By day, you run a DVD store in 2012 New York. By night, you’re a ruthless assassin. BLACKWOOD is a cinematic third-person shooter with grounded melee combat, brutal takedowns, responsive gunplay, and a double life to manage.
BLACKWOOD is at its most compelling when its different systems overlap. Running the store gives you clean money, contracts give you dirty money, cash gives you access to equipment, weapons become possessions you can modify, and combat rewards you for understanding movement and aggression.
Short and with an almost non-existent story to engage the player, poorly polished mechanics and archaic AI, the final product feels more like an advanced prototype than a complete commercial game. It clearly needs much more development time or should have been released in early access.
BLACKWOOD has a compelling experience buried inside. The double-life structure works as a concept, and the dual economy gives that concept real mechanical potential. But until the technical problems and weaker systems are addressed, the potential remains more impressive than the finished experience.
BLACKWOOD is one of those games where I kept asking myself if I was being too harsh, only to play another twenty or so minutes and realize I was actually being pretty generous.
I can see the vision, and the phenomenal takedowns prove the developers have talent. But until the camera is fixed, melee is tightened up, overall jank is fixed and the rest of the campaign arrives, Blackwood remains an unpolished prototype of the John Wick shooter we are all waiting for and it should have been labeled as Early Access.
