The Blood of Dawnwalker is a third-person action-RPG in which you play a good vampire fighting the bad vampires. It’s the debut game from Rebel Wolves, a studio headlined by some of the senior talent who helped craft The Witcher 3 at CD Projekt Red. Does it live up to the pedigree or are RPG fans in for a letdown? It depends on who you ask.
The game is currently hovering around an 83 on Metacritic, while rival review aggregator Opencritic has it sitting at the 91st percentile for games scored on the site. On the positive end of the spectrum are reviews praising the dark storytelling and vampire abilities. At the negative end are critiques of the combat and rehashed gameplay elements that some say make Dawnwalker feel predictable.
You play as Coen, a villager-turned-vampire who must rescue his family. By day, he’s a sword-wielding warrior. By night, he’s monster with access to supernatural powers. Euorgamer‘s Robert Purchese called this cycling day/night split one of the best parts of Dawnwalker. “Nowhere is this [great contrast between night and day] more apparent than in the game’s central city of Svartrau, which has densely packed houses and therefore rooftops, which night-time Coen can run around on and hunt from above on, whereas day-time Coen has to explore on foot below,” he wrote. “I love this.”
But other reviewers were less impressed with what Rebel Wolves is offering. “The problem is that actually getting through some quests can feel like a slog because the gameplay is essentially the same in every single one of them—every single one,” wrote GameRant‘s Josh Cotts. “Talk to a character, go somewhere, inspect something, gather clues, fight some enemies, go somewhere else, gather more clues, fight more enemies, and so on. The dialogue never made me impatient, but the gameplay certainly did.”
Kotaku did not receive an early review copy of Dawnwalker and will be covering it once it releases on September 3. In the meantime, here’s what the rest of the early reviews are saying:
IGN
The Blood of Dawnwalker is my new favorite vampire game and one of the best story-driven RPGs I’ve played in a long time. The day/night cycle that has you juggling human and vampiric forms is awesome, and the constraints placed on how you spend your limited time end up being one of the coolest, most wonderfully stressful parts of the adventure. Combat has a bit of a learning curve to it, but gets under your skin in all the right ways once you get the hang of it. Combine that with a story filled with memorable characters, gut wrenching decisions, and more endings than I’m ever likely to see, and this adventure kept me firmly in its thrall. Even if you aren’t particularly into the vampire fantasy, this is one that any RPG fan should absolutely not miss. – Travis Northup
GameSpot
Dawnwalker is composed of what feels like a ridiculous number of quests. Due to its structure, they seem haphazardly constructed at first, with no dedicated throughline; only a story you construct by taking on whatever tasks you think are worth your limited time. What’s shocking is that these quests, from the intricate stories of rebels fighting to free the valley and vampires following shadowy agendas, to the momentary tidbits of setup from a group of soldiers by the side of the road before you start hacking them apart with your sword, are so well-written. To the game’s credit, there’s a good chance you’ll want to do everything in Dawnwalker. The fact that you can’t is part of what makes it so compelling. – Phil Hornshaw
Polygon
At the moment of writing, I’m 18 hours into my main playthrough and have spent about 12 hours replaying quests for narrative comparisons, but honestly, this game had me in the first hour. After introducing the main problem (mom needs medicine) and dropping me in a confined section of the open world, Dawnwalker‘s prologue gave me an excellent taste of what the game is all about. I could explore to my heart’s content, chase objectives in different ways, befriend people, make enemies, and influence the narrative through dialogue and actions. I could even do nothing at all; freedom at its finest. Having gone back and forth between my save files, I can assure you that some choices, including non-choices, may have truly harrowing consequences. – Marloes Valentina Stella
Gamesradar
The Blood of Dawnwalker is an ambitious concept, but the implementation is so straightforward, activities and quests so basic, that it feels like an all too simplistic approach to getting it all to work on paper. Games like Gothic 1 Remake, Disco Elysium, or Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 revel in a weirdness and unfriendliness that make them memorable and interesting, the act of trying to figure out what they even are is a compelling hook for a first playthrough. All too soon after Coen takes his first steps out of the prologue I get The Blood of Dawnwalker, I know exactly what to expect from its skilltrees and rudimentary activity icons across its map, even if it’s up to me to thread those simple adventures into a shape of my own. What I don’t get is what Rebel Wolves want me to take away from that, bending unexpected design choices into an RPG shape that’s all too expected. – Oscar Taylor-Kent
PCGamesN
Every second counts in The Blood of Dawnwalker. You have 30 days to save your family, and those precious moments tick away with every meaningful action you take. I shouldn’t be “wasting time” – but I do. To make tea for a dear friend after a stressful outing. To share a story with an old lady giving directions, rather than brushing her off. To provide company to a man beyond redemption. It’s an RPG where your decisions matter, and consequences linger, yet I find myself making choices against my natural instincts. It’s a world where I question my beliefs, my morals, and who I trust – and where I wonder whether even those are enough to alter my actions. It’s one of my favorite games in quite some time. – Ken Allsop
Eurogamer
This is an RPG daring to do things differently, and a lot of what it does works. It’s in little details like blacksmiths that can level up your old gear to match your new gear that I feel RPG expertise and experience from Rebel Wolves – that I feel understanding of how RPGs might play that little bit better. Then it’s writ large in the way the game is structured and in the fundamentals of how it plays. In Coen, Rebel Wolves has discovered a dual-aspect hero that provides wonderful and welcome variation. In a time-limited and structureless world – although not quite as structureless as it might appear – it’s discovered a way to make people pay more attention to the things they do, and be more present in their own adventures. I’m not sure all of the elements quite sing in perfect harmony yet, but it makes me extraordinarily excited to see where this studio goes from here. The Blood of Dawnwalker is a hell of a debut. – Robert Purchese
VGC
One of the biggest compliments I can give The Blood of Dawnwalker is that it never felt like the game was wasting my time. From the smallest chest to the game’s largest quests, there is virtually no filler. In a 2026 RPG, that feels extremely rare. Sadly, on the performance side, it’s currently a less positive experience. A choppy frame rate and more than a shrug-offable number of bugs marred my playthrough of Dawnwalker. The game is liberal with auto and manual saves, so there weren’t any total disasters, but from what I played, the launch build is coming in slightly hot. – Jordan Middler
Game Informer
The standout features of The Blood of Dawnwalker never quite come together. The combat backbone also falters. It starts off with a similar promise, with blocking requiring you to follow directional cues to effectively riposte attacks. Yet, enemies tend to repeat movesets. Aside from the main boss fights, confrontations are repetitive Simon Says sequences. Nonetheless, I was enthralled by the gritty world on display, especially when learning more about the corrosive nature of the vampire court on the townsfolk. They are not only killing hundreds, but also corrupting aspects like faith and turning themselves into religious iconography in churches and running baptisms with blood instead of holy water. – Diego Nicolás ArgĂĽello
Gamerant
The frustrating thing about The Blood of Dawnwalker is that I don’t think it’s a bad game at its core. There are ideas here that I genuinely love, from the pressure of Coen’s limited time to the way his choices can affect the people around him, and its characters and story regularly gave me a reason to keep going when the gameplay itself wasn’t doing the same. Combat can feel fantastic when everything comes together, some of Coen’s abilities are incredibly cool in concept, and there were plenty of moments where I caught a glimpse of the game I thought I was going to get when I first started playing. Unfortunately, those moments are surrounded by so much repetition, inconsistency, and general jank that they never get enough room to make The Blood of Dawnwalker feel as special as it occasionally threatens to be. – Josh Cotts
