The Blood of Dawnwalker (PS5) review: a smart vampire RPG that doesn't quite sink its teeth into the fantasy

There’s clearly half a pint of The Witcher 3 DNA in The Blood of Dawnwalker, and I mean that both as a compliment and as a bit of a problem, because Rebel Wolves has made a big, handsome, sprawling medieval fantasy RPG full of muddy hamlets, ruined towers, castles, forests, caves and snowy mountain passes, all populated by people having a generally miserable time in the 14th century, but it never quite manages to escape the feeling that I’ve been here before.

That’s especially true of Vale Sangora, the Carpathian region in which Dawnwalker takes place, where the Black Death, war and social collapse have given a clique of vampires the opportunity to take control. At the centre of it all is Coen, a young man transformed into a Dawnwalker, human by day and vampire by night, who finds himself trying to save his family from Brencis, the vampire lord who has taken control of his homeland. It’s a terrific setup, particularly because the game makes time itself one of its central mechanics, giving you 30 days and nights to pursue your main objective while accepting that you simply won't be able to see or do everything along the way.

And yet, after spending time with Dawnwalker, I’m left with the frustrating feeling that Rebel Wolves has made a game containing several really clever ideas, then surrounded them with a lot of fairly ordinary open-world RPG stuff – side-quests that go nowhere, loot that rarely excites, character levelling that doesn’t demand attention, and a world that feels busy and empty all at once.

Blood of the Dawnwalker's time to reflect

The time mechanic is a good example. I softened on it after my first few hours where I felt hemmed in, because there is something genuinely interesting about being forced to make decisions rather than wandering around indefinitely hoovering up every question mark on the map. Time advances when you undertake certain key activities, and the game continues beyond the 30-day period rather than suddenly throwing you back to the title screen and offering New Game+, so it’s really an interesting pressure system rather than a hard game-over deadline.

The problem is what you’re giving up and the feeling that there’s a better, different game somewhere in here if only I’d made some different choices, and such is life. There’s a constant little FOMO anxiety hanging over Dawnwalker, because I know that helping someone, investigating something or simply spending time preparing Coen for what’s coming can push that clock forward, and yet when I take the gamble and go exploring, quite a lot of what I find isn’t especially compelling or even fun. Side missions and smaller activities can often boil down to clearing a camp, wandering through a cave, killing some soldiers, hunting a bear or two or monsters and picking up whatever loot has been left behind, and when the reward is another chest of largely forgettable equipment and crafting tat, I’m left wondering why I spent Coen’s precious time doing it.

It makes the game's open-world design feel at odds with itself. Other open-world RPGs encourage you to wander, to poke your nose into abandoned buildings, climb a hill because something caught your eye in the distance, investigate a strange symbol or clear out a bandit camp simply because it happens to be there. Dawnwalker does all of that, then occasionally looks at its watch and tuts because perhaps you really shouldn’t be wasting Coen’s time meandering around a nice-looking woodland stone circle in the off chance something fun may happen.

When Dawnwalker actually gives you a reason to investigate something, it can be brilliant. I didn't expect this game to become a sort of procedural medieval crime solver, but some of my favourite moments have involved examining crime scenes and piecing together evidence, whether I’m trying to understand the origins of the vampiric curse, working out how to undermine Brencis or simply helping some poor soul who has been swallowed up by the increasingly horrible state of the valley.

You use Coen’s Focus ability to examine the world, inspect clues and reconstruct what might have happened, and these investigations tap into something the more conventional quests rarely achieve: curiosity. I’m not just going somewhere because a marker tells me to kill eight vampires or destroy yet another leech farm (one of a series of missions to enrage Brencis’ court of vampires and weaken his hold on the region, one of many Assassin's Creed-like ideas in Dawnwalker), I’m looking at what happened, trying to understand why and wondering whether I’ve actually got the right person.

