder thing to defend, and it's the context in which every other flaw here should be read. Several players also report that in-game DVD box art, wall posters, and advertising banners appear to be AI-generated rather than hand-illustrated — a claim repeated across multiple independent reviews rather than sourced from any single outlet, but consistent enough in the specifics (no human-made cover art anywhere in the shop) that it's worth flagging as a recurring player complaint rather than a one-off.

What's Actually Fun Here

It would be unfair to write BLACKWOOD off entirely, because the moments that work, work well. The 2012 setting is rendered with real specificity — the DVDs, the cars, the needle-drop soundtrack, the CRT-adjacent aesthetic of the shop — and it gives the game a distinct identity that a plainer contemporary setting wouldn't have. World and level design in the action sequences, particularly the opening mission with civilian NPCs caught in the crossfire, show genuine craft. The gunplay, again, is legitimately good in isolated encounters, and the weapon customization loop is the kind of small tactile system that's easy to lose an hour to even when the mission structure around it is thin.

There's also a real story hook buried in here: a rival, a stolen thumb drive, a mysterious contact going by "little boy," and enough atmosphere in the cutscenes (uneven lip sync aside) to suggest AttritoM7 has a real narrative in mind, even if Act 1 barely scratches its surface. Players who came in for Zero Hour's world-building and music carry over some goodwill, and it shows in reviews that are frustrated rather than dismissive — people who want this to work and are annoyed that it currently doesn't.

Verdict

BLACKWOOD has one of the better action-game pitches of 2026 and one of its more frustrating launches. The gunplay and takedown systems have real potential, the setting is distinctive, and there's a compelling story trying to get out from under some very rough production values. But melee combat that actively works against you, a save system that punishes normal play, an hour of main-story content spread thin across DVD-store busywork, and a save-scarring bug list would all be forgivable in an early-access build. AttritoM7 has explicitly, repeatedly said that's not what this is, and that framing is where BLACKWOOD loses the benefit of the doubt. If Acts 2 and 3 arrive on schedule and address the melee and stability problems, there's a genuinely good game buried in here. Right now, you're paying full price to beta-test it.

Pros:

• Strong core gunplay and satisfying, weighty takedowns
• Distinctive, well-realized 2012 setting and soundtrack
• Tactile, Last of Us-style weapon customization
• A genuinely interesting dual-life premise with real narrative hooks
• Level and world design shine in the game's best action sequences

Cons:

• Melee combat is broken, including an unfair, unpolished boss fight
• Only about an hour of main-story content for a full-price release
• Save system only triggers on sleep, risking a full day of lost progress
• Frequent bugs: clipping, vanishing enemies, audio and performance inconsistencies
• Sold as a complete game while structurally and functionally resembling early access