The Blood of Dawnwalker

Played 11 hours so far. I'd give it maybe an 8/10. It's good, not great. I would still recommend you buy it. If you liked the Witcher, you'll like this game. The good parts: I think the RPG elements are really good so far. The story has me invested. I like the main character, which should be a give in, but a lot of games overlook this and make the main character unlikable. I like the side characters and villains so far. Graphics, sound design, musical score, and voice acting are great. Enemy designs are cool. Crafting system is simple, but ok. Abilities and powers are really cool, though I do have a complain about the perk system I will discuss below. Complaints: Combat is a quite clunky in my opinion. And combat is a massive part of the game. Part of the problem is that it's not very intuitive. The block and movement is tied to the same left joystick, so when you are blocking you can't move your character. It turns into a basic cycle of move, press block (which means stop moving) to block, counter attack. Rinse repeat until you've hit the enemy 20 times and he is dead. The more enemies you are fighting at once the more annoying and clunky the combat feels. The enemy lock system is too slow to switch between enemies, if it works at all. And you'd better hope the floor is completely free of clutter, because if it's not your character is going to get stuck. I hated the combat at first. I thought it was extremely frustrating. I am getting better at combat, so for me it has transitioned into being less frustrating at this point and more annoying, neither of which is good. I see enemies and I think, ugh, I have to get into the stupid combat mechanics again. The day/night time system is ok and had the potential to be great. One of the problems is that it's annoyingly unclear how much time certain activities will take. Want to repair a shrine? The game tells you it's supposed to take 1 time period. Ok. Turns out halfway through the quest, in order to repair the shrine you have to spend an additional time period doing an additional task. Then spend another time period to repair the shrine. Also, if all I am doing to repair a shrine is killing a wolf and picking up a statue, then placing a statue back in the shrine, why does that take 2 time periods? So it actually took double the amount of time the quest said it would take. The fact that the game is unclear and makes you spend more time that you originally expected to take happens a lot. Couple that with the perk system (talked about below) and there are many days or nights when I only accomplish one or two things because the game took way more of my time periods than I expected it to or than what feels reasonable. The perk system is also a big drain on your allotted time periods. Basically every perk you spend when you level up aside from the most basic perks takes time periods to level up. You can maybe argue that Persona/Metaphor does the same thing, where you have to spend time to improve skills. But it feels to me like Persona/Metaphor is much more relaxed with the time mechanic and you don't feel like you are wasting time when you work on leveling your skills. It feels like you are leveling up skills in order to achieve something else in the game. Where in this game, it does feel like you are wasting your time periods. Would I rather spend 3 time periods choosing 3 perks and feel like I wasted those time periods? Or would I rather use those 3 time periods to experience more of the game by doing an additional quest. I do understand that the game wants you to feel like these choices matter with how you spend your time, but to me the fact that leveling up takes away from experiencing more of the game and characters means the mechanic isn't good or fun. Overall it's a good game with a few annoyances that make the game less fun than it otherwise would be.