🎮 Overall: The Blood of Dawnwalker is a dark-fantasy action RPG from former The Witcher 3 developers, offering a distinctive mix of time-limited gameplay, meaningful choices, directional combat, and human/vampire playstyles.
🧛 Setting & Story: Set in 14th-century Europe in the Carpathian Mountains, the story follows Coen, a young man transformed into a Dawnwalker—human by day and vampire by night—after vampires conquer his valley following a devastating plague.
📖 Main Story: The reviewer found the central plot too simple and emotionally weak, particularly compared with The Witcher 3. Coen's family and the main villain don't receive enough development to make the overarching story especially compelling.
👥 Characters & Writing: Individual characters, dialogue, voice acting, investigations, and character-focused quests are considerably stronger. Choices can significantly alter relationships, quest outcomes, rewards, and even the ending.
🔀 Choices & Consequences: This is considered one of the game's best features. Decisions branch naturally, sometimes without being obvious to the player, making quests feel less linear and encouraging experimentation or a second playthrough.
⏳ Time-Management System: The day/night time mechanic affects quests, abilities, and activities across the game. Certain quests require specific times, while completing activities consumes limited time chunks. The reviewer initially worried it would be tedious but ultimately considered it one of the game's strongest mechanics.
⚔️ Combat: Combat is better than expected, using directional attacks and blocking. Perfect blocks/parries are particularly satisfying, with clear visual cues and well-balanced timing.
🐺 Enemy Variety: Combat suffers from repetitive enemies, especially wolves, vampire dogs, and large groups of similar soldiers. These enemies can become frustrating because of their erratic animations and limited variety.
👹 Boss Fights: Major bosses are well designed and have clearly telegraphed attacks, but they were generally too easy on the reviewer's chosen difficulty. Most could be defeated on the first attempt.
🌙 Human vs. Vampire Abilities: Coen has different abilities depending on the time of day. Vampire skills include wall-walking, claw movement, teleportation/blinking, and transforming into a wolf, while human abilities include enhanced speed and time manipulation.
🌳 Skill Trees: There are three major skill trees covering vampire abilities, witchcraft, and sword mastery. The abilities are generally useful and fun, but the reviewer felt their combat implementation was shallow because activating abilities often provides temporary damage immunity.
📈 Character Progression: Despite having multiple skill trees, equipment upgrades, crafting, and different gear qualities, progression feels underwhelming. The suspected level-scaling system prevents the player from becoming dramatically stronger than early-game enemies.
🗡️ Weapons & Equipment: Armor has attractive visual variety and useful day/night-specific stats, but weapon variety is disappointing. Different weapon types largely feel the same apart from minor speed differences.
🏰 Quests & Outposts: Character-focused story quests are among the game's strongest content, with good presentation and set pieces. In contrast, repeatedly clearing enemy outposts and soldiers becomes highly repetitive.
🌍 Open World: The world is considered a good size—not too large or too small—with enjoyable exploration, dungeons, collectibles, and quests discovered naturally. However, the landscape is somewhat flat and lacks much verticality.
🏘️ World Simulation: NPC systems are relatively basic, without highly detailed schedules or deep environmental simulation. The game prioritizes storytelling and combat rather than immersive-simulation elements.
📊 Other World Systems: The game's "court" system changes enemy presence and some economic/world conditions as Coen opposes the vampire rulers, but the reviewer considered its actual impact fairly minor.
🎨 Graphics: Visually, the game resembles The Witcher 3 but with more detailed characters and better animations. Overall, it looks good, although nighttime can become excessively dark even when using a torch.
💻 Performance: Performance was generally solid on the reviewer's PC, although there were noticeable frame drops. The reviewer expected patches, including the day-one update, to improve this.
🔊 Audio: Sound effects and voice acting are high quality. The music is less memorable but fits the dark-fantasy atmosphere well.
⚠️ Biggest Weaknesses: The main criticisms are the shallow overarching story, repetitive enemies and outposts, weak late-game progression, suspected level scaling, limited weapon variety, and combat abilities that lack depth.
❤️ Final Verdict: Despite its flaws, the reviewer enjoyed the game considerably and considers it an impressive first title from Rebel Wolves. They view it as a high-quality RPG with substantial room for improvement.
💰 Price: The reviewer considers the launch price too high and recommends waiting for a sale if you're uncertain whether the game's particular mix of systems appeals to you.
