The Blood of Dawnwalker review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

Rebel Wolves’ is a new studio founded by some developers from CD Projekt Red and their debut title, The Blood of Dawnwalker, is a dark fantasy vampire experience. Now that I’ve sunk my teeth into the action RPG… is this a great vampire game or is it a bloody mess?

When first launching The Blood of Dawnwalker and watching the opening cinematic, I wasn’t prepared for how brutal it was going to be right off the bat. Most games like this, if they have an intro before the start screen, will show a brief overview of the world, or a montage of in game events. In The Blood of Dawnwalker, you are jumping into the deep end right away.

The intro starts with Coen, trying to hide his sister Lunka from some soldiers. Lunka has contracted the plague, and the soldiers’ orders are to kill anyone who has it. Eventually the soldiers corner him and right before they kill Lunka a vampire named Brencis, along with a few of his vampires kill everyone but Coen and his sister, in quite brutal fashion. Brencis then uses his blood to cure Lunka and proclaims that he is life and death.

This brings us to the start of the game, where after a nightmare that serves as a short tutorial, we find Coen and his family in the small village of Laslea. This isn’t a very happy village, Brencis has ruled for about two years and has shut down the town’s main source of income, silver mining. He proclaims himself as a benevolent savior, requiring people to worship him and give him their blood. In return he supplies his own blood, which protects the village from the plague. If someone is infirm, their blood is deemed worthless and they are killed.

Brencis’ rule is anything but benevolent, depending on your choices at the start of the game, multiple people could be killed, including Coen’s mother. Surprisingly this early on, there are decisions and mistakes that will result in the death of characters. After the latest blood mass, some of the villagers are planning on a rebellion and give you the opportunity to join them. The rebellion ultimately fails and as an act of cruelty, Brencis attempts to turn Coen into a vampire, when you disobey Brencis, he determines that you are defective and pins you to a tree with a pickaxe letting the sun kill you.

Once Coen wakes up, it is discovered that his family has been kidnapped and will be sacrificed in thirty days. From this point forward, the game is an open world. There is no main questline to follow. Very early on, you are told that depending on your actions, you might draw the ire of Brancis. The more you do to draw his attention the more likely he will try to mess with your plans.

Actions that will raise your infamy level include things like eliminating soldier camps, or completing specific quests. As your infamy with Brancis’ court rises, he will issue edicts. These will change the world in specific ways. It could raise vendor prices, or prevent Coen from entering specific cities during the day. But, it will also unlock more quests with the rebellion, and unlocks a quest related to that henchman.

Now the thirty-day time limit is an actual time limit. Time does pass in this game, but not like most games. In most games, time passes automatically, here, it only passes when Coen does specific things, upgrading skills, completing marked quests, some quick travel, and making some key choices in the game. The day and night cycle are divided into 8 segments, every time a segment is used up, the game will warn you beforehand how much time will be used up.

Combat is one of the more unique combat systems I’ve played in a game. Anyone who has played The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, or any soul-like game will be right at home here. Just like souls games the attack and defense buttons are your shoulder buttons. But where the game differs is using the left thumbstick in conjunction with the action buttons to determine the direction of the attack or block. This took me a while to get used to, and I’m still struggling with this occasionally.

In easy to hard difficulty, an icon will appear on an enemy during a fight. It will be either a sword or a shield, if it’s a sword and has an arrow or direction associated with it, attacking using that direction on the thumbstick Coen gets around an enemy’s guard. When a shield is shown, if you block in that direction right before the hit, you don’t lose stamina.

Very early on Anca, the equivalent of a healer in your village, will teach Coen blood magic. One of the first abilities is pretty similar to Speak with Dead, where you can get information from dead characters. You can continue to learn new witchcraft abilities and improve on the ones you have, and some characters will sell you items that will teach you new abilities. Keep in mind that Coen can only use his witch abilities during the day, and vampire abilities at night.

At night, when Coen is in his vampiric form, he uses his claws to attack, has special movement abilities like shadow walk, and can use his claws to slide down vertical walls. He must drink blood to heal, normal healing items will not work at night. If his life is low and he is speaking to a character, even a friendly one, he could involuntarily attack that character and drink their blood, so be careful.

The Blood of Dawnwalker has a lot of similarities from the Witcher Wild Hunt. Both are dark fantasy stories, this one is darker, and both have big open worlds. The music is pretty similar too. This isn’t to say that the music in this game is bad, it is pretty good. The creepy ambience is for sure there in the opening moments of Coen’s nightmare.

Graphically the game is stunning and the lighting and shadowing on everything, mostly looks great. The graphical anomalies I saw I’m willing to chalk up to running the game on a five-year-old PC, with that being said I never had any performance issues with the game, no dropped frame rates and no slowdowns. My only complaint is some of the character animations in cutscenes seemed a little stiff and their lips didn’t match up with the words they were speaking most of the time.

My biggest complaint in The Blood of Dawnwalker is the autosaves. The game doesn’t autosave nearly enough. For example, at night, Coen can climb towers to get the lay of the land, and this will put points of interest on his map, including quests. Now something like this I would assume would auto save, but there have been multiple times where I finish a tower, go to a point of interest I found, die and would have to climb the tower all over again. I even had an issue where I saved after climbing the tower and it still set me back to before climbing the tower.

Overall The Blood of Dawnwalker is a great game, one that I will probably make multiple runs through to get all the endings, or heck just to get through the intro without anyone dying at the church! The combat is one of the more unique systems I’ve played and really enjoyed. The game looks great and plays smoothly. This is one of the better action RPGs I’ve played this year. I would highly recommend giving this one a try!

Note: Bandai Namco provided us with a The Blood of Dawnwalker PC code for review purposes.

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