Code Vein is an okay game, I really feel like the hate it gets is undeserved and especially the criticism towards the devs being assholes or things in that line of thought. Please at least refrain from insulting developers for no reason.


Soulslike combat with some tweaks:

Combat is pretty much the Souls system: but with one weapon: you get your light and strong attack, dodge, block and parry. It is not as good because of the weapon feedbacks and messy hitboxes but it’s overall decent.

On another hand, the game adds a nice skill system allowing you to equip up to eight skills at once, ranging from melee attacks to spells or buffs. This is where the combat shines as it adds a lot of variety and compensates for the weaker Souls imitation that the core combat is. With the addition of skills, the combat becomes really fun and different from Souls games. It also allows you to switch builds on the go, freely going from a caster to a melee build or anything you’d like to.

However, the code system is also pretty restraining. The main way of unlocking skills for free use is to equip a code, equip the skills you want to unlock and go kill enough monsters (usually around the length of an entire map segment). This essentially means that the game encourages you to constantly switch builds and makes it difficult to sustain a playstyle, let alone make an optimal build (which is a problem in NG+, when you start getting wrecked). I think this problem would be solved by having fewer codes. A lot of them are pretty similar and it turns into an oversaturation of choices for similar results. Likewise, there are many duplicates of skills. In both cases, one is always better than the rest.

The heavy focus on the companion system ultimately leads to a lack of balance. There are a lot of gank fights similar to Dark Souls 2 and the game relies on the NPC partner to compensate for the jankiness of many aspects of the game. The companions are rather interesting and I like them personally, even though I would totally solo a Souls game instead. However, they really trivialise many sections of the game because of how strong they are and sometimes you wish you could only call them when you actually want to. On another hand, you may also be thinking that the combat isn’t so good that you would want to challenge yourself on it, anyway. Very few fights seem fun in solo, most enemies are extremely aggressive and the only downtime you get from them is when they switch aggro to your partner. Even basic enemies will not leave you a second of respite as they can surprisingly run to catch up to you and attack you before you get any chance to heal.

The game also suffers from its overall choice of enemy patterns and hitboxes. The hitboxes are pretty bad at times, oftentimes you just don’t hit for no reason and it can be very frustrating especially with some weapons that require precise hits like the stabbing lance. On another hand, the enemies are very likely to hit when they should not. For example, a thrust attack can often hit you if you’re close enough to the side or even behind the enemies. What’s also terrible about getting hit is that a lot of enemies in this game have either good tracking or wide swing attacks, this means that they are likely to reach you no matter your placement. It reduces the importance of positioning and forces you into always having to dodge, but this problem is also exacerbated by the fact that the game relies heavily on gank fights so you can only imagine the result of having to fight a lot of enemies at once when all of them have such extended reach.

Hardcore souslike level design with a tweak too (the map):

The level design is cool. Seriously, I really liked it. The environments are varied but the decorations themselves are relatively subpar. However, every level has a lot of branching areas and secrets to be found. I had an absolute blast looking for them. The game makes an extensive use of verticality and having you drop down or climb up ladders to access hidden areas. One of the most infamous areas of the game, a certain copy of Anor Londo, was especially fun in my experience.

A lack of cohesiveness is also the level design’s weakness, while early areas tend to branch out more, later areas are more linear but they’ll instead have more shortcuts and circle around back to the checkpoints. It’s unfortunate that this design element appears so late in the game and the early levels are full of checkpoints instead. There are many cases where the placement is quite questionable, especially when the checkpoint is before a straight line leading to a branch of more paths: why not put the checkpoint there instead so the paths all lead to it?

There is an intriguing map system. By default, the map only registers your footsteps until you reach a certain spot where you can “unlock” a part of the real map. This footstep system allows you to manually map the levels and is very helpful in remembering where you went. I thought the combination works really well. This is also why I think the confusing layout of levels works because with your footsteps being tracked, it’s very easy not to get lost. Also, the solution to most levels is ultimately pretty straight forward because most branches are dead ends, so honestly it’s not that difficult to find where you’re going. The only weakness is that the map doesn’t show every vertical layer, which can be troubling in some areas or if you want an overview.


Weak story and chara design, but some cool ideas:

One thing I’m not a fan of is the character design. While male characters are mostly cool, the female ones can really be summed up to “boobies” for a huge part and that was very disappointing. A lot of the monsters look cool, on another hand, but when you get close up you realise they are also often naked female monsters so yeah… I think other games from Bandai Namco like Scarlet Nexus had much better designs overall.

The story is okay, not amazing but not completely boring either. I rather liked it and I think the character interactions are pretty fun. There are one or two sections in the game where you get bombarded with cutscenes for twenty minutes or more and it gets kinda boring.

The game uses a unique storytelling method of having the player collect memories which will be told in a theatrical manner as you walk down a corridor. This feature was cool and there were a lot of interesting ideas, however I think there are way too many memories and it makes them more boring than anything at some point. The lore points that they add are cool and allow to deepen some character backgrounds. The most annoying part is really the way you have to walk through them at a slow speed, only a few of the memories take advantage of this to do something interesting (and those were really well done). For most of them, you just walk as you observe scenes in the background in the form of theatre plays, you might as well just have been standing still no?


