DaRmaZat Blackwood is a highly ambitious third-person action game set in 2012 New York. Developed by AttritoM7 Productions, the game puts you in two very different worlds: running a DVD store together with Amelie during the day, while at night taking on jobs as a contract killer in the city’s underworld, getting into brutal fights, and eliminating human targets.
Anton is heavily tattooed, with a series of kill marks etched across his fingers, and he is not exactly the most sympathetic character. He spends a lot of time swearing and complaining to himself, but you do get the impression that there is a troubled soul underneath it all, somewhat reminiscent of… Max Payne? Although that is probably stretching the comparison. After playing Act One, it becomes clear that Blackwood is reaching for considerably more than it can currently deliver.
There are two builds available when starting the game, with the option to use the regular build or the DirectX 12 version. Whichever you choose, the technical rough edges become apparent almost immediately, along with just how chaotic things can get in Blackwood.
The game begins with Anton running through the sewers with little more than his pistol and a cat nearby. From the start, it is clear that a criminal gang is after him. After a very simple puzzle that requires you to shut down a water supply, you are thrown into a fight against a crocodile. The encounter is straightforward enough as long as you start shooting in time, because otherwise the animal can tear Anton apart in an instant during a stiff, stuttering cutscene. Spoiler: this will not be the last time a cutscene suffers from the same technical problems.
Once Anton escapes the sewers, he returns to his apartment, which is located a few floors above the DVD store. This is where the game begins transitioning into its daily cycle, but not without another few rough edges. Going to sleep requires interacting with a specific spot on the carpet, pressing the button from exactly the right angle rather than simply interacting with the bed itself. Since sleeping also functions as the game’s sole save point, this fiddly interaction will quickly get on your nerves.
Even worse, this means that everything you do after your last sleep is lost if you fail a mission. That can include money earned, progress made, and other activities completed during the day. On top of that, the following morning always starts with washing up, getting dressed, and eating the same breakfast of fried eggs and toast over and over again, which quickly makes these feel like mandatory chores rather than meaningful parts of a functioning life sim.
During business hours, you can take shifts at the DVD store’s register, advise customers on movies, restock the racks, order inventory, and manage emails through the computer. Running the DVD store generates the clean money needed to fund your illegal night operations. Leaving shifts to Amelie tanks store popularity and, by extension, your income.
Managing the darker side of Anton’s life takes place in the basement of the building, using the computer to handle emails, order stock, and buy weapons from the black-market website. The basement is also where you can practice your choreography, which essentially means learning and practicing the John Wick-style finishing moves used during brawls. On paper, it seems to offer a lot of gameplay variation and the feeling that you really are working toward a real goal and the ultimate mercenary/brawler build.
In practice, however, the store feels strangely isolated from the rest of the plot, and the loop lacks a clear ultimate goal. You can easily skip the whole shop business and, if you just want some fun and real-time action, launch yourself straight into night missions again.
Even when you try to invest in the shop, it is rarely clear what you are actually expected to do or whether what you are doing is actually working, as several of the activities are needlessly difficult to figure out. You have to keep the racks stocked, deal with customers, feed the cat, and maintain a certain DVD-to-VHS distribution, but the game does little to explain where everything is or how these systems are supposed to work. There are also no clear objective markers for many of these chores, and there is no minimap to help you navigate the store. I regularly found myself wandering around trying to work out what I had missed or which interaction the game expected me to perform next.
There is at least some distraction from the overall loop and a small variation between playthroughs, as certain assignments can change depending on how you play, but the main story itself remains linear. One of the more notable side activities is The White Tile, a fight club that feels heavily inspired by Fight Club and Yakuza’s Coliseum. Here, you take part in tournament-like brawls against individual opponents or groups, with and without weapons. The further you progress, the tougher the fights become. Well, at least there’s that.
Unfortunately, the combat falls short, not only in terms of its format, with its very linear arenas and often invisible, unexplained walls appearing in the middle of fights, but also in terms of its mechanics. While the shooting itself feels reasonably solid, with decent recoil and responsive aiming, the brawling is much less convincing. The John Wick-style gun-fu combat is often awkward because of its repetitive, stiff animations and heavily scripted finisher sequences. Some encounters are also artificially prolonged until you have weakened the final enemy enough for the cutscene to kick in, making it obvious that the game wants a specific sequence to play out rather than allowing the fight to unfold naturally.
The cover system adds further friction. When you leave a cover position, Anton does not always fully leave the cover object. Instead, he moves to the next side or corner of the same piece of cover, meaning you have to press the button again to actually move away from that corner and continue moving. This makes sneaking extremely clumsy, and it also clashes heavily with the fast-evolving firefights, where quick positioning matters.
These problems are compounded by broader technical flaws. Audio clips occasionally overlap, loading times can be excessively long, cutscenes can stutter and sometimes refuse to skip, and dialogue scenes suffer from stiff animations and inconsistent lip-sync. Facial animation is particularly rough, while the lighting often fails to make the environments look convincing.
Preliminary Thoughts
After Act One, Blackwood feels like a game with considerably bigger ambitions than its current state can support. The combination of running a DVD store by day and taking on mercenary work at night is an interesting foundation, and there are moments where the different systems begin to come together. The problem is that too many of those systems are either poorly explained, technically rough, or simply not convincing enough in execution.
The result is a somewhat sloppy experience that ends up in similar territory to the recently released Samson: an ambitious sandbox built around earning money and juggling different activities, but one that struggles to give those systems a clear purpose. The difference here is that Blackwood is also trying to build a cinematic action game around them, with elaborate takedowns, gunplay, brawling, and a dual-life structure. Right now, those ambitions feel noticeably bigger than the game itself.
Act One is only the first part of Anton’s story, with Act Two scheduled for March 2027 and Act Three following in September 2027. Both will be delivered as free updates to existing owners, so there is still room for the developers to improve the technical side, add basic conveniences, and refine the combat and management systems before the full story is complete. For now, though, Blackwood is a rough and rather awkward first act that leaves me more curious about what the developers intended than convinced by what is currently on offer.
Additional Information
Release Date: September 16, 2026 (Act One-only)
Previewed On: PC. Download code provided by the publisher and PR agency.
Developer: AttritoM7 Productions
Publisher: IZilla Games, AttritoM7 Productions
Relevant links: Available via Steam.
Berenhardt