Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Developer: Rebel Wolves
Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows
Price: $69.99
In 2015, CD Projekt Red released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which stunned gamers everywhere with its stellar writing and then-unparalleled open world. Many view it as one of the all-time greats (if not the greatest outright). The good will that the company garnered with this, however, wouldn't last.
Shortly after the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077, a team of CD Projekt Red developers left the company to create their own studio. The Blood of Dawnwalker is the result of that departure.
And I have to be honest, here...I could hardly be more conflicted on it. It's a game with a wealth of new ideas and some notable improvements over Wild Hunt's combat. But it's also a game with both some of Wild Hunt's more frustrating design choices and it's most now-overdone bits and bobs. Not every new idea is executed well, either. Also, the writing definitely isn't on par with its influence.
And yet...I still came back to this game every night for two weeks. That has to count for something.
So...let's get into it, I suppose!
Meanwhile, in The Blood of Dawnwalker, you play as Coen of Laslea: a denizen of a world similar to our own but with a coat of paint reminiscent of European folklore.
There are differences, but are you getting the overall picture here?
For starters on those differences, Coen of Laslea is just some guy, not a trained professional like Geralt.
For another thing, Dawnwalker's world is "similar to our own" in that it is our own. It takes place in 1347 in a fictional valley in the Carpathian Mountains. But there's also fairies, vampires, kobolds, and witchcraft alongside that good old-fashioned 14th century catholicism.
Oh, and also, the Qunari from Dragon Age are there. At that point, I have to wonder why it had to be our world and not a fantasy. It's not, like, super distracting or anything...but it's a little jarring to go from investigating a Qunari (sorry, "Uriashi") village to investigating the big city's jewish quarter. It's not even like the Uriashi are there as a "discrimination is bad" vector...I mean, at first it seems like they might be, but the game abandons that thought as quickly as it arrives.
Come to think of it, not even the jewish quarter is there as a "discrimination is bad" vector, and that would be the place to do it in a 14th century catholic context. But Dawnwalker doesn't seem to have anything to say about catholicism either.
Don't get me wrong...a game doesn't need to say anything at all...but it piles onto my point. The devs aren't trying to represent major intolerances in human history, the valley just seems to be a mixmatch of various European cultures, all religious references basically exist only as window dressing, monsters just exist out in the open, and really the only other bit of our world that exists here is some works by old poets. This is our world in name only. And while that would be an unbelievably petty thing to takes points off for, I couldn't help but find the worldbuilding a little half-baked because of this.
Whatever way you slice it, here's the gist. The fictional valley of Vale Sangora is ruled over by an evil Knyaz who seeks to kill all people infected with the plague (the real plague, from our world). Seeing the misery this Knyaz causes, a vampire (which are actually called "vrakhir" or "vrakhiri") named Brencis kills him and appoints himself as the new Knyaz.
In his position of power, Brencis abolishes all taxes and uses the healing power of vrakhiri blood to completely eradicate the plague. As you can imagine, this makes him an endearing leader to many in the valley.
However, there's a price to this new government that I'm sure you can guess. Each citizen must pay a blood tithe once a month during their city or township's mass. And those whose blood is deemed too weak are culled.
In addition, punishments for crimes are incredibly gruesome and often involve complete draining of blood. A little bit worse than just the usual torture and killing from before.
In the village of Laslea, a young man named Coen spends his days helping his family. Chief among his duties is helping his father take care of his mother.
If I go crawling through the prologue in great detail, we're going to be here forever. So, here's the cliffnotes.
His mother is weak, which doesn't bode well for the upcoming mass. He seeks help from the local herbalist who is also his latin teacher (and a top-tier cougar). Some things happen. Brencis turns him into a vrakhir, leaves him chained to a tree to die in the sunlight, and kidnaps his family to be drained during some kind of belated coronation ceremony in 30 days. But Coen doesn't die, as something within the transformation went wrong, turning him into a dawnwalker: someone who is human during the day and a vrakhir at night.
So from there, Coen ventures into the valley in search of allies and weapons that will help him take down Brencis before that coronation ceremony comes to pass.
