The Blood of Dawnwalker has been at the top of my must-buy list ever since the moment Rebel Wolves revealed it. I’ve always had a penchant for open-world RPGs like this, and given that it was pieced together by former developers of The Witcher, my interest in the brand-new IP was well and truly piqued from the get-go.
In the two weeks leading up to the game’s launch, I found myself thrust neck-deep into a brutal, emotional, vampire-laden adventure, exploring Vale Sangora, battling forces of the undead and the macabre, and trying at all costs to rescue my family from a bloodthirsty cabal.
Needless to say, I’ve had one hell of a great time with The Blood of Dawnwalker, but that line itself is nowhere near representative of the full breadth of this review.
The Blood of Dawnwalker Makes You Rethink ‘Time’
Allow me to set the stage.
In Blood of Dawnwalker (I’ll drop the ‘the’), you assume control of Coen of Laslea, a peasant who doesn’t have a hell of a lot going for him. He lives, like his family, friends, and neighbors, under the oppression of Knyaz Brencis and his followers. Brencis rules Vale Sangora, otherwise known as ‘the valley’, with an iron fist and razor-sharp teeth.
The twist here? Brencis is a fierce, fearsome vampire, known in this universe as a vrakhir. He likes to think he’s a compassionate, forgiving ruler, and he allows people to go about their lives mostly uninterrupted, provided they make regular blood offerings to his family unit of vrakhiri.
Things take a turn for the worse, and Coen, our would-be hero, finds himself turned by Brencis, morphed into a unique form known as a Dawnwalker – half-human, half-vrakhir. A race against time then begins, with Brencis capturing Coen’s family and threatening them with annihilation, prompting Coen’s journey to fully begin.
But this is where the concept of time is reimagined. You get 30 in-game days to rescue your family. If you miss that deadline, they’ll be eviscerated by Brencis and his crew. Therefore, you’re tasked with spending that time building up your strength, your forces, and your chances, and while doing so, you make a notorious name for yourself across Vale Sangora.
In short, it’s a brilliant mechanic, and it’s not too suffocating. Everything costs time in Blood of Dawnwalker:
- Completing actions within a side quest? That can take a couple of ‘segments’ off your clock
- Embarking on a major mission? That might cost you six or eight segments
- Leveling up a skill and acquiring new abilities? That’s one segment per upgrade
- Helping someone out in the wild during an ad-hoc mission? That might be two or three segments
It’s all about prioritizing what you want to do during your playthrough. You get sixteen ‘segments’ in a day, which means you’ve got 480 segments to spend in total, assuming you go right to the wire and avoid saving your family sooner than you must. It seems like a lot, but trust me, there’s a lot to do, and you will miss out on many things.
To add to that, some things can time out if you don’t action them quickly enough, and many side quests require you to ‘go away’ for a day or two to allow things to cook. This is a game with multiple endings, including some ‘hidden’ endings that can be accomplished very quickly.
One solution allows you to beat the game’s big boss, Knyaz Brencis himself, within minutes of starting the game.
But ultimately, if you’re aiming to accomplish as much as possible in Blood of Dawnwalker, including hitting those achievements, leveling up, grinding your skills, and becoming the ultimate vrakhiri hunter, you’ll need to manage your time very effectively.
… Or, of course, you can play through the game multiple times. Or save cheese. It’s up to you.
It’s also worth stressing that when your story ends, it ends. There’s no going back around the world to finish up whatever you’ve missed, and there’s no new game plus yet.
Under The Threat of the Knyaz, You Bloom
Coen starts life (at least, in this game) as a family man with a relatively quiet manner about him. By the time you end Dawnwalker (I’ve dropped the ‘Blood of’ now), you’ll be a phenomenal combatant, brimming with heavy armor, legendary weapons, and more abilities than the average vrakhir can handle.
It’s the ultimate journey from rags to riches.
I’ll say now that Dawnwalker is like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in many ways, but that’s not a bad thing. As I stressed, the team at Rebel Wolves is made up of some former CDPR talent, and that shines through in this game, but it’s not done in a way that makes it feel like a shameless copy. It’s definitely more inspired by than based on.