That feeds into Dawnwalker’s greatest strength, its sense that your decisions actually matter. Not every choice is a grand, flashing dialogue option where you decide whether Coen is a saint or an absolute brute – and you can simply give in to his vampire nature and feed on people mid-conversation. Sometimes it’s a comment, a small action, something you choose to investigate or ignore, and the consequences can ripple out later. Even after finishing a conversation or mission, I’ve often had that nagging feeling that I haven't quite finished with it and something I’ve done is really going to come back to haunt me later, and that’s a real skill to achieve in a sprawling RPG.

One particular vampire murder investigation really hammered this home. I helped a bloodsucker I thought was in trouble, got involved in the case, came away feeling like I’d done the right thing and moved on, only to discover a piece of evidence once I’d made my choices, that made me wonder whether my new friend was the innocent party I’d taken him for – only time will tell.

Dawnwalker's room to grow

That’s where Dawnwalker starts feeling like the RPG Rebel Wolves clearly wants to make, one where the world is reacting to you rather than simply waiting for you to complete its shopping list of tick-sheet missions and side-quests. It’s also where the game’s Witcher influence becomes less of an issue, because when Dawnwalker follows its own strange ideas, it gets considerably more interesting.

The vampire side of the story can be theatrical and wonderfully strange, with some sequences abandoning the familiar medieval fantasy aesthetic for something far more stylised, including ancient temples where Egyptian statues suddenly come to life and a dream world coated in a theatrical red backdrop. These moments feel like the game flexing a little, throwing its vampire mythology, traditional folklore grounding and supernatural history into a world that initially looks like another muddy European RPG, and suddenly there’s something here I haven’t quite seen before.

I wanted more of this too, because visually, Dawnwalker is very good at building a convincing medieval world. Unreal Engine 5 gives Rebel Wolves plenty of muscle to fill Vale Sangora with dense forests, believable settlements, imposing castles and snowy landscapes, and there’s a pleasing sense of place to it all. But there’s also a familiarity to the design, the kind of fantasy medieval environment where you can almost predict what you’ll find around the next corner.

Then the vampire mythology muscles into it, ancient cultures and supernatural architecture appear, and Dawnwalker’s world begins to show a personality of its own. The main story is good at selling the idea of lurching around the world as a bloodsucker. There are moments where the vampire path becomes bolder, where the imagery shifts and the supernatural starts to dominate the medieval setting, and these are some of the strongest sequences in the game. They suggest a much stranger RPG lurking underneath the more familiar open-world. It just doesn't happen often enough, and the bulk of the game, visually and stylistically, is very safe.

The same is true of Coen himself, because being a vampire sounds considerably more exciting on paper than it actually feels in my hands. By day Coen is witchcraft-imbued human, by night he becomes a vampire, and the game gives you different tools and abilities depending on which side of his nature you’re embracing. You can switch between swordplay and vampiric abilities, different armour loadouts, use Witchcraft, exploit supernatural movement and, at night, make use of abilities such as Shadowstep and other vampiric traversal options to reach places and approach situations differently.

There are genuine differences here, and Coen’s nightlife can open up rooftops and routes that aren’t available to human Coen, and the vampire life gives you a different way of seeing the world, one where human life feels considerably cheaper and Coen can move through the environment with a more brutal, cavalier attitude.

But mechanically the two halves don't feel different enough, and too often it feels like playing normal Coen, only on a roof. Human and vampire Coen largely control in the same way too, with similar rhythms and similar expectations, and even when I’m unleashing vampiric powers it doesn't always feel like I’ve transformed into something fundamentally different or monstrous. There are fun abilities in there, including blood-based attacks and supernatural powers – I can always watch enemies' blood boil and pop – and the idea of switching between two versions of the same character is strong, but the game doesn't always sell the vampire fantasy artistically or mechanically.

That feels like a missed opportunity, because the vampire Coen should be the thing that makes Dawnwalker impossible to confuse with another medieval RPG. Instead, some of the biggest differences are practical. Vampire Coen can move differently, reach places and approach certain problems from a new angle, but there isn't always the dramatic change in tone or visual language I was hoping for outside of the main story beats. The game knows that he is a vampire, characters tell you they're scared of you, but sometimes I wanted it to feel like I was one; a powerful, flamboyant creature of the night instead of a guy who can lurk on rooftops.