All things considered, it isn't a great story. The cast of characters, for one thing, is a mixed bag. You sure as hell aren't going to find any characters like the Bloody Baron from Wild Hunt or Joshua from Cyberpunk 2077.
Instead, the best you'll find is Coen himself and the various vrakhiri generals.
And the worst you'll find is a reluctant female vrakhir ally whose personality you've likely already (accurately) guessed from all those descriptors. That character does develop quite a bit as the plot progresses, but it's a cringey edgelord road to get there.
And while some of the writing is good, most of it is either serviceable or downright bad.
For every "I've learned to walk with my limp" (referencing a bit of emotional trauma), there's a "As long as we're dreaming, I'd like a pony, too!"
There's also a modernity to the language that doesn't feel intentional, which makes it worse. Sayings like "nightmare fuel," for example.
I do have to express one bit of appreciation for the writing, however. I have a couple pet peeves when it comes to writing, you see. Newspaper headlines in horror games where they write about how someone or a family was "brutally murdered" (no newspaper ever assigns adjectives like that to crimes), for one example. Another example is "I can handle myself" as a way for writers to avoid criticism for the female character who is 100% about to not handle herself...though that one hasn't appeared in maybe a decade. And one last example is "those...those...things." I don't need to elaborate on the contexts in which that shows up. You already know it.
The Blood of Dawnwalker at first seems poised for that last pet peeve during a mission involving the undead. But instead of my pet peeve, the script instead says the following: "normally we'd just walk across the courtyard, but it's full of those...those...of them." When I say that this one bit of writing almost makes up for every bad line in this script, I mean it. That's how refreshing it is. I had to give the writers props for that, at the very least.
Firstly, for the idea itself, which is this game's most controversial aspect.
Secondly, for how this aspect gets woven into the moment-to-moment plotting.
Finally, for how this aspect gets woven into combat.
You have 30 days before Brencis' coronation...as in you actually have 30 in-game days to complete the main quest. Every day consists of a handful of little ticks for daytime and a handful for nighttime, ensuring you spend half of each day in human form and half in vrakhir form.
Like in Persona, just about every little thing you do results in the clock ticking forward by a certain amount. Clearing out an enemy post in the world usually only results in the clock moving by one tick, while taking the time to destroy an important enemy installation or taking a major step in a quest might move things forward by three. Just going through the open world and killing regular enemies doesn't do anything, thankfully. Otherwise the time limit would be excessive.
The ultimate idea is to make you ration out your time carefully, only chasing down the leads that seem promising, etc. And I personally think it's handled well. When I committed to the final push, I still had 9 days to go. At that point, I was high enough leveled to beat the final boss without dying. I don't think I did a particularly good job of rationing my time, so I'm left with no other choice but to think that the time limit will be more than sufficient for you to be prepared for the end.
However, there's one aspect of the time system that I wholeheartedly disagree with. Spending perk points causes time to move by one-to-two ticks. I spent every perk point I had and still pulled off what I pulled off, so I don't think it really impacts things by much...but a new player isn't necessarily going to know that. It's just unnecessary stress, and I disagree with it on a conceptual level too. The whole idea of a perk point is that its your ability to role play what your experience helped you learn. But with the system as it currently exists, you become experienced enough to learn something...which often occurs after time moves...and then you move time again just by the act of saying what you're learning. It's a double-dip that bothers me.
There's one bright side to that sometimes-unwelcome time progression, though. You might get to see a different side to the plot than you might have otherwise.
Remember, you're a vampire at night, complete with giant claws and glowing eyes. People can tell what you are by looking at you. So side quests can go entirely different ways depending on the time of day you do them.
I, for one, did a quest at night where I was supposed to meet up with potential allies. I ended up getting ambushed by said allies and tied to a tree with silver chains. Time them passed until morning, at which point those potential allies watched as I didn't burn up like normal vampires. Only then did they start the process of maybe kinda-sorta trusting me.