Long video so summary.
Conclusion: this game is not that good. But it's rebel wolves first game so we're lenient and accept its many faults.
I'd guess it's same system as Dead Rising where you have timer to get medicine and get back to your daughter. If you fail, she dies but you can keep on exploring and doing side quests. Don't really know because never finished any DR because of it.
🗺️ Explore efficiently: Blood of the Dawnwalker has a 30-day time limit, so avoid wasting time on weak perks. Two excellent early movement abilities are Fever from Witchcraft and Shapeshift from the Vampire tree. Both dramatically improve travel speed, but 1 point is enough.
🧳 Skip carry-weight perks: The starting 200 carry weight is already generous. Shrines around the world also function as storage and fast-travel points, so save those perk points for combat upgrades.
📚 Understand progression: Leveling isn't just about XP. You must find and read skill books in the open world to unlock perk ranks, and unlocking abilities consumes 1-hour time segments—important because you only have 30 days.
⚔️ Prioritize Swordsmanship: Swordsmanship works day and night, unlike Vampire and Witchcraft skills. Recommended early perks are:
Omni Block — reduces stamina cost for directional blocking.
Perfect Riposte — perfect blocks enable guaranteed critical attacks.
Perfect Block — restores stamina after successful perfect blocks.
Counter Attack — gives 10% more damage after a perfect block.
Swiftness — increases attack speed after perfect blocks.
💾 Experiment safely: Save before investing in a perk or ability. If you don't like the result, reload and spend the point elsewhere.
🗡️ Loot aggressively: Better gear appears as you travel south, where enemies become progressively stronger. You can sometimes enter dangerous areas early, loot higher-level equipment, and use it before you're strong enough to fight everything there.
🛡️ Prioritize gear buffs over armor rating: Equipment ranges from common to legendary and can provide powerful bonuses such as increased health or a larger perfect-block window. These bonuses can be more valuable than a small increase in armor rating.
🔨 Upgrade your equipment: Blacksmiths can upgrade gear up to one level above your current character level. Rare and legendary weapons can be especially worthwhile to upgrade.
🌞🌙 Maintain separate loadouts: You can freely switch between day/human and night/vampire armor sets, which is useful because some equipment bonuses only work in one form.
🔥 Look for Weapon Arts: Certain rare and legendary weapons unlock special Weapon Arts. Charge them through combat, then unleash a powerful unblockable attack.
🧪 Don't ignore alchemy: Collect herbs and creature ingredients while exploring. Focus Sight highlights useful plants, and you generally don't need the perk that doubles resource gathering if you simply collect materials as you go.
⚗️ Craft permanent-style buffs: Some consumables provide powerful bonuses for multiple time segments—for example, increased weapon damage or dramatically improved stamina regeneration. Since normal time doesn't advance unless you perform actions that consume a time segment, these buffs can be extremely efficient.
🧛 Be careful with human blood: Human blood provides strong healing but increases corruption. Higher corruption unlocks stronger vampire abilities, but it can also make Kain lose control and potentially cause NPC deaths during story scenes.
🐺 Control your corruption: You can maintain lower corruption by feeding on animals instead of humans. During the day, quests may also give you opportunities to heal with food and potions instead of blood.
🩸 If you want maximum vampire power: To rapidly increase corruption, clear out guards in a village and then feed on the townspeople. You can either leave them unconscious after feeding or continue until they die—the latter increases corruption much more but has consequences.
🧛♂️ Build a tanky vampire: Strong defensive choices include Endless Hunger for more health segments, Voracious Bite for stronger healing, Closing Wounds for regeneration, Blood Theft for life leech on attacks, and Scholar Shield for healing when blocking/perfect-blocking.
🥷 Death from Above: This ability can instantly kill enemies and is particularly useful for stealthy approaches, despite the game's relatively limited stealth mechanics.
🏆 Overall priority: Focus your early time and perk points on movement, Swordsmanship, perfect-block/critical-hit mechanics, useful gear buffs, alchemy, and carefully managing vampiric corruption rather than carry weight or situational abilities.
Stormwolf: I think so. I've played through Oblivion twice (only TES Bethesda game i have finished) and always with 100's of mods. Always had a good time with it, new biomes like a big swamp and an old forest, NPC's going on adventures just like the player.. possibly one of the better RPG experiences i've had. AI is pretty dumb though, easy to exploit. I am unsure if i would like it today after playing e.g Elden Ring.
