Vampires are pretty cool. Don’t get me wrong, they’re almost always at least as silly and over-the-top as they are macabre, but they’re fun in a demented, emo sort of way. And sometimes they turn into a swarm of bats! There hasn’t been a decent vampire game since Vampyr, but with The Blood of Dawnwalker being made by a bunch of former The Witcher 3 developers, it certainly had promise. So, what is “Blade in medieval Europe” actually like?
You play as Coen, who starts the game as just some guy from Laslea, living under the vampiric thumb of Brencis as his fellow vrakhir. One attempted uprising gone wrong later and Coen wakes up from certain death having been turned into a vrakhir himself. Except something unexpected happens and, as the sun rises, Coen turns back into a human. Turns out he’s a Dawnwalker – a vampire by night and a human by night. He’s also heckin’ angry as Brencis has taken his family and village hostage.
Whichever one you’re playing as is filled with interesting possibilities. At night you’re a very powerful monster, capable of teleporting around, attacking with claws and all the other fun vampire stuff. However, during the day your vampire powers recede, leaving you human until the sun sets. Thankfully, you are quickly introduced to witchcraft, which will help you out during the day, but works by runes and sigils being etches into your skin, which heal over and are blocked while you’re a vampire. The dichotomy is pretty cool even if it is just a touch contrived.
Coen has 30 days to save his family from the clutches of the vamps, each day being split into sixteen segments – eight for day, eight for night. Time passes only when completing quests. Sometimes things take much more time than they should – killing three guards and destroying some barrels shouldn’t take almost half a day, for example. I’m also not a fan of unlocking skills costing time, either, and I’ve probably spent whole days just levelling up, which is silly.
Despite this, it is a novel way of putting time pressure on you and the idea that my Coen and yours could actually have different stories based on what we chose to do, rather than inevitably working through every piece of content in a different order is very appealing to me. At the very least it improves replayability. The transformation also provides some tactical considerations. You could go take out this fort right now, or you could wait until it’s nighttime, when you’re much more dangerous. Or maybe your witchcraft would be more useful?
You’ll need a lot of healing regardless of the time, because all your spells and abilities cost varying amounts of health to use. There aren’t many spells and there’s no throwing fireballs or anything so grand, as they’re meant to be more supplemental to your sword skills really. Your vampire powers are also fuelled by health, but it’s much easier to replenish when there are walking Capri Suns everywhere, and the actual skills are a bit more impressive. Also you can switch between fighting with your sword or your claws at night, which is very cool, though some skills only work with the sword.
Combat is a satisfying blend of traditional action RPG combat with a directional system for attacking and blocking. Each attack comes in one of four directions, but you can simply dish out basic attacks and block them with a stamina cost. Blocking directionally won’t cost stamina, but it is riskier if you try to time blocks for parrying. There’s more benefits as, with a few skill upgrades, you can also deal more damage from an unguarded direction. It takes a little bit of getting used to, especially since you can’t move whilst holding block because the analogue stick is directing your defence instead, but it is very satisfying, if a bit messy at times.
There are some quirks, such as the trope of enemies generally attacking one or two at a time, and the camera can be fiddly as well. Coen can also get stuck in bits of scenery due to how the animations trigger, and fighting in cramped areas is difficult for both you and enemies. I think perhaps the bigger issue is that it’s too easy if you have a passing familiarity with parrying. I would suggest increasing the difficulty, but even on the regular difficulty The Blood of Dawnwalker subscribes to the idea that large health bars are a fun feature, when they’re actually a dull way of lengthening fights. I can’t see that getting better with higher difficulty settings, but at least you’ll be more engaged in some of the longer, less challenging boss fights.
A similar problem pops up a few times in missions that require you to abandon your hard-earned equipment. Due to some grand coincidence, this happened to me on two long quests in a row and they were both almost ruined by all the fighting because of it. It wasn’t challenging, just long and slow as the lack of gear drastically reduced my damage, so each strike took only a sliver of health away. There are a handful of odd quest design decisions like this in the game that will leave you wondering why they would do that.
In addition to this there are also a handful of minor issues, mostly graphical. I’ve had NPCs that just weren’t there during cutscenes, minor graphical issues like doors not being open when an NPC walks through them or models moving but leaving behind a copy of themselves. They’re not constant, but they do happen regularly enough. There are also some minor control issues – if you’ve played The Witcher 3, movement will feel immediately familiar, except now you do it on walls sometimes.
Whether in the 30FPS ‘Quality’ or 40FPS ‘Balanced’ display modes, performance is close to perfect on PS5 – the 60FPS ‘Performance’ mode is set to be patched in for launch. There’s some stereotypical Unreal Engine texture streaming foibles with camera cuts in cutscenes, and facial animations are a bit weak, but other than that, Dawnwalker looks pretty good. Its ability to wow is mostly down to the overall art design and writing. The soundtrack is also very good, but if you played it for me and told me they were from The Witcher 3, I’d probably believe you.
By far and away the best part of the game is the writing, though. The vrakhiri are monstrous and their backstory is very interesting, but it’s not just that. The side quests are just as well written as the main story is, and even the smaller, box-ticking activities tend to have an overarching story over them as well. Most of my favourite quest lines in this game are side quests, if that’s any indicator of just how damn good it can get.
