Brutal and cinematic takedowns à la "John Wick". Dark, noir, "Max Payne" atmosphere. Fast fights with gunfire alternating with punches. Car chases. And it came out 1 minute ago on Steam.
BLACKWOOD has made its way to the various events (not least Gamescom in 2026) and in front of the outlets specialized in the gaming world by presenting spectacular animations and promising an all-action and DVD title worthy of the best third-person-shooters. The title developed by AttritoM7 Productions and published by IZilla Games tries to put together a story set in the New York nights of 2012, during which the cinematic action of the life of a ruthless contract killer alternates with the life of a DVD store manager.
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The atmosphere, at least in intentions, seems crazy, but it only takes a few hours to realize that the elegance of the model it looks at remains above all an aesthetic suggestion ... And with a tremendous nausea after a few hours of play, I wonder how it is possible that BLACKWOOD has been given all this hype.
Gameplay, combat, and controls
I state that I was uncertain about BLACKWOOD. But when I saw that AttritoM7 is a studio located in Bangladesh, I said to myself: "wow! How cool, I really want to see what these guys have created, because if it's even just barely valid stuff, I really want to try to support them". And I'm sorry to have given a vote that is practically a formation of a football team, but for the love of our readers I have to be objective.
The main problem with this video game is that many of its fundamental mechanics seem designed without a real focus on the coherence of the whole. For example, the game focuses a lot on cover combat, but then prevents you from using some elements of the scenario correctly: cars, for example, allow you to take cover on the sides but not on the back, they allow you to climb on the hood, but not on the roof... rather inexplicable limitations in a title that builds a good part of its shootings around positioning.
Even more problematic is the hand-to-hand combat, presented by the developers as one of the distinctive elements of the game thanks to the numerous contextual takedowns. In practice, however, the animations can start in an unreadable way and some takedowns seem to be activated almost randomly, while the rigid camera makes absurd some situations in which an enemy remains behind the character and attacks him without it really being possible to react in time.
Even the mapping of the controls on the controller (although it is a game that paradoxically lends itself to this control system) leaves several perplexities: for example, L1 to run and X to press to throw a punch and to hold down to kick during clashes are bizarre choices to say the least and further worsen the feeling of having an insufficiently refined system in front of you. In the DVD store the problem becomes even more evident, because interacting with menus and functions using the pad is often uncomfortable and unnatural. Furthermore, aiming at enemies becomes practically useless because the aim assist system, if active, is extremely invasive and practically cheated for you.
Interface, menus and DVD store
Store management is supposed to be the other half of the experience, but it ends up being one of the most tedious components instead. Tidying up, restocking, and managing DVDs may make sense on paper, but in practice the amount of downtime is astonishing, especially since this part fails to turn the shopkeeper's routine into a system deep enough to warrant their presence.
Added to this are purely technical problems of the interface. In the menus, moving the analog stick downwards, it happens that an item is skipped, while alternating mouse and controller can completely send the game into crisis, with the controller it can stop working correctly in the menus. These are small defects only in appearance, because accumulating they convey a general feeling of poor finish.
It doesn't help that in certain situations it is not at all clear what the game wants from the player, especially when running the shop (for example at the beginning you will have to complete "chores"... Yes but "chores" de what? What are these tasks? What should I do? Who tells me?). Even with an active mission, the next objective is not always communicated clearly enough and you end up wasting time trying to figure out what interaction the game expects.
The structure also has some annoying rigidities: certain cutscenes cannot be skipped, a mission selected by mistake cannot simply be canceled and the save is linked to resting in bed. In practice, once you start a mission you are often forced to carry it forward to a useful point in order to save, a choice difficult to justify in a contemporary game.
Graphics and performance
The art direction is probably the most curious case, because BLACKWOOD manages to be both pleasant and visually poor at the same time. Lights and shadows are often well done, the backgrounds are convincing in several cases and the urban setting has a fair amount of personality; when you stop to look at the elements in the background, in short, the game also manages to give pleasant views. The DVD store is also well characterized, with DVD covers that I can't understand how it could have been detailed in this way (indeed, yes, with artificial intelligence).
Then, however, we get to the characters and the difference is almost embarrassing for a 2026 title. Models and animations appear not very credible, with rigid faces and above all eyes that literally seem to be made of glass, lacking that naturalness necessary to support a production that focuses so much on the cinematographic component. Some details are so clumsy that they become perfect examples of the problem. In one sequence a shutter is raised, but the texture applied to the surface deforms along with the animation with the writings on the shutter visibly contracting and crushing, giving the impression that the material has simply been compressed in space instead of correctly following the movement. Justifying the technical compromise in the name of accessibility is really difficult, because BLACKWOOD, at least on the configuration used for the test, runs over 60 fps at maximum details without apparent difficulty, but it does so by showing models that seem to belong to a much less ambitious production. It would perhaps have been preferable to reduce the overall visual complexity and invest more in the quality of the models and animations, instead of achieving a strange imbalance between discreet backgrounds and unbelievable characters.
Steam currently indicates DirectX 11 as the reference API, while DirectX 12 support is indicated as an option for compatible hardware. In the copy sent to us for beta testing there was a selection "build DX12", but starting the relevant version led to the crash of the game: it was therefore not possible to consider it a really usable solution.
Then there is a problem that, more than many graphic defects, concretely risks compromising the experience: the camera shake during walking. The movement of the camera is so insistent as to be physically annoying; deactivating it from the options would be expected to disappear, but in the version tested the behavior did not change. After about an hour and a half of play, the result for me was a very marked level of nausea, to the point of making it necessary to interrupt the session. Something like this had only happened to me with the Meta Quest (which I then had to sell because I couldn't use it due to nausea). For a third-person game it is not a marginal problem, because visual comfort should be among the most basic settings and above all it should be respected when the player explicitly decides to disable an effect.
On sound and atmosphere BLACKWOOD manages at least partially to recover ground. The setting has that air that smells of cigarettes and gunpowder and the idea of New York in 2012, with the DVD store used as a counterpart to the nightlife, has an undoubted charm (which, however, the game could have exploited much better). Some urban views and the work on the lights also contribute to building the atmosphere.
Conclusion
BLACKWOOD had an interesting starting idea and an idea that, at least in intentions, could recall the noir action of the 2000s, but the result is too compromised by poorly maintained systems, questionable controls, slow and boring store management, interface problems and a number of technical imperfections that, added together, become impossible to ignore. The most frustrating thing is that we are not facing a technically disastrous game in the traditional sense of the term: the performance is good and some environmental elements are even successful, but precisely for this reason it is difficult to understand how such a result was achieved with such poorly realized characters, animations so rudimentary and mechanics that they seem not to speak to each other.
BLACKWOOD is a game that wants to seem much more refined than it really is. The atmosphere is there, the basic idea too, but everything else still seems halfway between a promising project and a title that would have needed several months of refinement before being presented as a finished product. Or, do I throw it there, is it the result of vibe-coding and a lot of use of artificial intelligence?
It must be said that the price is low. I don't know the price for Italy on Steam but in the press-kit it says "Base Game: $24.99; Supporter Edition: $29.99 ($5 Upgrade - which will gain additional content as new Acts release)", especially if we consider that the game is conceived in 3 acts and that the second and third acts will be given away to those who buy the game at launch as free downloads in March 2027 and December 2027 respectively.
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