Velhfis The Blood of Dawnwalker Review

The Blood of Dawnwalker — Review The concept is worth a million, the execution — hello, pre-first Assassin’s Creed era. I expected much more. From the creators of The Witcher you anticipate polished mechanics and great quests, but for now The Blood of Dawnwalker feels like a hastily stitched-together project stuck in time and built from 2000s drafts — not even reaching the level of BloodRayne. The game does have a few bright spots. What I liked: a fresh take on the vampire world (imo), lively characters, interesting quests. And that’s it. Praise is over — now the cons. The stealth attack-from-above mechanic instantly hit me with nostalgia for Ezio Auditore da Firenze from AC (wipes an old-school tear). But our clawed friend with a 10-centimetre manicure somehow can’t grab onto a tree to jump down from it. Or a cliff above a battlefield. Why make a cool falling attack if there are literally no convenient positions outside of urban and rural buildings? Terrible camera lock and no way to escape combat. You can’t just put away the claws/sword and run from a bad fight. Your jump, smoke teleport, sprint and door-opening mechanics simply get disabled — the camera automatically locks onto the enemy for no good reason. Because of this the game instantly turns from an interesting horror into janky locked-in old trash. Why even have a “sheathe weapon” button if it’s useless in combat? Illusion of choice in the story. Multiple endings in quests is just a name. Your decisions almost never matter — the story still runs on rails. For an RPG from these developers that’s simply shameful. In a game about vampires there is no stealth. How is that even possible? Every enemy smells you from a mile away even through obstacles, even while crouched. There are only a couple of stealth attacks — drain (which is a piece of broken code, more on that below) and attack from above. Draining an enemy… Do you realise that in the old BloodRayne games this mechanic was done better than what you have now? How is that even possible? Did they just pull you out of the basement where you’d been locked since the 80s and you never bothered to check what’s new in vampire games? WHERE IS THE STEALTH? WHERE IS THE DRAIN? Why is our character a walking idiot who plays like an elephant in an elevator full of china? In a vampire game there aren’t even proper combat abilities that let you heal by feeding on enemies during a fight! When it comes to vampire combat mechanics, the old BloodRayne is still head and shoulders above this. And why can’t you use magic at night?! So we mysteriously became almost undead. Our companion can use magic like a human. The main witch of the game looks like a dried-up corpse and can also use magic — at night! And what about us? Did they eat our brains? Hey developers, what is this nonsense? What the developers were thinking remains a mystery. There’s a vague feeling that Cyberpunk set the optimization standards for the next few centuries… Why is it so unfinished? It limps on both left legs. Playing on an RTX 4060. Constant freezes, crashes and shameless frame drops even with DLSS on. Overall it’s fine for one playthrough. The price is shamelessly inflated for such a raw product. If they ever decide to make a sequel, I’d lock the developers in a room with every game that has proper stealth and solid combat, and throw in a few books about vampires while I’m at it. Because right now it’s still very unfinished, guys.