REVIEW: The Blood of Dawnwalker
A promising beginning to a new vampire RPG franchise
The Blood of Dawnwalker is the first in a vampire RPG franchise by Rebel Wolves, a studio formed back in 2022 by former CD Projekt Red developers. I have been incredibly excited for Dawnwalker for a long time, as a massive fan of CDPR's RPGs. A vampire RPG by many of the same people who delivered those games seemed perfect for me. So how is Dawnwalker? Is it as good as Witcher 3? Well... that's unrealistic for a new studio's first game, but it is a great game.
Story, Structure & Lore
The Blood of Dawnwalker's story is every bit as great and well-written as Cyberpunk and The Witcher franchises. You play as Coen of Laslea, an average villager living in Vale Sangora, a region currently ruled by brutal vampire lords. Through certain events that I won't spoil, Coen's family is taken, and he is turned into a Vrakhir, a vampire. Yet unlike most vampires, Coen is not affected by the sun. Turning completely human in the day, and full vampire at night. Hence, "Dawnwalker".
Coen as a character is instantly loveable. He’s far from the professional monster hunter Geralt of Rivia. He has no real idea what he is doing at the start and struggles hard with events from his past and present. Whether those events end up consuming him and turning him into a monster or empowering him to become a better person is entirely up to you.
The side cast of characters is filled with incredible characters that Coen can choose to ally himself with or stand against. It is an extremely well-rounded cast, with each of the more major side characters having entire side questlines dedicated to them. My favorite characters were Vicho, Anca and Lacra. All three felt like they became true allies to Coen over the course of their questline and I absolutely loved what drove each one forward in their respective questlines.
The actual lore of Dawnwalker is fascinating. Rebel Wolves have crafted a world that is begging to be explored, and many questions are left completely unanswered by the end. They have set up a much larger world that I am very excited to see how it’s explored in the sequels, but Vale Sangora itself is filled with secrets and fascinating revelations about its inhabitants. It's every bit as interesting as the worlds of Witcher and Cyberpunk. I can already imagine hours long videos diving into all the secrets in this game and what they could mean for future installments
The structure of Dawnwalker is its most fascinating aspect. Coen has 30 days and nights to save his family, so there is a constant time factor throughout the journey. Time doesn't move on its own, but rather through specific actions. Progressing quests will move time forward, buying skills will move time forward, and doing open world activities may also have time move forward. This gives Dawnwalker a sense of constant urgency. I could never truly just relax and do open world activities as I was always thinking of how best to spend the time in this game. Time is a constantly depleting resource, but that's not to say the game ends when time runs out. If the 30 days do run out, certain story events will occur that will affect Coen and his journey, but the game will not end. I found this time limit structure to be one of Dawnwalker's absolute best mechanics.
It made me consider every single action, every quest that I'm spending time on, and which activities I was spending time with. You can absolutely finish the game before the 30 days mark, and I had one of the ending paths unlocked by day 15. I ended up finishing the game around day 25, which took me 40 hours. I did most of the quests in the game but have likely missed a few. A good 100% playthrough is likely to take 50-60 hours.
Another side to Dawnwalker that is extremely unique is that there is no traditional main quest, every single quest is technically optional, and there is no real golden path to follow. You can absolutely just B-line straight to the ending right after the prologue, though you'd probably get destroyed by the enemies there. It is a crazy amount of freedom for an RPG and led to one of my all-time favorite RPG moments where I managed to accidentally stumble across one of the major vampire lords in the game that Coen is hunting down, entirely outside of any quest through just exploration. And I managed to take them out despite being grossly underleveled, which ended up skipping over their entire storyline and rewarding me with their abilities very early on.
This structure can make the game feel a bit aimless at times, as you don't know which quests to tackle, but once you get hooked onto a storyline that stumbled upon by complete accident, it all clicks. One of the coolest aspects is that side quests tend to interact with each other in small ways, often unlocking new dialogue options because Coen knows a person related to a situation or just remembers encountering things before.
