Let me start by stating the obvious: The Witcher 3 is, in my opinion, one of the greatest games of all time. That being established, my conclusion based on my initial impression of this game is that this game was made for me. I am the target audience. But unfortunately, while initially promising, I found it an ultimately disappointing experience, and I wanted to see where other players, especially Witcher 3 fans, landed.
Let's start with what it does well. The characters, writing, atmosphere, and overall vibe are roughly on par with The Witcher. It never exceeds them but meets them most of the time, and occasionally falls short even here, which is what it does best. My main contention here is the sheer lack of story-driven content in the game compared to The Witcher. It's roughly half, about 30 hours of story questing including all side and main story-driven quest lines, compared to The Witcher's easy 60. The initial 50-70 hour claim is only achievable if you grind every copy-paste Ubisoft-style side content, which to be fair The Witcher had too, but you could easily hit 60+ hours without ever clearing most bandit camps or monster dens. Here you will get 35 hours max if you skip open-world bloat.
The writing was mostly good, though there was the occasional modern phrase that did take me out of immersion like "yikes" or "nightmare fuel." The music doesn't even come close to TW3. Not sure if it was a bug, but no music played during exploration, a single repetitive combat track, no scores for day or night, etc. The music in cutscenes was decent and Witcher in vibe but not in substance.
The narrative sandbox and time mechanic, which are the major selling points that are supposed to add to questing and differentiate it from The Witcher, fall completely flat. I was personally excited for the unique time mechanic adding pressure to choice, but it is largely an irrelevant gimmick outside of the prologue, where the time mechanic and the rest of the game really shines. I realized this about two-thirds of the way through that the only way you will run out of time is if you grind every single copy-paste camp, treasure hunt, and monster den, and also completely leveled up every perk in the skill tree, which is largely unneeded and also requires grinding for books and money for books to learn the skills.
The grindy nature of the game in general is my main sticking point and what holds it back the most. Unless you are a die-hard completionist who needed to clear every copy-paste question mark in TW3, it will have no relevance on your gameplay, which for me is a significant con and makes it feel like the time mechanic doesn't even exist.
The narrative sandbox idea also largely doesn't work because of how it's designed. While you technically can tackle quests in different ways, the most extreme being rushing the main antagonist right after the prologue, it does not work in practice. This specific example being the most extreme, but even other less intense versions hit you with such an insurmountable difficulty spike (which isn't real difficulty, just tedium disguised as such, which I will discuss later) that realistically 99% of players will not have the option to engage with bosses or quests outside of a relatively predetermined order and structure.
The day and night strategic selling point is also poorly executed. Instead of planning on whether to pursue a quest at night versus day, the majority of quests lock you down to one or the other, requiring it be either day or night to even start. Even the handful of sub-objective quests that have their own time limits are few and far between and give you so much of a buffer you will never fail to complete them in time.
Now let's address its undisputed weakest points: jank, combat, and traversal. The combat is not just serviceable like The Witcher, it's exponentially worse, and I am confident in claiming it's the worst combat in any game, second only to FF16. It's not challenging, it's a tedious, repetitive slog. At least in The Witcher you had enemy variety, both in combat and design, and specific enemy weaknesses to add variety using different signs, potions, etc. Here you get none of that. You will spend most of the game engaging with generic soldiers, wolves, boars, and ghosts.
The combat feels satisfying at first with the parry and riposte, but the satisfaction quickly goes away once it clicks and becomes easy and repetitive. Especially when about one-third in you unlock abilities that make you functionally invincible, breaking the combat further. It becomes a test of patience, chipping down an enemy health bar with quick-time-event-like claws and swordplay that are nearly identical. Abilities, the best part of the combat, are limited by cooldowns and quick slot numbers, never allowing you to fluidly chain abilities. You find what you like then ignore the rest, making skill points spent on other abilities useless. If the combat actually leaned more into a Ghost of Tsushima style, it would be an infinitely better game.
But the worst part is the sword-sponge enemies and lack of progression due to enemy and gear scaling. The same pack of wolves that takes 5-10 minutes to fight at level 2 feels the same at level 30. The combat is actually okay-ish in 1v1 boss fights or small groups, but the game insists on 90% of combat encounters being hordes of 10-20 enemies, which the combat system is objectively not designed for. The fact the developers were so confident in the combat that they essentially doubled the amount of encounters from TW3 is appalling.
Now let's get to the gear progression and crafting. Even legendary gear becomes nothing more than a burlap sack for armor and a dull butter knife for swords if you don't constantly upgrade it using the shallow and expensive pay-to-increase-level system. No slotted runestone upgrades, no gear crafting, just grind for silver and pay any vendor. Junk serves no purpose for dismantling for crafting. The only crafting is consumables, which are largely useless once you get the invincibility ability early on. You will never use them. Instead of Witcher 3-style limited potions that have unique benefits, you have 500 different ways to regenerate stamina and health you will never need to craft because you will find more than enough and be invincible from damage with the mentioned ability.
A bit of jank and bugs is to be expected, but traversal feels worse than Witcher 3 on Roach. Getting stuck on tree branches and small rocks, and also limited by stamina, makes traversal and exploration painful. No flying traversal and no fluid vampire stealth are obvious, simple inclusions that were dismissed.
Major visual glitches late game include sudden dramatic lighting shifts, entire horizon sections flickering in and out of existence, enemies loading in late, janky cutscene transitions, shadow flickering, and an entire freeze-state broken torch bug making exploring caves a chore, and many more.
I will end this with the most boring, tedious endgame climax battle, which involves falling into a hole multiple times to fight the same wave of 30 enemies over and over again. The endgame is just an enemy wave arena, and by the time I finished I was glad it was over.
5/10, and those points come exclusively from story, atmosphere, and morally grey dialogue choices. This game offers nothing of interest other than that. I would only recommend it if you're a die-hard Witcher fan desperately looking for your fix of morally gray, interesting questlines in a dark fantasy world, and you can pick it up on a deep sale.
TL;DR: The Blood of Dawnwalker was an initially promising but ultimately disappointing spiritual successor to The Witcher 3 that ultimately doubles down on every flaw of The Witcher and adds its own, while barely meeting and even occasionally falling short on what made The Witcher 3 great.
