Before dismissing this review as blindly hopping on the hate train, I have fully played out the main story of Act 1, and I have sank hundreds of hours into M7's other game, Zero Hour. If you don't feel like reading my essay, just know that this game is horrible and not worth buying. For the rest of you here goes:

I will start with what Blackwood does right. M7 has once again nailed the world design and the music as they did with Zero Hour. The attention to detail makes the world around you feel more alive. The performance of this game was acceptable, and performance was consistent throughout different environments. That is where the positive things I have to say about Blackwood (and M7) end.

This is just another Unity shop slop game, broken up by the occasional action sequence. I am not exaggerating, at least 80% of your time in Blackwood will be taken up by up-keeping your shop. You are limited to one mission per in-game day, and the day doesn't pass until you've spent about 20 real minutes in the shop. Do the math and at most you are doing one or two missions per hour, completely padded by shop simulator in between. I cannot stress enough how boring this game is. Also, the game can only be saved at the end of the in-game day; any crashes or soft locks during the day and you lose all your progress.

The shop simulator portion of this game is pretty bad. From what I can tell there is no way to maximize all of the things you are graded on. For instance, customers leave your store if not given a recommendation within seconds of entering and tank your customer service score. Having customers in your store while there are still things that need to be cleaned up tanks your score, even though you are given no time in the day prior to opening. There is no way of telling who has been helped and who hasn't because they still occasionally show the thought bubble thing regardless. Navigating the DVDs while managing shelves is extremely clunky and requires constantly opening up a sub-menu for each DVD to check its genre. On the topic of DVDs, many of the covers contain stolen images from actual movies and games (like Operation Doorkicker on Steam). The majority of the artwork that isn't stolen is blatantly AI generated. Not cool, M7.

The remaining 20% of the game, which mind you is supposed to be its focus, is somehow even worse. Optional missions are extremely short. Checkpoints in missions are so far apart that you replay a good chunk of the mission if you die. The hand-to-hand combat mainly consists of spamming just both mouse buttons and the F key. The gun combat is worse, which makes no sense as M7's only other game is a FPS? You miss shots even when your crosshair is directly on the enemy, enemies are able to shoot you in places that you aren't able to shoot them back, and the aim assist barely works. There is also one random driving mission with abysmal driving mechanics and immovable street signs that bring your car to a complete stop. Also, not to be that guy, but why are 90% of the enemies black and referred to as thugs?

I am a firm believer that games should not hold your hand the entire time, but this game does absolutely nothing to guide the user. For instance, there are zero indicators anywhere to point out where you need to go to do things. Everyday you need to go around and do chores around your store to maintain its organization and cleanliness, but it doesn't point out what. In missions, you will need to go somewhere, collect an item, etc., zero indication as to where it is. This makes every aspect of this game boil down to meandering around aimlessly until the game lets you progress. Another example of this is how half of the controls (such as ducking, diving, etc.), are not pointed out in the tutorial, you have to refer to the controls menu yourself.

There is no story in this game. You would think the first act of this game would set up the story, do some world building, set the scene for whats to come later in the game; not one crumb of that exists in this game. There is zero character introduction or development, and the dialogue is too shallow and meaningless to derive anything from it; basically all of the dialogue is an absolute nothing burger. There is also absolutely zero overlap between missions and the shop simulator portion of the game. All that I've gathered from the entire main story is that you are rivals with some random guy over a thumb drive you handed off to another guy who has "little boy" as his internet handle. You are still being bombarded by random attacks prior to this, though, so who knows.

This game is extremely buggy. Boxes, enemies, and NPCs spawn in above the ground. Enemies will sometimes spawn right on top of you, wander off, clip into walls while you are fighting them, or randomly one tap you before you even have a chance to react. Even in the store, customers will constantly get stuck walking into each other. One of the missions I tried to load into threw me into a black void and all I could hear was silence occasionally broken up by Anton grunting; I had to wait for the timer to be up to get out.

