The Blood of Dawnwalker Tech Review: Unfortunate Tech Issues Sour an Otherwise Masterful Game

Bringing to life a gothic world where vampires run amok, The Blood of Dawnwalker is a new RPG from fledgling developer Rebel Wolves, with its ex-CD Projekt Red staff carrying over the pedigree of The Witcher 3 alongside unique ideas of its own. Playing as part-time vampire Coen, players face an ultimatum to save their family from the evil Lord Brencis within a strict 30-day time limit - where every quest consumes a set number of time segments. The RPG formula is further twisted by a day/night mechanic that flips Coen between human and vampire forms, opening up distinct abilities such as wall-walking and combat teleportation.

While the game's opening scenes waste no time establishing a convincing (and blood-soaked) revenge-rescue narrative, the technical delivery on console presents noticeable friction - even on the latest patch, 1.04. How does the game perform across PS5, Series X and PS5 Pro? What modes are worth using on each platform? And on the single-mode Series S, do the game's strengths come across?

Regardless of which console you're playing on, you can hardly fail to notice that the game's well-plotted cutscenes are unfortunately marred by delivery flaws - with character models falling right into the uncanny valley thanks to coarse skin textures that lack proper subsurface scattering. Hair aliasing combined with rough self-shadowing crops up in bright daytime scenes, but the most frustrating issue is erratic hitching during camera cuts. Each camera cut introduces dropped frames as the game loads the next shot, resulting in frame-time spikes up to 120ms in NPC-dense areas while using the 30fps quality mode across Series X, PS5 and PS5 Pro.

Focusing on performance, optimisation levels across consoles are not where they need to be, with PS5 and Series X offering 30fps quality, 40fps balanced and 60fps performance modes. So far, so reasonable. In open stretches of woodlands, bogs and ravines, the 60fps mode runs reasonably well on both standard consoles, but combat, dense forests and heavy fog can all precipitate drops into the high 40s. Consequently, the 60fps mode relies heavily on system-level VRR tech to mitigate judder. That approach doesn't hold water with the CPU-heavy crowds in Svartau City, causing the game to slip outside VRR range and drop performance significantly - with Series X chugging more in the central market compared to PS5, despite higher frame-rates elsewhere.

Introducing PlayStation 5 Pro into the mix yields a smoother, improved frame-rate out of the box thanks to boosted GPU clocks and superior memory bandwidth. Open-world traversal, combat and traversal through Svartau City are far less prone to lurches on the Professional, establishing a console performance ranking where PS5 Pro takes the lead, Series X takes second and base PS5 trails behind. Nevertheless, PS5 Pro is still ideally reliant on VRR, as cutscene lurches persist and dense stress tests can still see readings drop down to 50fps.

Opting for the 30fps quality mode provides visual upgrades, but introduces an unevenly frame-paced 30fps cap that creates choppy, erratic motion reminiscent of Bloodborne (!), compounded by frame-time spikes up to 67ms. This severe frame-pacing judder affects PS5, PS5 Pro, Series X and Series S alike, alongside performance drops into the high 20s during cutscenes and market sprints. The 40fps balanced mode offers smoother overall motion, but carries over the exact same core issue of uneven frame-pacing on both 60Hz and 120Hz displays.

In terms of image quality, all modes target a 4K output using Unreal Engine's TSR upscaler, but native resolutions differ significantly across modes. On base PS5 and Series X, performance mode ranges from 900p to 1260p (frequently sitting at 900p to sustain 60fps), balanced mode scales between 1080p and 1620p and quality mode operates from 1440p to 1620p. While static image quality remains crisp across the board, TSR struggles when upscaling performance mode's native 900p during camera movement, leading to visible noise on fine elements like roof tiles, thatched roofs, and distant foliage.

Achieving 60fps on base consoles requires substantial visual sacrifices. Small water bodies like puddles lose UE5 Lumen reflections in favor of screen space reflections (SSR) that disappear when tilting the camera, while large bodies of water like lakes and rivers lose reflections entirely on performance mode. Furthermore, environmental shadow animations operate at a highly restrictive range where tree shadows only animate very close to the player, character shadow quality is lowered and distant NPC animations are cut down to half- or quarter-rate to alleviate CPU bottlenecks.

On PS5 Pro, image clarity receives a boost from higher native resolution bounds - 900p-1620p in performance mode, 1440p-1800p in balanced mode, and 1620p-1800p in quality mode - feeding more pixels into TSR for a cleaner image in motion. While Pro's 60fps mode retains the same graphical cutbacks as the base console, its quality mode uniquely upgrades large water bodies to full Lumen Reflections. Meanwhile, Xbox Series S targets a 1080p TSR output from a native 792p-900p baseline. Remarkably, it retains the SSR on large water surfaces, volumetric dust and interior Lumen GI from the Series X quality mode, though foliage density, texture quality, and shadow ranges are pared back alongside the mandatory, unevenly frame-paced 30fps cap.

Ultimately, The Blood of Dawnwalker presents a masterful RPG concept where its 30-day time limit, day/night vampire mechanics and branching plotlines invite compelling repeat play-throughs. However, console optimisation forces players to choose between stuttery, unevenly frame-paced 30fps/40fps modes or visual cutbacks with wavering frame-rates at 60fps. While the 60fps performance mode remains the less distracting trade-off overall - especially when paired with PS5 Pro and a VRR display - Rebel Wolves still has work ahead to polish out the game's technical rough spots.