This 100% wouldn't have happened had I approached their camp during the day. They still wouldn't have trusted me, but they wouldn't have gone about expressing their distrust in the same way. What's more, I might not have lost as much time as I did. It seems like there are considerations like this made for just about every quest that isn't time-locked. By which I mean "can only happen during the day or at night."
Compounding on the whole vampire side of these quest considerations is my favorite little detail in this whole game. As a vampire, your health is broken up into segments, and you have to keep your health at 2 segments or above or there might be consequences. Health at only one segment implies a lack of blood, after all, and vampires don't do well in those situations.
So if you end up accidentally entering a cutscene and talking to someone with insufficient health, dialogue options will frantically change between their original wording and "give in to the hunger." If you happen to click on an option as it turns into the latter, you'll end up killing whoever you talk to, no matter how important they are...including supremely major characters. It's the kind of thing I haven't seen since Morrowind.
That being said, it's not exactly hard to stay healthy as a vampire. You have the ability to drain animals you come across in the open world as well as enemies in combat. So if you end up in one of these situations, it's basically punishment for sucking (no pun intended) during a gameplay segment.
I, for one, only ended up accidentally giving in to the hunger during the tutorial for that system...and I sucked at this combat system for a long time. There were times where I took the nearly-always present option to give in to hunger voluntarily for roleplaying purposes, but as cool as this system is, it's not going to be a consistent pain in your neck (heh).
During the day, Coen's health is simply one large bar, not a sequence of segments. So the difference between day and night is also reflected in the combat loop itself.
Daytime Coen is weaker, but he has access to infinitely more healing avenues and doesn't run the risk of accidentally killing anyone. He's also able to perform witchcraft, in which he sacrifices a little health in order to hex enemies for direct damage.
Nighttime Coen, on the other hand, is an absolute powerhouse with a set amount of equally powerful healing options. But as we already discussed, he comes with some potential drawbacks. He's also able to perform "vampiric abilities" in which he sacrifices a little health for superhuman feats like slowing time or stunning large swaths of enemies with a screech. Crucially, he can also drain some of an enemy's blood to regain health (on a cooldown).
But it's not just skillsets that vary between day and night. It's also builds. This is a loot-heavy game where different weapons and pieces of armor/rings/amulets have different passive effects. Some of these effects specifically affect daytime Coen, while some exclusively affect nighttime Coen. Some are equally beneficial to both. Either way, you have two equipment loadouts that automatically switch when the time of day does. I'm not normally one to enjoy the micromanagement required for one build, much less two...but I found the concept compelling enough that I didn't mind.
Imagine an extremely streamlined version of the combat you'd find in the Kingdom Come games and you'll have a decent idea of how things work. A given combat encounter is made up of directional blocks/parries and directional attacks. That is to say, if an enemy swings at you from the right, you block to your right or else you take damage.
An attack direction is denoted by a little arrow in the center of the lock-on indicator for an enemy, with the correct moment to perfectly parry that attack denoted by a shield icon turning from yellow to orange. Once you've either blocked or parried an attack, you'll start wailing on the enemy in question until they start to attack again. And so on and so forth.
That's the basic gist of gameplay, but there are also those aforementioned abilities to consider. Whether it's a sword ability, a witchcraft ability, or a vampiric ability, at least one "activation charge" is required to make it happen. These activation charges are gained through perfect blocks, dealing damage, and various other ways unlocked through perks. So combat is all about using these abilities, engaging in vanilla fighting, and waiting for the cooldowns on the abilities to end.
And...well...that's it. Weird that I can ramble for so long about the contexts in which gameplay appears, but when it comes time to actually discuss the nuts and bolts, the discussion doesn't last long.
And if it sounds like having so simple a gameplay loop stretched across a 30-ish hour experience would get repetitive...
It does. Good golly holly, it does.
I could only take The Blood of Dawnwalker in relatively short chunks each night because I'd end up getting sick of doing the same exact gameplay scenarios over and over and over again.
It doesn't help that there's basically no enemy variety at all. Not in the slightest. You have a small handful of dudes who all share the same moveset despite wearing different outfits, exactly one type of uriashi, and a handful of monsters that get frequently re-used.
