Across its first five hours or so, The Blood of Dawnwalker came very close to convincing me that it could be the next genre-conquering RPG.
The vampiric debut from developer Rebel Wolves, Dawnwalker starts surprisingly strong, flaunting all of the intrigue and role-playing promise that you’d expect from a team that was once heavily involved with The Witcher 3.
But as much as it pains me to say it, the game never quite maintains its early momentum; its potential is ultimately scuppered by a number of issues, although I do think that it’s a solid story-led experience overall — especially if you’re in the mood for some emotionally-charged vampire fiction.
You play as Coen, a young village lad who’s being suffocated by his family’s plight. Haunted by past traumas, his mother’s weakened mental state provides a morbidly grounded basis for the story’s beginnings, and it’s hard not to be caught up in the horror of it all.
To make matters (much) worse, Coen’s community, and the surrounding valley of Vale Sangora, is under the rule of an ancient vampire and his ruthless army.
The twist here is that the undead overlord, Brencis, is widely hailed as a saviour. Not only did he overthrow the land’s previous ruler — an undeniable despot — he also used his cursed blood to cure the plague that was ravaging the population.
But when Brencis comes to town, you better be ready to offer up some of your own blood in exchange for his continued protection. With an unholy mass taking place after dark, Coen and his family are expected to attend — but his mother’s ongoing illness puts her under intense scrutiny. After all, the vampires have no need of “weak” blood.
If you’re sat there thinking “damn, this sounds like one hell of a narrative setup”, then you’d be right. As far as prologues go, it’s deeply intriguing, and on a mechanical level, it does a nice job of teaching you the ropes.
In particular, the opening illustrates one of Dawnwalker’s most important systems: time. Or more specifically, time management.
Time is essentially a resource that’s spent when progressing through quests. There’s no timer constantly ticking down in the background, and the game always makes it clear when a decision’s going to eat up a few hours.
If you’re concerned about feeling the kind of pressure that’s typically associated with time limits, don’t be. If anything, Dawnwalker just uses time as a means to track your overarching progress.
You see, post-prologue, Coen has 30 days and 30 nights to complete his one and only objective: to save his family and fellow villagers from the clutches of Brencis and his cohorts. How you reach that goal is entirely up to you.
The beauty of Dawnwalker’s quest system is that you’ll rarely hit a dead end. At some point, your current quest will tie back into your overall goal, meaning that side quests, at least in the traditional sense, don’t really exist.
Again, it’s all about how you decide to progress. You can track down potential allies, or disrupt the valley’s balance of power by striking at Brencis’ most trusted lieutenants.
The idea is that you’ll carve your own unique path through the game, with the “time limit” pushing you towards making big decisions.
However, in reality, you should have more than enough time to exhaust the vast majority of Coen’s leads, which does, to some extent, go against the title’s seemingly intended structure and eventual replay value.
For reference, I completed Dawnwalker in roughly 40 hours. And by the end, I still had just under a week of in-game time to burn. What I’m trying to say is that you really shouldn’t worry about it.
But even though the game’s time-based structure ends up being a bit of an illusion, decisions still carry a pleasing amount of weight. This is down to a combination of good character and scenario writing, the former in particular being one of the release’s greatest strengths.
Indeed, Dawnwalker’s got some great characters, all of whom are backed by fantastic voice acting. There were moments, during character-specific quests, where I actually had to stop and seriously think about what was best for the people involved — and that’s a clear sign of immersion.
Meanwhile, Coen himself is a fine protagonist, although he’s not very malleable from a role-playing perspective.
As a titular Dawnwalker, Coen is human by day and a vampire by night. In gameplay terms, nothing much changes between the two existences; you just get access to different abilities.
Still, Coen struggles to come to terms with his newfound powers — which, naturally, must be fuelled by blood — in an endearing and believable way.
However, this means that you’re never able to properly embrace Coen’s vampiric side. No matter how many innocent NPCs you suck dry, Coen will always revert to being a relatively good guy during dialogue. That’s just who he is.
This isn’t necessarily a problem given the context of his adventure, but those of you looking for a deeper role-playing experience will probably be left disappointed by the general lack of control.
Still, Dawnwalker isn’t trying to be Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s much more of an open world RPG that offers a smattering of key choices, as opposed to a consistent trickle of character-defining decisions.
That said, I do still wish that there was a bit more meat on the game’s role-playing bones, because it would have helped distract from Dawnwalker’s more prominent issues.
Let’s start with the open world, which is lovely to look at, but annoyingly empty. There’s just nothing of interest going on between locations, and so it’s no wonder that you can unlock traversal abilities to cover ground faster.
It always rubs me the wrong way when a game asks you to cough up precious skill points in exchange for making its design less tedious — and that’s exactly what Dawnwalker wants you to do here. Vale Sangora’s map could have been half the size and very little of value would be lost.
But the threat of a tiresome open world pales in comparison to the threat of fighting another pack of wolves. Or another group of soldiers.
Enemy variety is massively lacking throughout Dawnwalker. You’ll be battling the same sword-wielding guardsmen from beginning to end, just slightly reskinned. The same dogs, wolves, and undead wolves. The same demonic spirits. The same malformed vampires.
Only the game’s main bosses are blessed with anything that resembles a unique set of moves, and they’re incredibly few and far between. And unfortunately, this is just the beginning of the title’s combat-related woes.
Dawnwalker’s action is beyond repetitive. The game’s direction-based system works well in concept, as Coen can attack or defend from different angles to open his opponents up — think Kingdom Come: Deliverance and you’re on the right track — but said system simply never evolves.
Once you’ve got the timing down, and you’ve learned to read your foe’s intentions — which isn’t difficult, considering the severe lack of enemy types — you’ll be going through the exact same motions for the next 35 hours.
Questionable combat balance compounds the problem, too. In the early hours, Coen’s damage output is laughable. Even the most basic of foes — rabid wolves or wild boars — feel like they have way too much health.
It got to a point, about 10 or 15 hours in, where I considered lowering the difficulty — from the default setting — so that every fight wasn’t lasting several minutes. Several minutes of the same parry and counter patterns over and over again. In hindsight, I should have.
But then you get towards the end of the game and if you’re anything like me, you’ve stacked an insane number of damage multipliers on Coen with the help of legendary equipment.
Admittedly, it was quite funny to see the last boss die in just three sword swings, but come on — there needs to be a better balance at play here. As it stands, you spend tens of hours hitting foes with what feels like a wet noodle, only to become grossly overpowered for the last five percent of the game.
Now then, a quick word on performance. The review build features just two options: ‘quality’ and ‘balanced’. The former is capped at 30 frames-per-second, and the latter at 40 — but only if you have a 120Hz TV.
On PS5 Pro, both modes hold up pretty much perfectly, outside of some very specific situations, like fighting a bunch of guards right in the middle of the game’s bustling city.
But on PS5, the drops do seem to be a bit more frequent, particularly when roaming around the aforementioned city, which is rather disappointing.
Fortunately, Rebel Wolves has said that a ‘performance’ mode, targeting a much more agreeable 60fps, will be added via a day one patch. But it obviously remains to be seen whether this mode can stay consistent.