The animations of this game are terrible. Facial expressions and mouth movements look awful and barely sync to what the character is saying or their inflection. Many animations involve items magically disappearing from one place and appearing in a character's hand or vice versa. Pretty much every animation of any character or NPC interacting with an object, either in their hand or in the world, is misaligned. NPCs move around extremely stiffly, and the combat animations are even stiffer. The running animation is way too dramatic for how slow Anton's movement speed actually is.

The realism of this game is practically non-existent. Anton will kill dozens of people, and there is zero blood on him or the environment. There are culling bugs all over the place. Each character's hair is always shaded differently than the rest of the their body, and their eyes look like glassy marbles. Lighting in some settings, unfortunately including the store, is extremely inconsistent. The reflection in mirrors look awful. There are games that came out in 2010 that have more realistic graphics than Blackwood.

Blackwood is very clearly not finished, I do not understand why M7 is insisting so heavily otherwise. If the game were "early access" I could maybe see past some of the issues with the game, instead they are charging $25 for 1 hour of main story content and acting like it is a fully finished game. They showed off their studio in development log videos, and talked about their 60+ developer team and motion capture studio in interviews for this game. In spite of all of the resources and time invested into this game, this is barely passable as an early access game, let alone complete. The price is way too high for how little this game has to offer.

My main problem with Blackwood is not even the game itself. M7 turned their back on their previous game, Zero Hour, to make Blackwood. Zero Hour has not received an update in 2 years at this point, and the official Discord server for the game has been abandoned. Meheraj (M7's CEO) blamed the PvP community for their decision to step away from it, yet his initial goal with Zero Hour was to create a PvP game, and the only player base it has maintained long term has been PvP players. Instead of fixing game breaking exploits, they have passed Zero Hour on to another developer to port it (in its broken state) to console to squeeze more money out of it. Even when M7 did have an active role in facilitating community events such as tournaments, there were multiple instances of them not actually giving players their rewards. Nobody within M7 has been maintaining or fixing Zero Hour, meaning all of their effort has gone into Blackwood for 2 years. Given this, I am at a complete loss for how this game could have possibly released in this bad of a state.

I hate to be that guy who ♥♥♥♥♥ on the little guy, but I have to say that I do not recommend BLACKWOOD at its current state. It's an extremely janky game and it's not the fun kind of jank. The concept of leading a dual life sounds so good on paper but it's so poorly translated to gameplay.

The DVD store management is extremely simple, to the point of requiring almost no involvment from the player.

The combat does not feel good at all because of bad physics, poor weapon sounds, inconsistent hitboxes, and overall, clunky movement.

The melee combat and driving sections are not just the worst parts of the game, but some of the worst I've seen recently. Hand-to-hand fighting is so unresponsive and poorly animated that it feels like you're hitting wet paper. The car controls like absolute crap and even hitting the slightest obstacle sometimes results in game over.

Then there's the fact that the game just looks very uncanny valley. It has no visual identity. The less said about clipping and visual artifacts, the better. I also experienced this weird bug where the performance of the game would keep dropping with each checkpoint restart.

Lastly, the save system is abyssmal. Progress is saved permanently only once at the start of each day, meaning a crash at any point can cost you an entire day's progress. I learned this the hard way when I quit midway through an assassination mission, expecting to resume from the previous checkpoint, only to find myself back at the very start of the day. All the progress I'd made managing the store until evening? Gone. One other time, the game had me do the same story mission on two separate days—and it was the awful car chase one. The game is filled with infuriating design flaws that make an already repetitive gameplay loop even more frustrating.
This is one of those rare cases where I wish a game had chosen to enter Early Access phase. It's not entirely unsalvageable but as of now, it's just raw.

there is NO need for a game looking like this running so poorly, jitters, stutters frame drops etc... the idea is good but man the game feels janky and unpolished.. and dont let me get started on the controls and lack of settings to optimize the game, in every way thinkable.. this is a no from me, one of the biggest John Wick fans out there...