Equally unhelpful is how tanky just about every enemy seems to be. Doesn't matter what level you or the enemy is, it's going to take multiple iterations through the cycle to kill them.
Even more unhelpful is the abysmal difficulty balancing. In the early hours, you're going to get your ass kicked to kingdom come by literally every combat encounter you reach. In fairness, part of that will be because you're unfamiliar with the gameplay loop. But it'll also be because there's no easy way to tell what the recommended level for an area is. Certain places will have colored skulls on the map to signify how much you're going to get your ass kicked, but it's not everywhere. So you'll end up spending your first couple nights stumbling into quest after quest hoping to find something you can actually take on, and you'll come up against enemies that still somehow kill you in one hit but take a hundred hits themselves.
This will be the case until a certain point. It won't just be that the combat loop finally clicks. It'll be that you've somehow acquired something game-breaking, most likely a perk or two.
At that point, it'll become impossible to lose unless you're up against significantly higher-leveled enemies. Is that a preferable problem to dying every two seconds? Of course. But remember: this is longevity and survivability I'm talking about, not power. Enemies will still take just as many hits as they ever did, it's just that you'll be able to practically button-mash through the encounter. So despite your newfound "immortality," you still don't feel powerful. And while dying every two seconds is more infuriating, taking five minutes to dispatch a handful of guards is just dreadfully boring.
I still remember two relevant things that happened as I went through the final push.
The first was that I experienced a bug (more on those later, you'd better believe it) that forced me to reload a save. When I saw that the save was from 10 minutes prior, I internally whimpered "no-ho-hoooo" from the dread of having to sit there and clang away for another 10 minutes (assuming I didn't get the bug again). The dread was so intense, in fact, that I nearly put the controller down and gave up right at the finish line. As far as I was concerned, having had that kind of response was all that I needed to call it quits. I decided I'd do so if I got the bug again.
I did not, so onward I went.
The second thing was during a trippy segment where I had to do a sort of anomaly hunt thing involving finding what door had changed. Every time I went through a door, I'd end up back in the hall I'd come from, but with something different, and with a new wave of enemies to fight. At one point, it was implied that I'd guessed wrong and was back at the start of that whole gauntlet. Then the enemies from the first wave appeared again, and I again found myself internally whimpering "nooo, pleeeeease!"
I still don't know whether I actually did anything right during that whole sequence, but that's besides the point. The thought of having to start that combat section over again was, for the second time that night, emotionally devastating.
That, dear readers, is not a good thing to feel with a video game. And we're technically not done discussing gameplay flaws, but we'll return to this later.
So...are there any positives?
Yes.
Taken in short bursts, the overall combat feeling can be pretty excellent. The blocks and parries feel rock solid and come with the most realistic "clang"s since Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. And when you're surrounded by enemies and you end up blocking blows from all angles like its nothing, it's hard not to feel like you're accomplishing something awesome.
This feeling is helped along by the fact that enemy crowds are hard-programmed to only ever have 2 enemies at most actively fighting against you. So you get to frequently juggle enemies with the threat of being overrun without ever actually being overrun.
Furthermore, the directional input system feels more tactical than it is, so it's hard not to feel like you're playing smart even when you're just mashing buttons.
That's about it, though.
Aside from combat, there's one last bit of gameplay that must unfortunately be discussed: investigations. You know the kind. You embark on a quest and eventually come across the scene of a battle or a crime. You then walk up to various bits of evidence, sloooooowly crouch down the investigate, and mutter to yourself about what the thing you're investigating means.
It was present in The Witcher 3, and now every single AAA game has to have sections like this.
And you know what?
I detest them. I despise them. I abhor them with every fiber of my being. If I play one more game where I have to slooooowly crouch down to say "there's a blood trail leading away from camp...but whose blood?" I'm going to start taking off a full point for it!
On second thought, no. I'm starting that with this review!
Sadly, you're going to find this style of gameplay far too frequently in The Blood of Dawnwalker. From the main quests to the side quests you find out in the open world.
If you read those words from earlier and thought "oh no, this is a Ubisoft open world," congratulations!
Kind of.
