“The Blood of Dawnwalker is an open-world dark fantasy action RPG set in 14th-century Europe. You play as Coen, human by day and vampire by night, fighting to save your family in a story shaped by your actions and the secrets you uncover.” – Steam Description

The Blood of Dawnwalker is a third person action RPG made by former Witcher 3 developers and that influence really shows. I don’t mean that in a bad way, which is surprising because I did not like Witcher 3. This isn’t a Witcher 3 review though, so never mind that. Instead let’s talk about how this game approaches and lays out all its mechanics to you, dear player.

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Time Is On My Side

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This game caused a lot of controversy when it dropped. For what seems like EONS players have been clamoring for something new, something fresh. They are tired of the Open World empty “Collectathon” games that Ubisoft has been pumping out, they want something unique. Along comes Blood of Dawnwalker and hoooooo boy, this game says “Hey, here’s an open world for you to explore, secrets for you to uncover. But hey, you have 30 days to save your family.” If you want to level up, that’s 1 time segment per talent point spent. You found a book and need to study it to see what clues it has for where you should go next? That’s 4 time segements. The days are split into a day and a night cycle, and each cycle is split into 8 time segments. During the day, you’re Coen a human who is as mild-mannered as you’d like to play him. You can talk with NPCs, have access to most areas and can generally charm your way into places to complete your quests. There are some quests that can only be completed during the day so you’ll need to plan your time accordingly.

At night you slip into the world of Vrakiri, or vampires. There are night specific activities to do, and I would urge you to look around the map for towers that you can scale in your vampire form. These towers will let you see activities around the area for you to interact with instead of happening across them because you cut through a forest to avoid a guard patrol. Not to say that that isn’t a fun way to find quests, but having some idea of where to go is helpful. You can have an entirely different set of armor and weapons for your nighttime adventures which can be helpful if your armor gives “Human Health Recovery” that means at night it’s completely worthless. But if you find a multipurpose “Stamina on Block” you can obviously use it for both. Another thing that being a vampire gives you to manage is your health, if you’re too low you get a fun little dialogue option no matter who you’re talking to that says [Give into the Hunger]. I haven’t done it yet, but there’s been a couple conversations I wanted to Han Solo my way out of a few times and I sure eyeballed that option.

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My What Big Teeth You Have

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Okay obviously we are going to start with the Vampirism. This is a game called Blood of the Dawnwalker, you know from the rip that you’re getting blood sucking powers. Boy do you. When you get turned into a baby fledgling vampire, you have the opportunity (that I took in a heartbeat) to fight your Sire. He beat the brakes off me, it was like maybe 3 strikes in total, but the way he teleported around and the way that he moved with his vampire powers really opened my eyes. You can teleport behind your enemies and suck their blood damaging them and healing you as you might expect. You don’t have to use the blood suck ability though, you can just Shadowstep like you’re a subtlety rogue and this is World of Warcraft. There are other powers that you can get such as shapeshifting for travel or making people explode from within. Pay attention during the introduction of the elder vampires and you will get a glimpse of their powers and what you might be able to do.

More generally, you can opt to use Swordplay. When you’re a baby vampire you won’t have the skills to let your claws pay those bills yet, bub. Also during the day, you won’t have access to your bloody vampire powers so you’ll need something to fall back on. Wait, no don’t fall back on your sword.. nevermind. The point is, swordplay is going to be something you’re going to get some mileage out of. You start with one active ability in swordplay called Dirty Trick, and it’s never going to not be funny to throw sand in someone’s eyes mid fight.

As a human during the day, you will have access to Witchcraft. The witchcraft in this world is done via carving runes into the user’s skin. It’s visceral and makes good thematic sense as to why you can’t use it at night when Coen’s vampire skin heals over. The Witchcraft that you learn ranges from burning someone’s blood from the inside to making flocks of crows explode from people is all very flashy and beautiful to look at. There are some combinations between the Witchcraft and the Swordplay so you’ll be encouraged to progress both skill trees for Coen’s ultimate magus form.

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Dressed to Kill

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You have three different skill trees to spend your skill points in. They have a clear path and most require a time segment to learn. This can be a pain point for a lot of players, but I think it’s impactful. The more you spend leveling up the stronger you might be, but you won’t have quests to give you other benefits by the time you fight Brencis. It definitely makes leveling a conscious decision. Even if you had all the skill points available though, you would need to read books to unlock some abilities or defeat certain bosses or quests to unlock others. To be clear though, this only unlocks the option of you spending a point there, those books or kills don’t grant you the ability off the rip.

Once you have some active and some passive abilities, you can look at your Active Ability Wheel. From here you can set which abilities you have equipped. You can quick slot some into direction buttons for easy use but you will need to learn the ability to have more ability slots in your relevant skill tree. You can also equip your passives in this screen as well.

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• Graphics– Graphics are good. It’s made in unreal so it’s hard for it not to look good, but you have obvious clipping into models. Not even like hair or clothing clipping, but I mean someone’s hand going into their thigh. The environments are gorgeous. The cutscenes looks great and overall the game is fine to look at.
• Gameplay– This is going to be divisive but I really enjoy this time mechanic. It has turned a lot of people away from the game. Either from trying it or into quitting and asking for a refund. I think they are doing themselves a disservice. Balancing the time with the exploration and quest design is done so very well. The amount of times I have been just running off the beaten path somewhere only to find a cave with a monster, or a person getting attacked by wildlife for me to intervene, or fairy circles complete with ominous lights for me to follow has been staggering. The world feels alive, and it makes you want to explore and play more to find out “Hey what’s over here?” The developers have put together a fantastic gameplay gameplan, and if you as a player play ball, you’re going to have a fantastic time.
• Sound– Sword clang noises go Brrrrr. But seriously, sound design on the parry and striking with weapons, the vampire bitings, the blood attacks, it’s all great and immersive. I haven’t heard something to take me out of the game. There are some spots where NPC dialogue seems to get lost, like I’m looking at an NPC and they are talking to me but are very quiet. So I spend some conversations trying to relocate around the speaker so I can, and chat can, hear them better. There ARE subtitles so it’s not like I’m totally missing out on the context, but it’s happened enough to dock some points.
• Controls– Controls are fun. The combat is directional. I’m playing on the hardest difficulty because I’m a wannabe achievement hunter (read: masochist) but normally there is an indicator to tell you which direction to block, parry, or dodge. On my difficulty, I don’t have that I just have the watch the body language of the opponent, and I love that I can do that. The lock-on leaves a bit to be desired. I have on more than one occasion died because the lock-on snapped to another enemy when I was attacking. Traversal with the witchcraft and vampire powers feels nice and I think Vampire is the clear winner here in terms of that, but the controls feel great aside from some camera foolery.
• Story– I have not been hooked on a story like this in such a long time. I am frequently just “one more quest”-ing it all over the place here. Every person you meet has a story, a reason, and that’s just the ones who talk to you. There is also notes and books to find to unravel stories of those dead or long gone from the valley. There are magic circles to commune with spirits and find secrets and uncover ancient ruins. It’s such a good story and I cannot get enough right now.