As the sun sinks and darkness sets in, Rebel Wolves’ The Blood of Dawnwalker rises in earnest. A new IP developed primarily from creatives with significant experience from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyperpunk 2077, the inspirations that shoulder this dark fantasy action game are laid as bare as the fangs of its vrakhir. I can say with almost complete certainty, you’ll read and hear a litany of comparisons to 2015’s game of the year. It’s simply inevitable.

From the combat feel, to open world exploration and even presentation of dialogue choices, so much of The Blood of Dawnwalker’s DNA will feel familiar, homely even, if you’ve played dozens of hours of Geralt’s adventure. However, I’d caution against simply drawing a firm comparison and leaving your decision at that, as Rebel Wolves have built a foundation here from which to launchpad their own ambitions and vision, and their opening gambit is a long-toothed beast in it’s own right.

While the night is long, a Dawnwalker’s day can be just as pertinent. Unsheathe your sword and unleash your claws, let’s find out if The Blood of Dawnwalker can survive its incursion into the light.

Am I Coen Mad?

We open into the 14th century inspired world of Vale Sangora. The landscape has been ravaged by the Black Death, with a cabal of vrakhir (vampires) having usurped control from the previous, brutalist leader. Brencis, the group’s dominating commander, demands blood sacrifice in return for the gift of his blood, one which cures the plague’s affliction. So it is that we, as protagonist Coen, are thrown into the deep end.

After Brencis’ actions leave Coen in an almost fatal state, rescued only thanks to big bad’s intervention to turn him into a Dawnwalker, we must set out to rescue the family he has stolen. Coen himself is a mix of level-headed rationality with an emotional, responsive streak. He’s a defined character, one which you can somewhat shape through dialogue choices and your self-determined rules. However, his personality won’t fundamentally change or shift, more your own moral reasonings played out through him.

I liked him throughout my time with the story, though I never really felt much beyond a cordial positivity. He has some highlight moments, but he lacks a little bit of charisma that makes the best characters iconic. The overarching story is set up with clear stakes – bring Brencis to his knees and rescue your family, all within 30 in-game days and nights. Or, don’t bother at all, it’s a free world, after all. Who says family has to be everything?

Quite An A-brencis-ive Character

Across the story’s main and side quests, Coen will be faced with a multitude of moral quandaries, dilemmas and decisions. Some ultimately lead to the same or similar outcome, while others will have lasting ramifications. On at least a dozen occasions, a choice I made in one quest would come back to aid me in another, or in a couple of instances, absolutely screw me over. Many of these were memorable, as the “a-ha!” instant flicked in my mind and I applauded or lamented my past decisions.

The choice and consequence system is layered and impactful throughout most of the game, but where it mattered most, in the conclusion, I found it to be underwhelming. How you resolve the conflict with Brencis and your family is ultimately up to you, but the choices leading into it become clearly predetermined and obvious well ahead of the actual decision points. The execution of the missions themselves is superb, but the narrative payoff just wasn’t there for me.

Despite the flat note at the tail end, I came to really appreciate the side cast of characters and villains. Uncovering Vicho’s history, learning more about Crake and Lacra, or spending time with Anca was fulfilling. The supporting cast have well written backstories that are entertaining to uncover. Brencis’ boyars (or lieutenants) are similarly engaging, but they suffer from the open world formula by being non-existent entities until their specific questlines, should you choose to pursue them. I will give Brencis his due though, he’s a monstrous villain, but has plenty of background lore to make him genuinely compelling to discover more about.

Around The World In 30 Days (And Nights)

So, 30 days and 30 nights to overcome the odds and bring down Brencis and his boyars, sounds intimidating, right? Time is a currency in The Blood of Dawnwalker, with each day/night chunked into segments. Fear not, for mooching around the world itself won’t progress time, but engaging with most quests, activities or tasks will move time forward by an allocated number of segments. Throughout most of the game, you can plan your time accordingly.

While I initially found this mechanic to be a real pressuring element, I came to respect the sense of tension it creates. By the midpoint of the story, I had dozens of quests and activities available to me, all of them threatening to eat away at my time. I prioritised targeting Brencis’ operation and officers first, which meant neglecting side characters and potential alliances until later. My Coen was all about morally becoming powerful and weakening his foe, but you may decide differently.

Unlike most open worlds, where I would simply tick off everything as I went along, I was forced to consider each action I took. I could spend longer here with this person, making them more comfortable for a potential reward, but what if those 3 time segments could be better spent on another quest? It adds a nice layer of tension that undercuts the mundanity that can creep in to open world busywork. Don’t be deterred if this mechanic is off-putting to you, the time constraints are lenient and forgiving, but what it adds to the experience is well worth the bit of stress it induces.

Blood of a Boyar

As mentioned before, Brencis and his boyars are a very real threat to Coen and his family. Ambrus, Bakir and Xenthe are very different personalities, who all fulfill different roles within Brencis’ operation. The world map is littered with activities that you can engage with to disrupt their evil doings (handily tracked through the “Court” spider diagram). Intercepting blood transports, destroying blood distilleries, hinder blood guard conversion, plenty of blood going around to get your hands on.

While many involve simply going to a location, wrecking a few enemies and destroying some gear, a handful are much more involved, and can lead into fully fledged side quests. Most importantly, every activity feels like it’s contributing to your overall “war effort” of sorts. You’re always weakening your enemy, building XP to make Coen stronger, or finding more resources to use across other quests. The mid section of The Blood of Dawnwalker was my favourite for this reason, and I couldn’t stop playing.