Vale Sangora isn't as lousy with repetitive things to do as a Ubisoft title, but it features some of the hallmarks you know and love. Including...say it with me, now...towers you climb to fill up your map.
I'm admittedly being a little whiny here. The open world isn't bad, it's just nowhere approaching good.
Your activities are pretty much limited to repetitive miniboss fights, magic rituals that I literally never did even once, repetitive kobold dens, repetitive enemy camps and patrols that have slightly different stories depending on which general they serve, and the occasional side quest. But I can't say I did many of the side quests you find out in the world aside from the ones that weaken the generals. I would have...but, well...whose fault is it that in-game time is limited, eh?
So, what you can do in the open world is a bunch of boring chores.
And boring, sadly, also applies to the world itself even when divorced from its content. Like, imagine if that original bog/swamp level from The Witcher 3 was about half as interesting and also it was the whole game, and you have an idea of what to expect. There's a little bitty bit of snow in one corner, but not one place in this entire map has an identity of its own aside from that. No interesting landmarks, no interesting biomes, nothing. And rather than fill the open world with interesting foes to face, it's just wolves and boars. Wolves and boars, wolves and boars, and more wolves and boars. Sometimes you'll come across two whole packs of wolves within a couple steps of each other, so egregious is the scale of the lupine/porcine copy-pasting. This just makes the lack of different biomes feel all the more repetitive.
Well, there is a city. That's obviously a different "biome." But it's not exactly a well-made city. A couple landmarks exist in there, but I never once got the hang of how to get anywhere the way I did in The Witcher 3's Novigrad.
Given Cyberpunk 2077 and even some reports from The Witcher 3's launch, I'd believe it!
I'm not normally one to split a topic into two sections separated by a different topic, but I had to this time. It's simply not possible to discuss the negatives with The Blood of Dawnwalker's combat without also delving into its technical state.
Right off the bat, the biggest technical problem is the movement. It's the kind of movement that makes your average overly-animated AAA experience feel like Neon White. It's clunky, janky, you turn too fast when you need to turn slow and you turn too slow when you need to turn fast, it's just a nightmare. And if you let up on the thumbstick while sprinting even a little bit, Coen comes to a complete stop and slowly has to start sprinting again. Easily the worst movement I've experienced in a long time.
And then there's the lock-on. Good GOD the lock-on. I've never seen a worse lock-in in my life. There's a "soft" lock-on that initiates automatically when you enter combat, as well as a "hard" lock-on that initiates when you click the right thumbstick.
The hard one restrains your field of view somewhat. However, it's easier to change targets in that mode.
On the other hand, the soft one lets you more consistently keep track of enemy positions. However, it's infuriatingly hard to switch to a different target on demand.
Why? Why couldn't they have just made one lock-on system that had the strengths of both modes and the weaknesses of neither? It isn't hard! Even the most low-budget soulslikes on the market have it figured out! This is amateur hour stuff.
Sadly, just about every other technical flaw you can think of (apart from crashes) also crossed my path.
There are serious character model problems in cutscenes. There was one Ubisoft-style general-weakening quest where a group of peasants walked up to me after I accomplished my goal. They were wanting me to do something scummy, and it was nighttime, so I elected to give in to the hunger and drain the leader of the group. Then, when I accomplished the same goal in the next iteration of the quest, the group showed up again, but without their leader. At first, I thought that was a great detail. They were out for blood after I'd done what I did!
But no...the same cutscene from before played out, just with the camera focused on thin air and no dialogue playing when the leader would've been speaking in the original cutscene. Then when I again picked the "give in to hunger" dialogue choice, Coen simply sunk his fangs into thin air.
In another scene, a peasant got his hand chopped off by a crime lord. But as this newly de-handed guy walked away, pieces of the hand's model remained attached to his arm with that stretchy effect you always see when a piece of a model gets caught somewhere.
Many cutscenes also featured glaring animation glitches. There was also sometimes an odd lighting bug where a small square on a character model or background detail would be blindingly lit with a yellow color.
One or two scenes were also missing audio cues entirely. So, Coen would clash swords with somebody, but there'd be no "clang."
