The Blood of Dawnwalker

The combat system is an absolute nightmare, they advertised that it was optional but the option is use it or die. i wouldn't recommend picking this up until it's patched. Everything else seems great so i'm looking forward to continuing to play but that's difficult when anything more than a 1v1 is a janky unresponsive slaughter of Coen

Dawnwalker — an Early Access game sold for €70. At €15–20, maybe. At €70, absolutely not. There are good ideas here, but the game feels unfinished, undercooked, and massively overpriced. Worst of all, none of the genres it claims to represent are done particularly well. The RPG elements are weak, the open world feels empty and lacks substance, the story choices feel hollow, and the combat is unreliable, with attacks and parries sometimes not registering properly.

The targeting between multiple enemies is full garbage. Fix it. What were they thinking? You have a move where you toss dust in a guys face. The guy is the closest enemy to you. You toss the dust in his face and think I'll now attack him while he's blind. Nah. The game breaks you off from him and starts trying to attack another enemy that's not even in your reach. What is this?

Loving it so far: the story is dynamic and entertaining, events happen quickly, but you still have time to explore and build empathy towards characters. There's a lot of blood and cruelty, but it doesn't look like it was created for shock value, everything feels in character. Really interesting lore - without spoilers, I found a certain cave and spent a lot of time learning history and looking at the paintings, I love some hints into ancient lore, huge thanks from me! Also I do like the sense of urgency, and the fact that you have to pick what quests to do, while still having time to explore freely. Gameplay requires some getting used to, but once you stop being greedy in the fights, they become quite tolerable. A lot of fun mechanics: from what I've gathered, you can piss of certain fractions, you can piss off the main villain and every action of yours have consequences; this is very refreshing and raises the stakes in the late game, I think. Overall, 4 hours of really pleasant (albeit intense) emotional experience and a feeling of my money well spent.

I want to like it, however, playing on controller is impossible. Randomly stops moving completely for an instant, no matter what you are doing: sprinting, running, walking, strafing during combat, and then start walking again. You get stuck on everything during combat. He controls terribly in general. He either walks super slow or runs. Constantly running past things in interiors. Controls way worse than original Garalt in W3. I feel like these things are the basics and supposedly they are aware of the problem.. Where is the hot fix for my guy not being able to run without stopping every 3 seconds? You don't give me a horse and give me a broken movement system.

So far not a big fan of the time mechanic, everything else is good though. the time mechanic sucks because It makes it so I can't play the game, you are incentivized to boss rush the main story, beat the game and uninstall. Why would the devs make it so skipping content is the intended playstyle. It'd be like playing skyrim but you get punished for doing anything aside from the main dragonborn quest. I want to explore, level up and get loot but all of those takes time away from your 30 day timer. The timer also gives me no sense of urgency because I don't care about Coen's family, in fact I'd prefer if they'd die because they are ruining the game lol. Probably just going to totally ignore the time system now, gonna do whatever I want and if this ♥♥♥♥ continues to suck the fun out of this game then I'll mod it out. I've seen alot of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ saying "oh everyone asks for devs to try something new" first of all no-one asked for that, in fact most people have been wanting games to be more like games from the 2000's and 2010's, secondly trying to do something new is totally fine, the new thing sucking balls is not fine. This mechanic sucks and is un-fun and the game would be better without it.

Movement feels clunky, I think adjusting the walk/run speed for controllers would be beneficial and adding a run/walk toggle for MKB would also go a long way but it may benefit from some deeper attention. Still, early in but so far that's my only gripe... so all in all this is a great game so far. Visually stunning and combat feels really tight and engaging. In an ideal world I'd rather not have the time mechanic but that's just because the loot goblin in me wants to go every where and do everything but it's not that big of a deal and does give my choices of what I do decide to do more weight. A firm recommend to anyone who loves a solid RPG. P.S hearing that alot of the devs are Ex Witcher 3 devs gave me alot of confidence to buy this day 1, and that confidence was not misplaced. I get solid Witcher 3 vibes from this in all the right ways. I look forward to what Rebel Wolves will do next. For the initial title this is a great start.