As an RPG, Dawnwalker unravels perfectly. You’re free to choose what kind of warrior you become, and there are three core pathways to follow:
- Witchcraft
- Swordsmanship
- Vampire
If you want to suck the blood from everything you see and rely on more hellish abilities, you can prioritize your vampire skill path. If you’re an honest, simple, and traditional fighter, you should upgrade your swordsman skills. And if you want to dabble in the occult and unleash mysterious, ethereal abilities on your enemies, you can lean more into witchcraft.
But that’s not me saying you can pick A, B, or C. You can have some twisted mix of all three, if you so desire. That’s what I did, anyway.
It’s all about choice and consequence, growth and bolstering, exploration and adventure.
As you navigate Vale Sangora, you’ll build relationships with like-minded folks wanting to bring down Brencis and his team, and it’ll be entirely up to you to choose who you side with, betray, ignore, or slaughter.
Now, as we talk about the wider journey, let’s touch on playtime.
It took me exactly 15 hours to complete Blood of Dawnwalker. I know that sounds dreadful, but let me explain a few points:
- I played on the easiest difficulty, and trust me when I tell you it is super accessible. I never struggled.
- I spent the latter half of my playthrough effectively speed-running the game to get it done in time for the review embargo (damn you, Gamescom!)
- I ended my run ten days earlier than I could have, opting to take down Brencis alone in a spur-of-the-moment decision.
- I left a lot of content on the table, including some relatively major side quests.
That said, I could see a more full-fledged playthrough lasting at least 20 to 25 hours on my difficulty level. If you crank up that difficulty, go for the full 30 days, and try to accomplish as much as possible, I think you could comfortably stretch Dawnwalker to 30 to 40 hours.
For proof, here’s a screenshot of an autosave after completing the game and rolling the credits:
Beauty in Terror
There are plenty of references to the undead, the underworld, and the afterlife in Blood of Dawnwalker. It’s a dark game; that much is obvious, and there are some seriously morbid themes present at times. We’re talking blood slaves, murdered children, mass graves, and ungodly betrayal and sacrifice.
But for all the woeful themes, Dawnwalker has a glorious platter of beauty on display. Firstly, it looks gorgeous at times. The open-world environment of Vale Sangora is stunning and bursting with exploration opportunities. It’s a diverse world littered with villages, ancient ruins, dense forests, and caves, and you never know what you’ll run into next.
The character models are superb, even if their animations are, at times, a little clunky and janky, and the majority of the outfits and customization options you find, craft, buy, or unlock are intricate and well-ranged.
There’s a day-night cycle that lends itself to two different worlds. At night, you adopt the powers of the vrakhiri in your vampire form, becoming a shadow that tears through enemies with reckless abandon, while in the day, you’re all human. That also changes how people react to your presence.
You can form intimate relationships here and there, take a more tactful, gentle approach with people, and, as a character, Coen can show compassion, gratitude, and even love, despite his circumstances.
Even the most mundane side missions become memorable; the flora and fauna of the world are plentiful, and everything from the lighting to the foliage is well done.
If there’s one complaint I have in this category, it’s that the game hasn’t shipped with photomode, which, to me, seems like an immense opportunity missed. This game is nothing short of sumptuous when it comes to visuals, and I’d love to snap some digital photography on my journey.
The game’s soundtrack is brilliant, if a little close to what we’ve heard in years of The Witcher; the ambient soundscape is authentic and nice to listen to, the voice acting is truly on point, and the atmosphere around you feels well designed.
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But Not Everything is Perfect
Dawnwalker is a stellar game with some incredible selling points; that much is clear. But it’s not perfect.
I had a few bugs as I explored Vale Sangora, including my companions getting stuck in some geography, movement-related issues causing a few unnecessary deaths, and some audio-related glitches that cropped up here and there.
The game’s detritus NPCs quickly grew to grate on me, as they’re mostly brain-dead character models that serve to populate the world aimlessly. In the game’s core city, they roam without purpose and repeat the same voice lines over and over, sometimes getting trapped in a loop that sees them utter the same thing ad infinitum.