But unfortunately, the combat doesn't quite provide the same sense of invention. Dawnwalker uses directional combat, allowing Coen to attack and block from four directions, with the left stick used to determine where you defend and the right stick controlling sword strikes. Special abilities, magic and vampire can be launched on the D-pad. It works, certainly, and there are moments when getting a parry right feels satisfying, particularly against tougher enemies and oddly enough against groups of enemies where fights ebb and flow in a more dynamic way.

Combat can feel blunt

The bigger issue is that combat rarely feels genuinely challenging or inventive. Enemies tend to settle into familiar patterns, and once you’ve understood what the game wants you to do, encounters can become more about executing the routine than improvising within it. Against one or two enemies, it can feel slow and lacks a real sense of danger – you’re never on edge, feeling you’re one hit or block from victory or defeat.

There are flashes of fun, especially when Coen starts mixing his supernatural abilities into the fight. Witchcraft gives the human side some entertaining tricks, while vampire abilities can become considerably more vicious, with attacks that boil blood or finish off enemies in suitably nasty fashion.

But, again, I wanted more, and it's odd how the sword feels more satisfying than the vampire claws, which is a slightly awkward conclusion for a game whose big selling point is that its hero is a vampire. The skill structure splits upgrades between Witchcraft, Swordsman and Vampire abilities, but in practice I rarely felt like I was building a particular kind of Coen. I accumulated so many upgrade points that specialisation became largely irrelevant, and eventually I upgraded things because I had the points rather than because I had made a meaningful strategic decision about the character I wanted to play.

The inventory has a similar problem. At one point I found myself carrying a large collection of junk, including defacto wooden spoons every 'realistic' RPG features, and while I understand the appeal of having a world filled with things that can be picked up, there’s a point where I start wondering why I’m still collecting cutlery while supposedly racing to save my family from a vampire lord.

It contributes to that undercooked feeling that runs through Dawnwalker. The systems are there, the world is full of things to collect, the skill trees are full of upgrades, and there are weapons, abilities, resources, and crafting ingredients, but not all of these systems feel like they have enough reason to exist and you won't really pay all them any attention because you simply don't need to.

Which brings me back to the time mechanic, because this is meaningful, and I love what Rebel Wolves is trying to do with it, even if I’m still not convinced it always works. The point is to make the world feel finite and pressures you into deciding what matters. You can't help everyone, investigate everything and clear every cave, and that’s a ‘big idea’ response to one of the pressing problems with modern open-world RPGs, where the main story might be threatening the end of civilisation while your protagonist spends 45 hours picking mushrooms, trying our new hairstyles and attempting to fix the marriage of random characters they just met.

But Dawnwalker doesn't always give me enough compelling alternatives to make its choices painful. If the thing I’m giving up is a fascinating investigation, a brilliantly written character story or a bizarre vampire mystery, then yes, make me sweat over the clock. If it’s another bandit camp containing a chest full of equipment I’ll never use, I’m less bothered. That’s the contradiction at the heart of Dawnwalker – it can make me feel like I'm missing out, it can force me to follow the story paths, but if I do gamble and play outside lines there's more often not a lot to surprise.

Is The Blood of Dawnwalker worth playing?

Rebel Wolves has created a world with a convincing sense of history, populated it with characters whose stories can surprise, and built a narrative system where seemingly insignificant decisions can come back to bite you later in unexpected ways. Coen's struggle between his humanity and his vampiric nature is a strong foundation, and when the game allows that conflict to shape the world rather than simply alter his move set, it can be genuinely compelling, but it could have been taken so much further.

There are all the ingredients here for something genuinely distinctive, whether it's the time mechanic, day-night-character arc, detective gameplay or world-affecting decisions; I just wish Rebel Wolves had trusted its strangest ideas a little more. Because when Dawnwalker is being weird, reactive and unpredictable, it’s a much more exciting game than the one where I’m clearing another cave and wondering whether that wooden spoon is finally going to become useful.