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The Blood of Dawnwalker is the debut game from Rebel Wolves. They are a studio founded by Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, the game director of The Witcher 3, and for all intensive purposes this game is a spiritual successor / spin-off of The Witcher series. The world, the dialogue, the graphics, the story, all would feel perfectly at home in The Witcher 4. As a massive fan of The Witcher 3 (it is one of my games of the 2010s) you may think this is leading towards how much I loved The Blood of Dawnwalker but unfortunately that could not be further from the truth. I have no insider information so I am purely just speculating, but this game screams of a developer whose grandiose ambitions were hamstrung by having to absolutely ship the game by a certain date.

The closest comparisons I can think of are the first Mass Effect or Assassin's Creed games. Upon release they were universally lauded but were also called out for some design decisions that didn't hold up as the game progressed, and haven't aged especially well since. These shortcomings are usually glossed over when people reminisce about the franchises because it is the sequels that are the true stars. I feel The Blood of Dawnwalker has the potential to follow a similar path. But over the 47 hours that I played the things I disliked easily overpowered the things I enjoyed.

So before I talk about The Blood of Dawnwalker, I want to make sure I highlight all of the positives.

The graphics are great. Rebel Wolves is making superb use of the Unreal 5 engine and they have a solid artistic direction that, while it does feel a bit Witchery, is still incredibly beautiful and fun to explore. I honestly cannot think of any times where I thought the graphics or art was subpar. Most of the time it faded into the background because it helped immerse me in the world and then every once in a while I encountered one of those stunning vistas that just makes you want to stop for a moment and take it all in. No notes here. 10 outta 10.

The story, voice acting, and worldbuilding are fantastic. This was easily the highlight of the game for me and honestly The Blood of Dawnwalker could have been a Telltale style visual novel and I still would have loved it. I really shouldn't be that surprised seeing as how the vast majority of the developers at Rebel Wolves worked on Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. But it is great to get confirmation that the talent at CD Projekt Red is able to continue to execute at such a high level outside of the studio. Without spoiling anything there is Marvel style post-credit scene that has absolutely nothing to do with the choices you make during the game but hints at a possible future for the Dawnwalker franchise that I am totally onboard for. Also, not only was the voice acting great but it was all from relatively unknown actors which is something I always love to see.

The combat peaked my interest for the first hour or so. I know there are many games that use a directional combat system (where the direction on the joystick influences the direction of your attacks / blocks) but I had never played one so it felt quite fresh. At the start of the game you are just a regular, lowly human and the combat is difficult but not overtly unfair. This was a breath of fresh air and I was genuinely interested in improving at it. But then everything fell apart.

The Blood of Dawnwalker has some of the worst combat I have played this decade. It becomes so rote and so boring so quickly. I literally got to the point where I would pick up my phone in my left hand and read news articles while mashing the attack button with my right hand. The problem is a common one (I have ranted about it in Marvel's Spider-Man 2) but you simply fight too many enemies that have too much health. Its basically the same enemies from level 1 to level 40 and they don't do any attacks that really require you to react. The Blood of Dawnwalker also commits the cardinal sin of scaling the level of enemies so that a pack of wolves or boars you fought at level 1 will take the same amount swings at level 40. To me this is the prime example of a game studio that had an idea for their combat but just ran out of time to actually make it interesting. I would not be surprised in the slightest if Dawnwalker 2 has a completely overhauled combat system and becomes one of the best aspects of the game. Just like my earlier references to Mass Effect 2 and Assassin's Creed 2.

But what makes the combat even worse is that Dawnwalker has absolutely atrocious skill trees. Generally speaking I believe skill trees are lazy game design because they always devolve into options that just don't feel great as a player. Odds are a large number of your choices will be "increase skill X by Y%" which make the numbers go up by a pitiful amount, and can be immediately counteracted by the fact that the enemies are scaling with you as you level. You're also are never going to get enough skill points to select everything so you are forced into making incredibly obvious trade-offs. This inherently isn't a bad thing but when you waste a point on something that you can immediately tell is worse than another option it doesn't feel great. This usually compounds when games either make resetting skills trees impossible or cost some incredibly rare resource. Dishonored 2 was my goto example of this. By the end of the game you have so few powers and no ability to increase / change them that you just end up repeating the same actions over and over again. Your gameplay style cannot evolve because you are hamstrung by ill-informed decisions you made hours ago. I can now add The Blood of Dawnwalker to this inauspicious list.

