Eighty-four on Metacritic (the site that aggregates review scores) for PC. Eighty-three on PS5. Eighty-six on Xbox Series. Six out of ten from Game Rant. Between these numbers that tell different stories hangs the fate of Blood of Dawnwalker, the vampire RPG (role-playing game) from The Witcher 3 veterans, due out tomorrow, September 3, 2026, on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.
Rebel Wolves, the studio Konrad Tomaszkiewicz founded in Warsaw after leaving CD Projekt in May 2021, promised to recapture the formula that made The Witcher 3’s reputation. The pedigree is real, with Daniel Sadowski on design, Jakub Szamałek on writing and Bartłomiej Gaweł as art director, three names who worked on the Polish trilogy. But the reviews do not agree.
The studio grew from around twenty people to 160 employees by April 2026, for this debut game it presents as the first entry in a series. The gap between the aggregate scores and the actual reviews is worth examining point by point, from the story to the frame rate (the number of images displayed per second).
Reviews are divided on Blood of Dawnwalker
On OpenCritic, a rival aggregator to Metacritic, Blood of Dawnwalker stood at 84 on August 31 across 53 reviews, recommended by 89% of them. By September 2, with 95 reviews counted, the average had climbed to 85 and the recommendation rate to 93%, backed by a “Mighty” badge (the site’s top rating tier). The averages alone tell the story of a solid launch, near the top of the fall lineup.
The headline of the article published by Kotaku, written by Ethan Gach on August 31, 2026, tells a very different story. The journalist sums up the divide in one line, “Reviews Are Divided On Whether It’s A Great New RPG Or Repetitive And Janky.”
GamesRadar+ puts the game at 83 on Metacritic, just behind the first two Witcher titles but far from the 92 The Witcher 3 scored in 2015. The site’s own review, written by Jordan Gerblick, drops to 3 out of 5, citing “odd pacing” and quests it calls “repetitive.”
RPGFan, by contrast, goes as high as 92 out of 100, praising “some of the best writing” seen in a recent Western RPG, in a far more enthusiastic tone than its peers.
Game Rant goes as low as 6 out of 10, describing a world “enormous but strangely empty and lifeless,” marred by “a frankly ridiculous number of bugs.” Our review roundup of the Tarnished Edition of Elden Ring already showed this kind of gap between the aggregate average and individual reviewers’ impressions.
A studio built in the shadow of The Witcher 3
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz left CD Projekt in May 2021, after directing The Witcher 3. He founded Rebel Wolves in Warsaw in February 2022, aiming to recapture that magic without the constraints of a studio that had become a giant since Cyberpunk 2077. Publisher Bandai Namco boarded the project, built on Unreal Engine 5 (the graphics engine used by a large share of today’s big-budget games), and unveiled a first trailer on January 14, 2025.
The game had already made an appearance at gamescom 2026, in the lineup our team covered. The 2015 game, for that matter, is still making headlines, as The Witcher 3 arrives on Battle.net with a Geralt skin in Diablo 4, a reminder that its shadow never quite leaves this story.
Game Informer confirms that link after a prologue it calls striking, “almost every element carries the fingerprint of The Witcher 3.” The site also warns of a point of no return thirteen days before the end of the story, a detail that matters for anyone hoping to see everything before the credits.
Writer Piotr Kucharski explained the studio’s philosophy after that prologue to CNET, “you’re out of the prologue, you do you.” That freedom comes at a cost, and the reviews say where.
Thirty days to save his family
The story takes place in Vale Sangora, a fictional kingdom modeled on the Carpathians, in 1347, in the middle of the Black Death. Coen de Laslea, the hero, becomes a “Dawnwalker,” human by day and vampire by night, after a forced transformation. He must save his family from the vampire lord Brencis, whose cursed blood cures the plague but demands a much steeper price. The game’s vampires go by a name of their own, the Vrakhiri.
The story runs on a thirty-day countdown, split into sixteen segments, eight of daytime and eight of nighttime, and every activity moves the clock forward. The fight against Brencis stays accessible almost the whole way through, quest order is free, and no one can see or save everything in a single playthrough. It is an unapologetic narrative sandbox (a structure where the player chooses the order of events), with no morality system judging the player’s choices.
Three talent trees (the system that lets players spend points to unlock abilities) shape progression, with Witchcraft on the human side, Vampirism on the vampire side, and Swordmastery shared by both. Combat runs on four directional stick inputs, with a last-instant parry, a formula several reviewers compare to Kingdom Come: Deliverance and For Honor.
Blood of Dawnwalker undercut by bugs and performance drops
Bloody Disgusting, in a review by George Yang on August 31, 2026, calls Blood of Dawnwalker “one of the best RPGs of 2026,” with a structure it compares to Persona and Breath of the Wild. The same review flags combat that turns “monotonous” over time, along with specific technical issues on Xbox Series X, frozen enemy animations, trees popping in late during cutscenes, and an autosave that sometimes stops working despite running every fifteen to twenty minutes.
Checkpoint Gaming sums up the PS5 experience in one line, “when it is working, it is a superb experience,” before adding that the game “feels at war with itself, much like its hero.” Allies never interact with one another, Coen never comments on what he has just done elsewhere in the world, and the frame rate drops in populated areas, especially in Svartrau.
These technical flaws don’t stop either Bloody Disgusting or RPGFan from naming it one of the RPGs of the year. They help explain why Blood of Dawnwalker finishes well short of the score The Witcher 3 earned in 2015, despite writing praised even in the harshest reviews.
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