Another detail that I loved is that because at night time, Coen craves blood, you can end up choosing to give in to the hunger and instantly kill mid-cutscene pretty much every single important character in the game, and the story will react to your actions accordingly as Coen becomes more and more monstrous if you choose to start doing this. The amount of choices and freedom in this story is crazy, and I am sure there are a ton of variations to the narrative that I have not been able to come close to in my own playthrough as I stuck to being a good guy in general.
The one type of "quest" that I overall felt did not fit this overall package is the activities that can be done to anger Brencis' court. These usually are just basic Ubisoft-style outpost clearing without much depth. They get repetitive very quickly, and I recommend only doing them to level up early on, then focusing more on the in-depth side quests instead, until you decide to anger Brencis that is and go after his Boyars.
The time limit structure also contributes massively to replayability. It’s not possible to do everything you want in one playthrough if you choose to abide by the time limit, making replays valuable to see different paths and quests through. There are multiple endings. I did all of the major endings, and there is a pretty large amount of variety here, even if the ultimate end point is similar between them all. It reminded me heavily of Cyberpunk and how it handled its endings. You can expect something very similar here.
Overall, the story and its structure are the absolute strongest aspects of Dawnwalker. The writing is impeccable. The time limit mechanic makes every decision important, and the lack of a traditional main quest can lead to some of the most interesting moments I've ever had in an RPG.
Gameplay
Dawnwalker's gameplay mechanics unfortunately leave much to be desired. Focusing on the positives first, the contrast between human gameplay in the morning and vampire gameplay at night is done very well. You feel far more powerful at night thanks to the Vampire abilities and the extremely fast claws attack that defeat swordplay entirely. You also get a neat teleport ability that helps you get behind enemies during combat or to traverse across rooftops and climb on walls. Coen can also turn into a wolf to travel much faster at night. At daytime, there are still powerful abilities with Coen's witchcraft powers on top of swordplay, but it is a far more simple gameplay loop at night, with no way to get on rooftops, feeling extremely similar to The Witcher's general movement style.
Where the gameplay stumbles is in the combat. The combat of Dawnwalker can be described as an action take on the Kingdom Come combat style. Attacks can be aimed towards specific directions, and enemies must be blocked or parried by aiming towards their attack and then countering with a powerful riposte. There are also the abilities which you gain throughout the game, such as a powerful throat cut or just biting your enemies as a vampire. This combat system works great for about half the game, as Coen feels rightfully underpowered, and each encounter feels unique and fun for the first time.
Unfortunately, by the mid-late game, this combat begins to drag as it feels extremely damage sponge-y, even on normal difficulty. Enemies aggressively scale with your level, there is never a moment where I ever felt like I was getting stronger, as all enemies feel like they take 20+ hits to take down. This resulted in the combat getting extremely tedious at a point, and by the late game, I was just begging for enemies to go down faster so I can get to the next great story moment.
The combat also lacks variety, there just aren't enough enemy types for the game's 40-hour mark, you'll have seen all the enemies in the game by the 10-hour mark. And there is no unique strategy to take on enemies, you can basically counter and riposte every single enemy type, with no real variety on how to take them down. This, combined with the ridiculous health pools that these enemies have, results in a combat system that at a point, I just wished could be skipped. It needs rebalancing.
It should not take 20+ claw hits at level 40 to take down a boar, I never once felt powerful as Coen no matter how many perks I invested into damage and making abilities stronger. The combat ended up being the game's absolute biggest issue. It works well for about 10 hours when you're still getting introduced to new enemies and are rightfully feeling weak at a low level, but by the 40-hour mark, I was just done with it. I can see this combat system being a pretty big barrier to entry for many players who aren't as tolerant of systems like this, and it reminded me most of The Witcher 2's combat, which was controversial for similar reasons. I think this game would've really benefitted more from a more action-focused combat like The Witcher 3. With a rebalancing patch to make you feel more powerful in the mid-late game, I can see this combat system being far more tolerable and fun. But in its current state, it's an overall miss for me and the game's biggest flaw.