As you grow as a character and a Dawnwalker, you become increasingly powerful, impressive, and above all else, notorious, but this never seems to be reflected in the general populace. Even when fighting rough-and-ready bandits, whom you can cut down with all the ferocity of the half-vampire that you are, nobody ever really seems to acknowledge that you’re a pretty terrifying guy.
You might get a quick, ‘Bloody hell, this is a slaughter!’ from a guard, but that’s about it.
I mean, you’re using vrakhir claws to dismember and decapitate enemies while unleashing hellish and otherworldly powers on them, and nobody ever seems to care that much.
And that notoriety becomes a massive issue later on. Part of the game’s core theme is to build your reputation, and for each ‘level’ you unlock, something happens in the world. At the latter end of the spectrum, guards will attack on sight, but in a dense location, they never stop coming.
You’ll run a hundred paces, get into a fight, clear them out, run another hundred paces, and get into another fight. It never ends; they never stop spawning, and your progress is seriously hampered.
The game is technically quite sound, but you’ll quickly learn that almost every fight plays out in the same way, with the same combat loops, and the same enemy builds. The notion of repetition emerges more obviously in the wild, where your runs across the open environment are non-stop hampered by packs of wolves or boar.
Further to that, I don’t know if it’s because I played on the easiest difficulty, but impressive boss battles were run-of-the-mill things with simple solutions, often not delivering that much on the build-up leading to them.
Also, as I’ve mentioned The Witcher 3 a few times, the game falls prey to the loot loop present in that game. You’ll constantly find heaps of loot, but almost none of it means anything, because chances are, you’ll find that one sword or piece of armor that you like and will keep upgrading as you work through the game.
You’ll probably never pay attention to all the stats, some of which run deep on the average item, and you’ll wish for a transmogrification feature once you’re a few hours deep.
And if you’re an achievement or trophy hunter, you’ll find the game somewhat artificially extended because of the need to complete several endings and pathways, just to tick every box. That’s the time mechanic coming back to haunt you, in some ways. At least it’s baked into the game’s narrative and makes sense.
If it were an arbitrary countdown, I’d be much more pissed off about it.
Finally, for all the enjoyment I found playing Blood of Dawnwalker, I couldn’t help but notice it had been crafted under the mark of the typical Ubisoft open-world formula. You have your ‘mini-bosses’ that support the big boss, and to get to them, you need to complete side missions to gain their attention, draw them out, and eliminate them, slowing ‘taking over’ the world.
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Will We Get a Dawnwalker 2?
Without giving anything away, we’re definitely getting a Blood of Dawnwalker 2. The way the game wraps up leaves a lot open to interpretation and assumptions about what comes next, and I’m fully anticipating a sequel being announced soon enough.
What I love is that Dawnwalker’s universe is fully established in a few hours. That means that you understand the lore and the deep backstory relatively early on. Everything is easy to digest, and by the end of the game, you’ve got this entirely new and broad IP delivered as a debut project from a fresh studio, and you genuinely want to learn and see more then and there.
I mean, I’m going back to scoop up as many achievements as possible and to check out the alternate endings and act on decisions I left unmade, and I can’t wait. I know that the ‘negative’ section above is a bit expansive, but it’s nothing game-breaking, and that means I’m more than happy to keep soaking up Dawnwalker.
The Blood of Dawnwalker Review Verdict
The Blood of Dawnwalker might just be one of the best debut titles from a new studio in recent years, if not ever. It’s a beautiful adventure that presents a never-before-seen universe in delightful form, and it’s equal parts brutal and emotional. Being able to play as a vampire-human hybrid gives you a sense of immense power while retaining that humanity that keeps the game grounded, and I love that.
It’s not without teething issues, but the bulk of the game is stellar, and I can see some post-launch updates populating the ecosystem with new features like new game plus and a photomode, and perhaps some DLC, to really tick some extra boxes (at least in my book).
Ultimately, The Blood of Dawnwalker represents a full-blooded romp that RPG fans everywhere will wholeheartedly enjoy. It’s stylish, deep, and diverse, and it’s the start of something incredible, with the developers deliberately leaving the door open to what comes next.
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The Blood of Dawnwalker
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The Blood of Dawnwalker
Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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