BLACKWOOD Is Out: John Wick Has a Fucking DVD Store
BLACKWOOD launched today on Steam, and the interesting part isn't that you play a contract killer. It's that the game appears determined to make you deal with the boring shit surrounding contract killing too. You prepare for jobs, buy ammunition with dirty money, manage weapons and equipment, operate a DVD store and then head out at night to professionally ruin someone's evening.
Act 1 is the first of three planned parts, with four main missions plus side content. It's a linear single-player game, not an open world, and right now it's far too early for a proper verdict. The first Steam reviews are Mixed, but there are only 24 of them. That's not a consensus. That's a moderately successful birthday party.
What BLACKWOOD does have already is one hell of a premise.
BLACKWOOD has the murder sorted. Now see what happens when crime games stop pretending criminals don't need an economy, a plan and somewhere to put all the stolen shit. Enter the Crime Games Hub.
The Assassin Has a Day Job
Anton Blackwood runs a DVD store in 2012 New York.
At night, he's an assassin.
Normally, I'd expect the DVD shop to be the sort of thing a game shows you for twelve seconds so you understand that Anton has a Normal Life™, before somebody walks in, says something ominous and we're back to shooting men in warehouses.
BLACKWOOD actually lets you run the bloody thing.
You can restock shelves, organise inventory, set prices and work the counter. You don't have to spend your entire game worrying about whether The Dark Knight Rises should be moved closer to the till, because the shop can run on autopilot, but it's there as an actual part of Anton's life.
And I love the sheer mundane stupidity of that.
Somewhere between assassination contracts, this man has stock levels.
Imagine being a feared professional killer and having a genuinely shit Tuesday because nobody is buying Battleship. You've got three armed men to kill at 11pm, you're low on ammunition and the DVD business is having a catastrophic week because apparently New York has finally discovered Netflix.
This is where BLACKWOOD becomes much more interesting than another game going, "Look! John Wick!"
We've had John Wick.
I want John Wick checking the till.
Prefer your criminal career with four idiots, a drill and a rapidly deteriorating plan? Our PAYDAY hub has the heists, builds and guides for when “professional criminal” becomes extremely theoretical. Go deeper into PAYDAY.
Apparently You Need to Prepare Before Murdering People
The other half of BLACKWOOD is third-person combat built around shooting, melee, movement and contextual takedowns. You can play aggressively, get close and turn rooms into furniture-assisted homicide, or use cover and approach gunfights more carefully.
Pre-release hands-on impressions found plenty to like about the shooting and takedowns, although they also found rough melee, stiff animation and some control problems. Those impressions came from earlier builds, so I'm not going to pretend they describe exactly what launched today.
More interesting to me is everything BLACKWOOD puts before the shooting.
Ammunition costs money. Independent hands-on testing confirmed that dirty money earned through contracts could be spent on ammo for the next job. The developers have also shown a broader equipment system involving weapon customisation, multiple weapon configurations and a black market where damaged guns can be bought for parts, reused or sold.
Which means BLACKWOOD is flirting with something I desperately want assassin games to do more often: make being an assassin feel like a profession rather than a level-select screen.
You shouldn't be able to accept a contract and suddenly develop seventeen magazines of ammunition somewhere inside your jacket.
You need bullets.
Bullets cost money.
You need equipment.
Equipment needs preparing.
And suddenly the dude you're about to murder isn't merely Mission Four. He's funding Mission Five.
That's good crime-game logic. Horrible life advice, obviously. Excellent videogame economics.
There's also an apartment functioning as Anton's home base, two currencies connected to the different sides of his life, equipment preparation and the DVD shop sitting on the civilian end of it all. How much those systems actually feed into each other across the whole of Act 1 is still unclear. That's the big question for me now.
Because there's a brilliant version of BLACKWOOD where running the shop, earning dirty money, buying equipment and preparing contracts gradually make you feel like you're maintaining this increasingly ridiculous double life.
And there's another version where you click some shelves for five minutes and then go back to shooting.
Please be the first one.
You cannot give me Professional Assassin DVD Shop Simulator 2012 and then chicken out.
Act 1 Is Only Part of the Game
There's something else worth knowing before throwing money at it.
BLACKWOOD launched today, but this is Act 1 of three. It has four main missions plus side missions and additional content. The developer puts Act 1 at more than six hours, although that's their estimate and it's much too early to treat it as the universal playtime.
Act 2 is planned for March 2027 with another four main missions. Act 3 is planned for September 2027 with five more and an alternate ending.
You only buy the game once. Future acts are included for existing owners, although the developers plan to raise the base price as those acts arrive. They don't consider BLACKWOOD Early Access. Each act is supposed to be a complete part.
Fine.
From the player's side, the label matters considerably less than the practical situation: you can buy BLACKWOOD today, play Act 1, and the rest of the story is scheduled to arrive over the next year.
That's what you're buying.
Want the other side of CRIMENET, where you don't merely commit crimes but become the reason somebody invents a boss fight? We've built an entire home for that particular moral collapse. Enter the Playable Villains Hub.
And Is It Any Good?
Too early.
Steam currently has BLACKWOOD sitting at Mixed, with 62% positive from 24 reviews at the time of writing.
Twenty-four.
I'm not building a courthouse out of that.
The useful information comes from the pre-release hands-on coverage. The shooting and takedowns showed promise. Weapon recoil got praise. The combat could apparently produce some properly stylish moments.
It was also rough.
Melee could feel janky. Animations were stiff. One hands-on found button prompts occasionally refusing to cooperate while in cover. Another specifically called out the lip-sync and character animation.
Those were demo builds, and BLACKWOOD has now launched. We'll know soon enough whether those rough edges survived the journey.
That's why I'm much more comfortable saying BLACKWOOD is interesting than saying BLACKWOOD is good.
Interesting, though?
Very.
There are hundreds of games where I can shoot someone in the face.
BLACKWOOD might be the first one where I have to wonder whether I sold enough DVDs first.
Comments