Another issue with the gameplay is the movement. In daytime, Coen can move faster by using “haste," which is a very janky fast run ability that always looks awkward. It is a very strange thing that there are no horses in Dawnwalker, they do not exist as an animal in the world at all, and there are no mounts. It really felt immersion-breaking at a point, and I constantly wished Coen just had a horse to get around with, something like a cool vampire horse like Shadowmere from Skyrim would've really sufficed.
In night-time, the movement really struggles. Because it's a very Witcher 3-style movement, it constantly feels far too clunky to achieve any sense of "cool" as a vampire as you have to abuse the teleport mechanic to get around the janky jumps and awkward speed. There is no real parkour here, which feels like a huge omission to the vampire fantasy. The wall climbing ability is far too rarely truly useful, and for such a cool ability, I would've liked to see it be more integrated into the gameplay loop.
Another strange omission in gameplay is that Dawnwalker has no stealth. Which feels like it goes against the entire idea of vampires being sneaky creatures of the night, but the game has absolutely 0 stealth, and you are always forced into combat no matter what. It honestly made the existence of wall climbing and crouching as mechanics feel arbitrary as you cannot sneak up on enemies at all, it is just not a thing. This is absolutely something that should be added in the sequel. It also contributes to the combat getting tedious even faster as you cannot avoid it at all.
Open World
The open world of Dawnwalker is fairly big. There is a ton to explore with a high level of variety. From snowy mountains, plains, eerie swamps, and the main city of Svartrau. Exploration is done very well, and usually just running in one direction can lead to finding several activities and quests. So whenever I felt aimless after finishing a questline, just picking a direction and going forward usually led to something new and interesting. The general vibe of the world can be mainly compared to Witcher 3's "Velen" with Svartrau serving as this game's Novigrad.
Svartrau City served as my favourite location in the game and where I spent the most time. The city itself is not that big at a glance, but it is extremely dense with quests and locations to explore. I absolutely loved this city, especially at night when you get to sneak around and explore rooms that only a vampire can climb up to. It feels like a truly living city that is constantly adapting to your actions.
Speaking of actions, Dawnwalker employs a notoriety system that goes through several permanent levels as Coen becomes more and more well-known for his disruptions to Brencis' operations. I highly recommend cleaning up most side quests before you decide to max this bar out, as it can make going anywhere in the world very complicated. The quests also react to this, and characters will recognize Coen instantly if your notoriety is high enough. Meanwhile, if it’s low, then Coen is a complete stranger that nobody knows. These are permanent changes, so be sure to assess before taking actions that can increase this bar.
Overall, this is a great open world that is always fun to explore and very much feels like it’s taken the best of The Witcher's world and applied it here.
Performance & Polish
I tested Dawnwalker on both PS5 Pro and PC, with the majority of my playthrough on PC. Overall, the game ran great on my RTX 5080 computer. It kept a 60+ FPS for pretty much the entire experience on Ultra settings.
On console, performance mode was not yet available in my testing, so I only managed to try out the 40FPS Balance Mode and 30FPS Quality Mode. Both modes look fantastic on the PS5 Pro and hold a nearly perfect FPS with no real drops.
In terms of polish, I only experienced minor bugs in Dawnwalker, like clipping through a couple of objects and one singular crash in the final quest. In my experience, this was a very polished game with no game-breaking bugs at any point. The game is still getting patches right now leading up to launch so I expect it to be even more polished by the time you play it.
FINAL VERDICT
Considering this is the start of a hopefully long-running franchise, I can see the sequel doing wonders if it takes in all the feedback on gameplay, as Rebel Wolves' first-ever game completely excels in so many aspects. The ending made me excited to see where this franchise will go, and I hope the next game takes its time to improve the gameplay and achieve the vampire fantasy much more in-depth. As it stands, The Blood of Dawnwalker is a solid beginning and a great foundation for a long running franchise.