The rest of the landscape is filled with camps, places of power, merchants, villages and the like. There’s plenty of the usual filler content you can expect, but to its credit, The Blood of Dawnwalker makes excellent use of a smaller open world, that has meaningful and compelling work to be done within it.

Swords ‘n Claws

As you can imagine, you’ll be doing a lot of slicing and dicing, regardless of how bloodthirsty your Coen is. By day, Coen has access to regular swordcraft and magical witchcraft abilities. By night, he can feast on blood and draw on vampirical powers. Mechanically, The Blood of Dawnwalker plays very similarly to The Witcher 3, with an emphasis on landing blow after blow, mixed in with your chosen powers or special abilities which use up activation tokens.

If you didn’t jive with The Witcher 3’s combat, I suspect you won’t be converted here either. Dawnwalker’s fights have the same floaty feel, with occasional frustrations like certain enemies having unreliable attack windows to gauge. Any dog based foe is also a colossal annoyance, owing to their nippy, aggressive nature. However, I’ve always liked this form of combat, and the addition of directional inputs for blocks, parries and attacks gives this iteration some much needed depth and freshness.

Towards the backend of my playthrough on normal, I was criminally overpowered, basically able to ability mash my way through entire crowds. I tired a little of the combat sandbox, but that’s also due to me not really experimenting all that much with the various tools available. On the hardest difficulty, aspects like crafting, potions and builds become much more essential, perhaps offsetting some of this problem. On the regular difficulty, it can become akin to sleepwalking through the encounters after a certain point.

A New Dawn Beckons

Speaking of builds, The Blood of Dawnwalker offers three distinct trees you can invest into: swordsmanship, vampirism and witchcraft. Each offers unique bonuses, abilities and their own ultimate perk and play very differently from one another. My Coen was a jack-of-all-trades, as I plugged skill points into each to diversify my strengths, but if you were to spec purely into one, you could very quickly become a one-minded demon.

Interestingly, levelling up any of the trees both eats up time segments, and requires you to find a huge number of manuals or books out in the world to unlock further powers or tiers. It’s similar to an immersive sim like Kingdom Come: Deliverance, where you can seek out trainers, purchase manuals from traders, or loot them from fallen enemies. There’s a consistent drip feeding of new abilities as a result, which creates a really effective power gradient as you continue progressing through the game.

While I’m not the most creative builder of characters, even I was able to stumble upon some explosive combinations. Hitting an enemy with Bad Blood witchcraft before severing their head from their shoulders with Artery Strike was a sadistic delight. There’s an element of swordsmanship being the crutch tree, owing to the fact you can use all of its perks, abilities and buffs in both day and night (while the other two are exclusive to their time of day), which slightly undercuts the value of the system, but nothing overly detrimental.

Fear The Sunrise

The Blood of Dawnwalker’s world is an easy one to find yourself getting lost in. The gothic architecture of Griefburg castle is haunting, medieval fantasy motifs of the villages and Svartrau city are grounded yet distinct. Exploring Vale Sangora will take you through dank bogs, bandit infested ruins, across snow capped mountains and even into Roman or Greek inspired labyrinths. Smaller open worlds typically have more density in their environments and that is very much the case here.

Additionally, there are plenty of flourishes in the smaller moments. The oozing of blood from a sinister vampiric power, the panache of a sword strike decapitating an enemy in slow motion, The Blood of Dawnwalker has plenty of flair baked into its blood infused pie. As you might typically expect, there are the usual graphical hitches, from wonky animations when dashing onto certain geometry, to characters literally floating in mid-air during combat, all the way through to a musical number abruptly cutting out mid scene.

For my tastes, The Blood of Dawnwalker is in fairly good shape compared to many of its contemporaries at their launch. Aside from three instances of crashing and a couple of times of getting stuck in an infinite loading screen, Rebel Wolves have done a good job on the performance end. There are a number of minor issues, many of which will likely be tackled by launch, but even if they weren’t, none of the above really impacted my enjoyment of the game at all.

A Blood Feast

I clocked in at about 36 hours, with that encompassing completing all main and side quests, the majority of open world activities, and having seen every available ending. If you were to play on a higher difficulty, I’ve no doubt The Blood of Dawnwalker could take you into the 40-50 hour zone. What’s here is a tightly packed, potent blood bag that’ll satiate even the most hungry of vrakhirs or Dawnwalkers.

The best part of the experience, for me, was around the 15-25 hour stage. There were mysteries abound, powerful sorceries to uncover and a host of compelling villains and allies to spend time with. I literally couldn’t put the game down, desperate to feed on its gluttonous source of blood. The early portion of the game is a real slow burn, while the tail end somewhat underwhelmed, but that midway point was some of the most immersed I’ve been in a video game all year.

I couldn’t help but compare The Blood of Dawnwalker to the first entries of other iconic series, such as the first two Witcher games or Uncharted. While they weren’t the best in their collections, they were great games in their own right, essential in paving the way to phenomenal, genre-defining entries. This Dawnwalker’s origin is similarly great in its own right, but I simply can’t wait to see how Rebel Wolves build on this foundation, and I have great confidence it’ll lead to a sequel that will match the very best of the genre.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is available September 3rd on PlayStation 5 (review platform), Xbox Series X|S and PC.

Developer: Rebel Wolves
Publisher: Bandai Namco

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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