BLACKWOOD - Blood Effects and Character Responses
It's John Wick season. We've just recently had Gunman Contracts - Stand Alone come out delivering that experience in first person and VR, and now we have Blackwood too. Personally, I'm all for it.
As the title suggests, this review is about Blackwood, but with both games coming out almost side by side, I will be comparing some of the aspects in this review.
Body damage
First up - there is no dismemberment. For some viewers of the channel - if nothing comes off it's a no go. Personally I don't hold that opinion for most games. The foundation for a responsive feel in the body damage aspect is a response at the point of impact, and we do have that here.
There is a wounds at the point of impact feature for gunfire, which will work consistently. And if you've played Zero Hour you'll recognize them too. Compared to GC the wounds here will be much more visible and that will deliver a stronger impact, especially in the midst of intense action.
BUT, we have a somewhat common issue of the wound itself having a massive, tennis ball sized hole. Actually bigger holes here than the ones in Zero Hour.
What I would suggest is an appropriately sized small hole with the big noticeable part of it being the blood splatter around it. Concentrated around the wound and getting more spread out further away.
One of the best examples I have of it for an action game is Alan Wake 2. Alan Wake 2 uses revelation of an overlay for the blood splatter, but since Blackwood uses decals for the whole thing, the patterns around the hole could look better.
In the case of the shotgun those tennis ball sized holes could work for closeup hits (though you would want a lot more splatter), but basically there is no difference in body damage between pistols and shotguns. And that's a shame. You can get it to feel much better when you get a bloody and messy response for hits from close up, and some spread out pellets for hits from further away. Soldier of Fortune 2 did it in 2002, surely games could do it today.
When it comes to melee, the response won't be good. I haven't seen wounds for knife takedowns, and in the case of fist fights you just get a small stain spawned on the face. I'm not expecting full on MMA game style responses, but just better looking variations of cuts and bruises would make a huge difference.
Environment
The features you will be seeing in this aspect are stains if there's a surface right behind the character, stains on the floor if there's nothing right behind him, there will be blood pools and I think some of the finishers have stains of their own.
The floor stains look pretty good, the wall stains not quite as good but some are nice, and the blood pools are going to be more interesting than just the regular circular pattern, but no TLOU stuff.
However, we have some massive issues:
The spawning for the response stains is going to be very inconsistent. Will a stain spawn on the ground? That's pretty much a coin toss, seems to be entirely random. On surfaces behind characters it's going to be somewhat more consistent, but also you won't have them always spawn.
And bodies will despawn in about 25 seconds or sooner. I have seen them despawn at times ~5 seconds after a kill.
The latter is about the easiest issue to avoid. On PC there's no reason not to have configs for how many bodies and blood stains can stay. And that can be expanded to things like debris and bullet shells too.
If your machine can handle it you absolutely should be able to see the full aftermath of each fight. And in a game like this for the most part you don't stick around the same place for too long, so it should be possible to also do a cleanup when you move further ahead.
I do also have to note GC, which has settings for the blood and bodies. There are limits, highest setting doesn't mean everything stays permanently, but they're quite high and personally I've only seen stuff disappear when I was actively testing it.
Animations
In the animations aspect, the flashiest and the strongest feature is the takedowns. We have quite a few games that have those to spice things up, but in Blackwood they took this feature notably further. There are more takedown animations than you have in most games and the the player will use the surroundings when possible as well.
It's not unusual to see someone's head being whacked into a nearby wall in a takedown animation. But when you see an open car door being slammed on someone's head in one of the animations, that will have more of an impact.
I do have a few points of feedback:
There were some takedowns where I thought "why did he die from a punch", and then slowing the clip down I saw that a knife appeared in your character's hand. Pulling the knife out should definitely be a part of the animation.
I haven't seen multiple enemies taken down in a single combo.
And the main limitation here is that the animations are rigid and occasionally you will have something glitch out. In the big picture though that's not a big deal.
Non fatal hit reactions will have that nice action movie feel, though I haven't seen any injured states for enemies. You can shoot the weapon out of someone hands, after which they'll either try to pick a nearby one, or they'll resort to melee.
On fatal shots, what you will be seeing is a ragdoll that is more often a miss than a hit. Sometimes it will look decently good, but for the most part it won't feel quite right. And for things like shotgun blasts it will look pretty bad.
With that ragdoll, the lack of recoil, the sound effect not having much of an impact and the wound just being the pistol one reused, the shotgun will feel very underwhelming.
Conclusion
It's quite close to delivering a more than solid experience. You have consistent wounds, consistent blood pools, good looks for the stains, exceptional takedown functionality and nice non fatal response animations.
But there are some things that muddy the experience, so the key points of feedback are:
Improving the looks of the wounds would make a notable difference. Small hole and more focus on the splat pattern around it.
Blood staining features for the surroundings are already in the game, and the stains look good. Now they need to activate consistently which is massively important. If there's a splash - there should be a stain.
Let PC players configure how long the blood and the bodies stay. Additional settings for shell castings and other debris would be great. I can't help but think that the people testing it were just speedrunning the game or something.
Death animations and\or active ragdolls for non takedown kills would make a massive difference.
Pretty much everything about the shotgun badly needs improvement.
There were some games that after playing I thought - for it to deliver a responsive experience they basically need to redo the whole bloody thing. That's not the case here. I think as you can see from the feedback, some of the issues are pretty big, but it's nothing that can't be fixed. And hopefully it will be.
If you agree, do share this post where it would be appropriate, and check out this site and Random Madness Youtube channel for more coverage of response mechanics in games.
You can get BLACKWOOD here.
A key to the game was provided to me ahead of release free of charge.
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