The Blood of Dawnwalker - 8/10 - GREAT
- REVIEW: The Blood of Dawnwalker A promising beginning to a new vampire RPG franchise The Blood of Dawnwalker is the first in a vampire RPG franchise by Rebel Wolves, a studio formed back in 2022 by former CD Projekt Red developers. I have been incredibly excited for Dawnwalker for a long time, as a massive fan of CDPR's RPGs. A vampire RPG by many of the same people who delivered those games seemed perfect for me. So how is Dawnwalker? Is it as good as Witcher 3? Well... that's unrealistic for a new studio's first game, but it is a great game. Story, Structure & Lore The Blood of Dawnwalker's story is every bit as great and well-written as Cyberpunk and The Witcher franchises. You play as Coen of Laslea, an average villager living in Vale Sangora, a region currently ruled by brutal vampire lords. Through certain events that I won't spoil, Coen's family is taken, and he is turned into a Vrakhir, a vampire. Yet unlike most vampires, Coen is not affected by the sun. Turning completely human in the day, and full vampire at night. Hence, "Dawnwalker". Coen as a character is instantly loveable. He’s far from the professional monster hunter Geralt of Rivia. He has no real idea what he is doing at the start and struggles hard with events from his past and present. Whether those events end up consuming him and turning him into a monster or empowering him to become a better person is entirely up to you. The side cast of characters is filled with incredible characters that Coen can choose to ally himself with or stand against. It is an extremely well-rounded cast, with each of the more major side characters having entire side questlines dedicated to them. My favorite characters were Vicho, Anca and Lacra. All three felt like they became true allies to Coen over the course of their questline and I absolutely loved what drove each one forward in their respective questlines. The actual lore of Dawnwalker is fascinating. Rebel Wolves have crafted a world that is begging to be explored, and many questions are left completely unanswered by the end. They have set up a much larger world that I am very excited to see how it’s explored in the sequels, but Vale Sangora itself is filled with secrets and fascinating revelations about its inhabitants. It's every bit as interesting as the worlds of Witcher and Cyberpunk. I can already imagine hours long videos diving into all the secrets in this game and what they could mean for future installments The structure of Dawnwalker is its most fascinating aspect. Coen has 30 days and nights to save his family, so there is a constant time factor throughout the journey. Time doesn't move on its own, but rather through specific actions. Progressing quests will move time forward, buying skills will move time forward, and doing open world activities may also have time move forward. This gives Dawnwalker a sense of constant urgency. I could never truly just relax and do open world activities as I was always thinking of how best to spend the time in this game. Time is a constantly depleting resource, but that's not to say the game ends when time runs out. If the 30 days do run out, certain story events will occur that will affect Coen and his journey, but the game will not end. I found this time limit structure to be one of Dawnwalker's absolute best mechanics. It made me consider every single action, every quest that I'm spending time on, and which activities I was spending time with. You can absolutely finish the game before the 30 days mark, and I had one of the ending paths unlocked by day 15. I ended up finishing the game around day 25, which took me 40 hours. I did most of the quests in the game but have likely missed a few. A good 100% playthrough is likely to take 50-60 hours. Another side to Dawnwalker that is extremely unique is that there is no traditional main quest, every single quest is technically optional, and there is no real golden path to follow. You can absolutely just B-line straight to the ending right after the prologue, though you'd probably get destroyed by the enemies there. It is a crazy amount of freedom for an RPG and led to one of my all-time favorite RPG moments where I managed to accidentally stumble across one of the major vampire lords in the game that Coen is hunting down, entirely outside of any quest through just exploration. And I managed to take them out despite being grossly underleveled, which ended up skipping over their entire storyline and rewarding me with their abilities very early on. This structure can make the game feel a bit aimless at times, as you don't know which quests to tackle, but once you get hooked onto a storyline that stumbled upon by complete accident, it all clicks. One of the coolest aspects is that side quests tend to interact with each other in small ways, often unlocking new dialogue options because Coen knows a person related to a situation or just remembers encountering things before. Another detail that I loved is that because at night time, Coen craves blood, you can end up choosing to give in to