The game has three skill trees that can effectively be broken down into magical spells, sword skills, and vampirism. Basically everything in the magical spells tree only works in the day, everything in the sword tree works anytime, and everything in the vampirism tree works at night. At a high level I have no problem with this. Game developers have to find ways to push players to change up their playstyle to avoid boredom. Too much of a good thing ("my steak is too juicy, my lobster is too buttery") still applies to video games. But the issue in Dawnwalker is that because the skill trees are mutually exclusive I found myself naturally going all-in on one of them. By the end of the game I was level 43 and had put the vast majority of my skill points into vampirism. I realized early on that attacking with your vampire claws was more effective because they scaled with your level where your swords did not. The game encourages you to double down on a single skill tree because you need to put multiple points into a skill to unlock its "best" version. Now you are finding yourself in the sunk cost fallacy because there is no way to reset the skill tree. The more I played and levelled up my vampirism, the more enemies levelled with me, the less fun it was to fight them with a sword instead of my claws. I assume the developers were hoping you would use your magic during the day, vampire skills at night, and fluidly move between your sword and claws. But this failed horribly because they just do not give you enough skill points. By the end of the game I think I had put 70% of my points into vampirism, 25% into swords, and 5% into magic.

The cherry on top of this horrible skill tree is that the very first boss of the game has to be fought at night. So if you were really enjoying the magic system and put all of your skill points into it, congratulations you don't get to use any of that for the first boss fight. It is just a straight up brawl and if your vampirism skills suck that is too bad you better learn how to "git gud". Again, these are the really obvious signs of a small studio that was just under the gun and could not find the time to actually balance the combat.

I'm obviously ranting at this point so let's just try to bang out some of the things that rubbed me the wrong way without dwelling too much on them:

• The UI is really bad, even for a console game. I constantly found myself struggling with which items are better and should be equipped. It felt kinda like circa 2010-UIs, ala Skyrim.
• Within the first 30 minutes of the game you'll find either medium or heavy armour and are told that you aren't proficient in it. This means you will receive reduced stats if you wear it but you have no idea what the reduction is. If you put a skill point into armour proficiency you're still told you are not proficient. Only when you get all three skill points do you become proficient and can finally understand what the actual stats of the armour are.
• Maybe it is a Polish translation thing but "The Blood of Dawnwalker" has horrible mouth feel. I have typed "Blood of the Dawnwalker" incorrectly in this review easily three dozen times before catching it and correcting myself.
• The game starts really slow. There are 45-60 minutes of cutscenes and you're forced to walk five steps or have a quick canned conversation with someone to advance between them. I'm not against cutscenes but its obvious the developers were expecting me to feel something during them but I had absolutely no connection to any of the characters yet.
• You can upgrade your weapons and armour using the game's currency. I never once upgraded anything and saved every dollar until I was ready to fight the final boss. By this time I had unlocked full legendary armour and weaponry. I spent every dollar I had and was only able to upgrade 60% of my equipment. If I had spent a single dollar during the other 46 hours of the game then I'd have been able to upgrade even less. Just another reason to put your skill points into vampirism.
• Dropped items are always relative to your level so you're constantly finding better items. This sounds good in practice but how about when you complete a difficult quest that gives you a sword lost for a millennia and some random bandit on a dirt road drops something better 20 minutes later?
• There are skills that cannot be used on certain enemies, usually bosses. So we're back to the sunk cost fallacy where you think it is a good idea to invest points into a single ability and it becomes useless when you need it most.
• You will nearly always face more than two enemies at a time and all but two will walk around in circles waiting for you to defeat someone. It's like bad 80s action films (or modern Star Wars).
• You only have 30 days of in-game time before you must attempt to defeat the final boss. In practice this did not affect me because I completed all of the quests I wanted to with days to spare. But I can totally understand how someone would hate this because it literally stops them from playing all of the game. What boggles my mind is that to level up your skills passes time. If this wasn't the case I'd have probably gotten back like four or five days which would have easily allowed to me to complete every quest. Again, signs of a studio that just ran outta time and had to ship.
• You are able to bind abilities to the D-pad but also bring up a skill wheel that has everything you can use. Problem is that combat doesn't freeze when you bring up the wheel so you'll constantly find yourself getting hit while trying to activate something.

I'm not gonna lie, I am just finishing up editing this review and it sounds like I absolutely detested this game. I swear, the world and story really are that good and pulled me through a large part of the time I put into The Blood of Dawnwalker. I am complaining like this because I genuinely see the greatness in this game and really hope Rebel Wolves gets the opportunity to make a truly fantastic sequel.