Character models themselves (when they show up at all or are entirely put together) run the gamut of looking excellent to looking like they're wearing a poorly-chosen makeup. Even singular models (such as Coen) run that gamut. It's like when the lighting is good, the weaknesses in the modeling become apparent.
Thankfully the lighting isn't good very often, as it's entirely too dark a lot of the time in a way that can't exactly be rectified by changing the brightness. The contrast is just too huge unless you want to constantly switch brightness settings hundreds of times throughout your playthrough.
As previously stated, the final mission had a bug that set me back about ten minutes...but that wasn't even the last bug present in this mission! Given what I've said about the whole day/night cycle, how would you imagine the final battle goes down? Half as human Coen and half as vampire Coen? Well, you'd be right...in any playthrough other than mine.
See, when it got to the second phase, Coen was still using his human moveset. He had the vampire look going on, so I know for a fact he was supposed to be fighting as one. But he was still using witchcraft and food was still being used to heal, which means he was still human in the eyes of the gameplay logic.
If there's one positive to the final mission, it's that the quest tracking itself stopped being screwy since there were no longer other quests to follow. The various main plot lines are made up of several quests that flow into each other, so one would expect that when you finish one of those quests, the next quest that gets tracked would be the next one in the lineup, right?
Wrong!
Instead, the game just chooses one of the quests in your backlog at random and tracks that instead. This necessitates you going into the journal and manually choosing to continue what you were doing every time. Like, Jesus Christ. Again, it's amateur hour stuff.
Finally, there was a moment where the buttons on the main menu didn't function, so I had to close out and start again. Not the biggest thing in the world, but it's yet another straw on this poor camel's back.
So are there any technical positives aside from the sword "clangs"?
Eh...not really.
I mean, I suppose it all looks as good as any modern game with a decent budget does. Though it's all in service of ugly environments and character models that don't always hold up.
I suppose the soundtrack is also competent. Though it's basically a one-to-one ripoff of The Witcher 3's soundtrack without anything half as good as that game's "Skellige" theme or the one that plays during combat.
I suppose...well...I can't think of anything else I can even throw half-hearted praise at.
I went into this review conflicted but leaning more towards the positive...if you can believe that. After all, in spite of everything, I still booted The Blood of Dawnwalker up every night without so much as a single groan. But the longer I went in a given night, the more the myriad of flaws started to get to me. And when I started writing, that little burst of fun in the combat could no longer hide those flaws.
It's especially a shame given how much care clearly went into the ending. It truly seems like there are hundreds of ways this game can end depending on which quest lines you followed. In my own case, for example, a side character from exactly one side quest ended up playing a major role. I can only imagine what other possibilities there were had I gone down different paths!
But I won't be returning to find out what those could be.
To call The Blood of Dawnwalker "bad" would be dishonest...is what I started to write here. But then I tried to think of what would keep it from that descriptor, and I came up short of anything convincing. Especially since I was basically begging for it to be over throughout the last mission.
Still, I'm not convinced "bad" is the right word to use. I rarely view "bad" as relevant when there are legitimate positives to be found (such as the day/night cycle and everything that comes with it). But I'm also not sure that "mediocre" is correct.
In the end, this is what I settled on. The Blood of Dawnwalker is a waste. It's a showcase of some truly excellent ideas held back by a team without the talent to give those ideas a proper playground. It features a simple-yet-effective gameplay loop held back by threats that never make any meaningful demands of it. And even if those assertions weren't true, the whole experience would still be held back by easily the second-worst QA job I've experienced this year.
Still, I'm clearly in the minority...so I guess you can find out for yourself. But if my opinion is the final thing you're looking for before you make your purchasing decisions, don't waste your time or money.
Let us review:
Weak characters and script - 0.5
Repetitive, poorly made combat - 1.0
Basically begging for it to be over - 1.0
AAA investigation segments - 1.0
Boring Ubisoft open world - 1.0
Technical woes - 1.0
The final score for The Blood of Dawnwalker is...
4.5/10 - Slightly Below Average
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thoughts? Questions? Think I'm full of it?