Bangladeshi indie studio AttritoM7 Productions, the crew behind the tactical shooter Zero Hour, has launched its newest sport Blackwood on Steam, bringing a John Wick-inspired tackle motion video games to the platform.
Launched on 16 September, Blackwood follows Anton Blackwood, a seemingly unusual DVD store proprietor dwelling in New York in 2012. By day, he manages his small store, dealing with inventory and costs. By night time, he enters town’s prison underworld as a contract killer.
For AttritoM7, Blackwood marks a major follow-up to Zero Hour, the tactical shooter that helped put the Bangladeshi developer on the worldwide gaming map. Developed by the Dhaka-based crew, Zero Hour constructed a following with its concentrate on close-quarters tactical fight and have become certainly one of Bangladesh’s extra seen indie sport exports. Blackwood now sees the studio transferring away from the slower, methodical tempo of its earlier title in direction of a extra cinematic motion expertise.
The sport’s fight takes cues from the John Wick movies, permitting gamers to mix gunplay with hand-to-hand fight and environmental takedowns. AttritoM7 has additionally labored with stunt performers to create its fight animations, with dives, rolls and slides including a extra fluid high quality to encounters.
Blackwood additionally borrows from video games corresponding to Max Payne, that includes a Shootdodge-style dive and bullet-time sequences. Regardless of the cinematic presentation, nevertheless, the builders have tried to maintain fight grounded. Ammunition is proscribed, whereas well being doesn’t merely regenerate to full after each encounter, forcing gamers to be extra cautious about how they method fights.
The sport’s largest hook, nevertheless, could also be what occurs between these encounters. Anton’s DVD store is a useful a part of the sport relatively than merely a backdrop. Gamers can handle the enterprise in the course of the day, making a distinction with the violent work he carries out at night time.
The 2012 setting reinforces that duality. The story takes place in the course of the closing years of the bodily video rental period, when a small DVD store may nonetheless plausibly function an unusual enterprise. Beneath that mundane façade, Anton makes use of his prison connections to tackle assassination contracts.
Blackwood launches with its first act, that includes greater than six hours of content material throughout 4 primary story missions, alongside aspect quests and collectibles. The remaining two acts are scheduled for March and September 2027, with each deliberate as free updates for present homeowners.
With Blackwood, the builders of Zero Hour are taking the expertise gained from certainly one of Bangladesh’s most recognised indie shooters and making use of it to a really completely different sort of sport, placing a distinctly formidable Bangladeshi studio behind a cinematic motion thriller.