Blackwood Review – Not Quite Wick

What happens when you try to mix John Wick and Max Payne? You'd probably get a character more badass than anything we've seen in games, films, TV series, or any other medium. That's what AttritoM7 Productions hoped to achieve with Anton Blackwood. Somewhere along the way, though, it seems they got a few constants and variables wrong.

When the developers themselves invite that kind of comparison, only two outcomes are possible. The game either becomes a legendary one or a total flop, and in Blackwood's case, the latter is the more likely verdict.

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The developers desperately want for Anton to be the next John Wick. They will have two more chances to convince us; the first chance didn't work out so far.

Clean Cash by Day, Dirty Work by Night

Blackwood is a third-person shooter in which you play as Anton Blackwood, a gun for hire who takes on all sorts of shady jobs to put bread on the table. However, there is a strange twist to it all, as that is only what he does at night. During the day, he runs a small DVD store, which earns the money that pays his bills, his rent, and everything else.

In theory, this setup should work really well. During the day, you'll take care of small tasks like feeding the cat, tidying up the DVD cases, and fixing broken lights. Completing these tasks raises your store's popularity, which brings in more customers and, with them, more money. The money earned in the store is clean cash, and it keeps the store running. The catch is that you can only take one job per night, so you'll spend a lot of time behind the counter whether you like it or not.

Night activities are far more fun and thrilling. You'll find jobs on the computer in the basement, which gives you access to the Dark Web. Here, you can also buy new weapons and customise the ones you already own, and this customisation is one of the game's highlights. By combining different parts, you can assemble entirely new guns, and playing around with this option is a lot of fun.

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The store looks decent, and the gameplay during the day seems relaxing, contrary to the high adrenaline gameplay at night.

Cover, Shoot, Repeat

After accepting a job, you're automatically sent to carry it out. The jobs vary in context, but they always come down to the same thing. You find the target or the asset, start the job, and almost always, something goes wrong, which means gunplay or hand-to-hand combat. Speaking of those two, the gunplay can be fun, and I'd say it has potential, but it's buggy as hell.

The shooting relies heavily on the cover system. Anton will usually take cover automatically, but you can also press a dedicated button to do it yourself. It's the usual shooting from behind cover we've seen in so many games before, and there's nothing here that makes Blackwood stand out. If you let enemies creep up on you, a gunfight can easily turn into a fistfight, and this is where the game frustrated me the most. No matter how many times I tried, I never managed to break free from an enemy's grip, and every time I got grabbed from behind, it was game over.

Where Blackwood really shines is the takedowns. Get close enough to an enemy, and Anton will finish him off with a brutal, smoothly animated move, often using the environment around him, before switching straight back to his gun. These are the moments when the game actually feels like a John Wick film, and they're easily the best-looking animations in the whole game. The problem is that they're almost too strong. Takedowns cost you nothing, and you don't need to weaken enemies first, so many encounters come down to pressing the same button over and over, at least until someone appears behind you and empties a whole magazine into your back.

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The combat in Blackwood relies heavily on the cover system.

The game sends enemies at you from many different directions, and if you're not careful, you'll be overrun in no time. The rather dumb AI doesn't help either, as enemies keep spawning out of thin air, and there's nothing you can do about it. They do take cover, but once you're out of their line of sight, they won't bother to move. Instead, they keep shooting into obstacles rather than repositioning, which forces you to go looking for hidden enemies just to finish the encounter.

The checkpoint system is also poorly balanced. Because of encounters where enemies easily overwhelm you, I was forced to repeat huge sections of missions. Make one mistake, and you'll be sent back to replay long stretches, which quickly becomes tedious and boring. On top of that, the game only saves permanently at the start of each day, so quitting in the middle of a mission means losing the whole day's progress.

Act 1 also includes a single driving section, a car chase in which you have to get from one point to another with enemies on your tail. It sounds exciting on paper, but the car has no weight at all and slides around as if it were driving on ice. Crashing into other cars or walls feels lifeless, yet a simple street sign can bring you to a dead stop. Slow down too much or miss a turn, and you'll have to start the whole chase again, which makes this one of the most frustrating parts of the game. The developers have said that Act 2 will bring more driving, so this is one area that urgently needs work.

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The missions can be taken on the PC in the basement, where you can access the Dark Web.

A Story That Barely Begins

I haven't mentioned the story until now on purpose, because there isn't much to say about it. Every mission tries to paint a bigger picture, but since the game is split into three acts and only Act 1 is available right now (the other two arrive in 2027), the story barely scratches the surface. The four available story missions serve only as an introduction and a warm-up for the real stuff the developers promise for the upcoming acts. We'll have to take their word for it, but so far, I'm not convinced. It remains to be seen what the game has in store for us next year.

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The first act just introduces things, barely scratching the surface of the story.

Stuck Two Generations Behind

For me, the biggest problem with Blackwood lies in its presentation, which, let's be honest, is far below today's standards, and I'm struggling not to use stronger words here. For reference, I've seen plenty of games from the PS3 and Xbox 360 era that look far better than this.

The textures look awful, especially in the background, where the low quality becomes obvious as soon as you move the camera away from Anton. Visual effects that games have been using for a very long time, like particle effects, advanced lighting and realistic shadows, are nowhere to be seen. Everything looks bleak, the colours are washed out, and there's simply nothing in the visual presentation I could call even barely passable.

Then there's the character design, which looks stuck in the PS2 era. The movement animations, general behaviour, and facial expressions are simply awful, and if Blackwood wants to be taken seriously, the developers have to fix these things in future acts. And let's be clear here. This is not an Early Access game. The developers clearly stated that this is the first act of the full game, so all of these criticisms fully apply.

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This is simply not how the characters should look in 2026, and during a cutscene on top of everything.

Echoes, Voices and DX12 Woes

As for the sound design, the soundtrack is okay. Some of the background melodies that play during calmer moments in the DVD store are pretty good, and the music during gunfights does the job too. What bothered me was how the guns sound. Every shot sounds like it's being fired inside a narrow tunnel, echoing all over the place, even when the fight takes place outdoors. The voice acting gets a passing grade, although Anton can sound ridiculous at times, using a soft voice in situations that clearly call for something else.

Performance on my PC (Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 3080 Ti, 32 GB RAM) was more than good, but considering how outdated the game looks, that's hardly a surprise. In DX11, the game was stable the whole time. However, if you launch it in DX12 mode through Steam, it becomes extremely unstable and crashes constantly. The developers do warn you about this, and that would have been acceptable ten years ago, when DX12 was still settling in. By today's standards, it simply isn't.

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Look at the quality of the textures on the right. This must be fixed posthaste.

Conclusion

Blackwood had every chance to become a hidden indie gem. A DVD store owner moonlighting as a hitman is a great hook, and the takedowns and weapon customisation show that the developers have good ideas. Unfortunately, almost everything around those ideas falls apart. The gunplay is buggy, the AI is dumb, the checkpoints are punishing, the driving is clumsy, and the presentation looks like it belongs two console generations ago. To be fair, the developers have been patching the game regularly since launch, and Acts 2 and 3 will come at no extra cost to everyone who buys it now, so there is still some hope. Right now, though, Blackwood is a game I'd rather keep an eye on than recommend, and John Wick can rest easy for the time being