the hunger and instantly kill mid-cutscene pretty much every single important character in the game, and the story will react to your actions accordingly as Coen becomes more and more monstrous if you choose to start doing this. The amount of choices and freedom in this story is crazy, and I am sure there are a ton of variations to the narrative that I have not been able to come close to in my own playthrough as I stuck to being a good guy in general. The one type of "quest" that I overall felt did not fit this overall package is the activities that can be done to anger Brencis' court. These usually are just basic Ubisoft-style outpost clearing without much depth. They get repetitive very quickly, and I recommend only doing them to level up early on, then focusing more on the in-depth side quests instead, until you decide to anger Brencis that is and go after his Boyars. The time limit structure also contributes massively to replayability. It’s not possible to do everything you want in one playthrough if you choose to abide by the time limit, making replays valuable to see different paths and quests through. There are multiple endings. I did all of the major endings, and there is a pretty large amount of variety here, even if the ultimate end point is similar between them all. It reminded me heavily of Cyberpunk and how it handled its endings. You can expect something very similar here. Overall, the story and its structure are the absolute strongest aspects of Dawnwalker. The writing is impeccable. The time limit mechanic makes every decision important, and the lack of a traditional main quest can lead to some of the most interesting moments I've ever had in an RPG. Gameplay Dawnwalker's gameplay mechanics unfortunately leave much to be desired. Focusing on the positives first, the contrast between human gameplay in the morning and vampire gameplay at night is done very well. You feel far more powerful at night thanks to the Vampire abilities and the extremely fast claws attack that defeat swordplay entirely. You also get a neat teleport ability that helps you get behind enemies during combat or to traverse across rooftops and climb on walls. Coen can also turn into a wolf to travel much faster at night. At daytime, there are still powerful abilities with Coen's witchcraft powers on top of swordplay, but it is a far more simple gameplay loop at night, with no way to get on rooftops, feeling extremely similar to The Witcher's general movement style. Where the gameplay stumbles is in the combat. The combat of Dawnwalker can be described as an action take on the Kingdom Come combat style. Attacks can be aimed towards specific directions, and enemies must be blocked or parried by aiming towards their attack and then countering with a powerful riposte. There are also the abilities which you gain throughout the game, such as a powerful throat cut or just biting your enemies as a vampire. This combat system works great for about half the game, as Coen feels rightfully underpowered, and each encounter feels unique and fun for the first time. Unfortunately, by the mid-late game, this combat begins to drag as it feels extremely damage sponge-y, even on normal difficulty. Enemies aggressively scale with your level, there is never a moment where I ever felt like I was getting stronger, as all enemies feel like they take 20+ hits to take down. This resulted in the combat getting extremely tedious at a point, and by the late game, I was just begging for enemies to go down faster so I can get to the next great story moment. The combat also lacks variety, there just aren't enough enemy types for the game's 40-hour mark, you'll have seen all the enemies in the game by the 10-hour mark. And there is no unique strategy to take on enemies, you can basically counter and riposte every single enemy type, with no real variety on how to take them down. This, combined with the ridiculous health pools that these enemies have, results in a combat system that at a point, I just wished could be skipped. It needs rebalancing. It should not take 20+ claw hits at level 40 to take down a boar, I never once felt powerful as Coen no matter how many perks I invested into damage and making abilities stronger. The combat ended up being the game's absolute biggest issue. It works well for about 10 hours when you're still getting introduced to new enemies and are rightfully feeling weak at a low level, but by the 40-hour mark, I was just done with it. I can see this combat system being a pretty big barrier to entry for many players who aren't as tolerant of systems like this, and it reminded me most of The Witcher 2's combat, which was controversial for similar reasons. I think this game would've really benefitted more from a more action-focused combat like The Witcher 3. With a rebalancing patch to make you feel more powerful in the mid-late game, I can see this combat system being far more tolerable and fun. But in its current state, it's an overall miss for me and the game's biggest flaw. Another issue with the gameplay is the movement. In daytime, Coen can