The Blood of Dawnwalker Reviews: A Very Good RPG With a Combat Problem

The first reviews for The Blood of Dawnwalker are in, and they are unusually consistent — which is itself worth noting, because a debut from a studio built out of ex-CD Projekt Red leads could easily have split the room.

What everyone agrees on

The setting and the writing carry it. Rock Paper Shotgun put it alongside the RPGs it is obviously measuring itself against, and the recurring note across reviews is that the day-night structure — a hard clock that pushes you to choose what you do not get to do — turns what could have been another open-world checklist into something with real weight behind each decision.

Vampire fiction in games has spent a decade being either a power fantasy or a horror skin. Dawnwalker's trick is to make the vampirism a scheduling constraint, and reviewers have responded to that far more warmly than to any of its individual systems.

What everyone agrees is the problem

Combat. Push Square's headline is the bluntest version — "toothless" — and it is not an outlier. The complaint is consistent: the swordplay is legible and never quite satisfying, the enemy variety runs thin, and encounters end up as the tax you pay between the parts of the game that are actually working.

Where that leaves it

This is the classic shape of a very good RPG rather than a great one: a game whose best hours are its quietest, sold at full price on the strength of a combat loop that is its weakest element. If you buy story-led RPGs for the story, the consensus says you will be fine. If you bounced off The Witcher 3's fighting specifically, nothing here fixes that.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is out now and is currently sitting on Steam's top-seller shelf.