Played 4 hours which is pretty much the prologue.
Enjoying it immensely TBH.
Had some minor bugs and glitches but nothing game breaking.
The story is pretty captivating and the turning is really well done.
I quite like the directional combat although it does take a bit of getting used to, it adds an element of strategy and challenge to fights.
I’m not too bothered about the time mechanics.
I’d prefer the game without them but it does make things interesting by forcing you to choose what quests and activities to do.
Vampire powers are fun but I’ve barely used them yet!
Playing quality mode on PS5 Pro and it looks great with barely any framerate issues.
Might drop it to balanced mode if I need to later though.
So far so good and at least a solid 8/10 game in my opinion.
Spoiler:
I think I got mother killed by not following the recipe for the brew!
I should have read it before making it lol.
I suspect if I’d done it correctly, she’d still be alive :/
Timer in the game is a skip for me, not playing any games rushing progress.
And it's not even a "fun" or gameplay-integrated timer like Majoras Mask or Outer Wilds, where the loop itself is part of the appeal. I can get behind those.
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
- Albert Camus
I don't know if it's the scaling enemies or what...but I feel piss weak both as a vampire and as a human. Why they added a cooldown timer to the fucking combat abilities is beyond me - they already limited ability use by having to charge up the ability diamonds used to cast them, why have a cooldown timer as well? Also, why do so many passive abilities take up an active ability slot? You only get 4 of those (with heavy point investment)?
Basically the combat devolves to standing absolutely still, having the enemies surround you, and then perfect parrying and countering after each parry x 100 ad nauseum. Movement = DEATH, because as soon as you move, your blocking is fucked (movement direction turns into blocking direction, so guess who's getting hit?). It also doesn't help that enemy attacks are like a fucking MAGNET - turning/lunging/following you midway through the attack animation/swing defying every law of physics known to man.
Story and character wise this may be solid - but the Skill and Combat system fucking SUCKS. The timer turning every minor side-quest into a potential point of failure due to running out of time is just the icing on the shit cake.
I don't know if it's the scaling enemies or what...but I feel piss weak both as a vampire and as a human. Why they added a cooldown timer to the fucking combat abilities is beyond me - they already limited ability use by having to charge up the ability diamonds used to cast them, why have a cooldown timer as well? Also, why do so many passive abilities take up an active ability slot? You only get 4 of those (with heavy point investment)?
Basically the combat devolves to standing absolutely still, having the enemies surround you, and then perfect parrying and countering after each parry x 100 ad nauseum. Movement = DEATH, because as soon as you move, your blocking is fucked (movement direction turns into blocking direction, so guess who's getting hit?). It also doesn't help that enemy attacks are like a fucking MAGNET - turning/lunging/following you midway through the attack animation/swing defying every law of physics known to man.
Story and character wise this may be solid - but the Skill and Combat system fucking SUCKS. The timer turning every minor side-quest into a potential point of failure due to running out of time is just the icing on the shit cake.
To me combat looks much worse than Witcher 3, make it better let's not go back.
The combat is like a mashup of Witcher 3 and Kingdom Come Deliverance.
Maybe they’ll patch out the directional combat or make it optional if it gets a lot of backlash.
Timer in the game is a skip for me, not playing any games rushing progress.
i think its fine, if the playthroughs are short. 10-20 hours. i'd replay a game if it was good and make different choices. I think it's a good idea but i dunno how well it's been executed.
Like, im never, ever gonna replay Witcher 3 since a playthrough is 120+ fuckin hours. Witcher 2 however, i'd replay no problem since each playthrough was short, and to get the full story, i had to re-make a choice in act 1 which would totally change how the rest of the game played out. I don't know why this system was abandoned, it was fantastic for RPGs.
headshot wrote:
The combat is like a mashup of Witcher 3 and Kingdom Come Deliverance.
Maybe they’ll patch out the directional combat or make it optional if it gets a lot of backlash.
I'm not that into the loop, but why is it a bad thing that i can control my strikes as the character? I always got annoyed as fuck when Geralt would randomly spin or pirouette in Witcher 2 and 3. Made it hard to predict my moves. If i'm in control of it, it seems like a good thing.
The game reeks of fake choices. You spend daytime playing with the kids or doing other stuff like that which I doubt has any impact other than wasting your questing time.
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) that.