move faster by using “haste," which is a very janky fast run ability that always looks awkward. It is a very strange thing that there are no horses in Dawnwalker, they do not exist as an animal in the world at all, and there are no mounts. It really felt immersion-breaking at a point, and I constantly wished Coen just had a horse to get around with, something like a cool vampire horse like Shadowmere from Skyrim would've really sufficed. In night-time, the movement really struggles. Because it's a very Witcher 3-style movement, it constantly feels far too clunky to achieve any sense of "cool" as a vampire as you have to abuse the teleport mechanic to get around the janky jumps and awkward speed. There is no real parkour here, which feels like a huge omission to the vampire fantasy. The wall climbing ability is far too rarely truly useful, and for such a cool ability, I would've liked to see it be more integrated into the gameplay loop. Another strange omission in gameplay is that Dawnwalker has no stealth. Which feels like it goes against the entire idea of vampires being sneaky creatures of the night, but the game has absolutely 0 stealth, and you are always forced into combat no matter what. It honestly made the existence of wall climbing and crouching as mechanics feel arbitrary as you cannot sneak up on enemies at all, it is just not a thing. This is absolutely something that should be added in the sequel. It also contributes to the combat getting tedious even faster as you cannot avoid it at all. Open World The open world of Dawnwalker is fairly big. There is a ton to explore with a high level of variety. From snowy mountains, plains, eerie swamps, and the main city of Svartrau. Exploration is done very well, and usually just running in one direction can lead to finding several activities and quests. So whenever I felt aimless after finishing a questline, just picking a direction and going forward usually led to something new and interesting. The general vibe of the world can be mainly compared to Witcher 3's "Velen" with Svartrau serving as this game's Novigrad. Svartrau City served as my favourite location in the game and where I spent the most time. The city itself is not that big at a glance, but it is extremely dense with quests and locations to explore. I absolutely loved this city, especially at night when you get to sneak around and explore rooms that only a vampire can climb up to. It feels like a truly living city that is constantly adapting to your actions. Speaking of actions, Dawnwalker employs a notoriety system that goes through several permanent levels as Coen becomes more and more well-known for his disruptions to Brencis' operations. I highly recommend cleaning up most side quests before you decide to max this bar out, as it can make going anywhere in the world very complicated. The quests also react to this, and characters will recognize Coen instantly if your notoriety is high enough. Meanwhile, if it’s low, then Coen is a complete stranger that nobody knows. These are permanent changes, so be sure to assess before taking actions that can increase this bar. Overall, this is a great open world that is always fun to explore and very much feels like it’s taken the best of The Witcher's world and applied it here. Performance & Polish I tested Dawnwalker on both PS5 Pro and PC, with the majority of my playthrough on PC. Overall, the game ran great on my RTX 5080 computer. It kept a 60+ FPS for pretty much the entire experience on Ultra settings. On console, performance mode was not yet available in my testing, so I only managed to try out the 40FPS Balance Mode and 30FPS Quality Mode. Both modes look fantastic on the PS5 Pro and hold a nearly perfect FPS with no real drops. In terms of polish, I only experienced minor bugs in Dawnwalker, like clipping through a couple of objects and one singular crash in the final quest. In my experience, this was a very polished game with no game-breaking bugs at any point. The game is still getting patches right now leading up to launch so I expect it to be even more polished by the time you play it. FINAL VERDICT Considering this is the start of a hopefully long-running franchise, I can see the sequel doing wonders if it takes in all the feedback on gameplay, as Rebel Wolves' first-ever game completely excels in so many aspects. The ending made me excited to see where this franchise will go, and I hope the next game takes its time to improve the gameplay and achieve the vampire fantasy much more in-depth. As it stands, The Blood of Dawnwalker is a solid beginning and a great foundation for a long running franchise. The Blood of Dawnwalker - 8/10 - GREAT
- Excellent story, characters & lore - Brilliant 30-day time-limit system - Great open world & exploration - Tons of choices and replayability - Combat becomes repetitive & spongey - No stealth or proper parkour - Movement can feel clunky These are the main points. Not bad tbh
Loved reading this. Sounds like I’ll play on the easiest difficulty and have close to no issues.
Nice one, I will definitely give this a go