Overall, Code Vein is a fun soulslike with some flaws, it’s very subjective whether you’ll enjoy it or not. I’d say the game is pretty similar to Dark Souls II if anything, so if you really enjoy DaS2 and anime isn’t a problem for you then you’ll probably like this game.

Loved the character design and character creator in this one, did not care for the story

Gameplay is fun albeit a bit simple for the genre, environments were kind of bland but fun enough to explore, forced walking segments with bland story elements was a pace killer, was able to break the combat pretty quick so ended up not being too difficult except for some bosses which I appreciated, would love to see a sequel expand on what made this game great as well as fix the issues it had

7.5/10

Started playing this with my brother because we had played through the Dark Souls trilogy like a million times and were looking for something new. We were playing it for a few months till I made a comment about how the game play kinda sucks. He agreed and we both realized we didn't have to finish this game. The writing and characters suck, the game play sucks, mechanics feel weirdly restrictive even though there's lots of styles. The only thing I really liked were the edgy designs for the enemies & weapons and the environments.

A mediocre attempt to recreate a soulslike experience.
Don't get me wrong, this game is solid, it's quite easy and relaxing, but it feels like it doesn't really know what makes the souls games so special, the amount of cutscenes and the emphasis on the story doesn't really fit for this genre, in a way, its a flawed soulslike game, but on its own, it's actually surprisingly enjoyable for the most part.

The gameplay is good and the exploration is pretty fun, the world looks very beautiful, I like the art-style, the characters look cool and the graphics are pretty nice, most areas look great, the destroyed city with the spikes coming out of the earth, the crystalline cathedral of the sacred blood, the corrupted dark caves, and many more.

The character customization is fantastic, there are many options to choose from, even though there's a lack of clothing options, since your character is going to wear an armor and a mask most of the time, I do appreciate the amount of different customization options, I just really like creating my own character, and the game did satisfy me on that part.

As for the progression system, oh well it's honestly so damn confusing, I still don't understand how it works, it doesn't make any sense and most abilities are useless, I ended up leveling up all the time and using a strenght build with a greatsword, didn't really bother with the Blood Codes, and I still decimated everything, even in the endgame areas. The boss fights are actually very simple, no challenge whatsoever, I do like the fact that you can have a sidekick but it makes the game significantly easier, which isn't really a complaint but I wish the boss fights had more variety and a bigger moveset, to balance it out, but unfortunately that's not the case at all.

Also, it's worth to mention that the hitboxes are terrible, enemies attack in front of them and if you are behind them, chances are you still get hit, even if you are about to attack, because the frames are broken, it's very inconsistent and random.

Lastly, the level design is very boring, most areas are okay, but some of them suffer from terrible and obnoxious platforming, and monotonous layout, they're not connected well, and they feel copy-pasted.

I know, I complained a lot, but at the end of the day, this is still an enjoyable game even with all its flaws. It's worth trying out but don't expect anything more than just a silly unmemorable little adventure, some people might enjoy it even more than I did but it's just nothing to write home about.

Final Rating: "Decent" ~ 6/10.

Honestly, I really like Code Vein, most people criticized it due to being an "anime dark souls", and of course not being as good as the former, but I personally think that it was much more.

For me, it was quite a better version of God Eater, I found the setup pretty cool, it behaved like a decent JRPG, having some cool characters and ideas, the story wasn't particularily good, but it had interesting thoughts and touching parts, its also had fun combat and interesting customization, and it had cool mechanics/elements as the character's echoes, which allowed you to wander the character's pasts, althought it felt a little boring after doing it repeatedly.

But most important, this game has one of the best soundtracks in gaming, which is a little sad, cause the game isn't as good as its OST, which is absolutely brilliant and beautiful, I can't explain how much it means to me, the most I could do is using all the OST in my DnD campaign and giving my players the best experience I ever could.
Code Vein it's such a good album that it even comes with a game!
Jokes aside, Go Shina and Jose Delgado are amazing, Bandai should give them more projects and let master Motoi Sakuraba rest, as he has done plenty already, and he isn't as great as he used to be, which is logic, considering his age, I think that these two former composers really envisioned the game as a masterpiece, if not, I can't imagine how they composed something as good.

Overall, it's a cool game, but it had more potential, I hope Bandai Namco makes a sequel!

Code Vein is an adequate facsimile of Dark Souls, but lacks that game's storied charm. Enemy design is repetitive and level design ranges from mediocre to horrible (although the excellent map system helps mitigate that somewhat). While the overall plot and premise are interesting, the cutscenes are excruciating to the point that I lost interest in the plot. Side-quests are utterly meaningless with generic rewards. The veil/blood code system is interesting and allows for flexible class-building/switching. The combat is fast-paced and smooth, with well-designed encounters, but the difficulty is extremely uneven. Overall a game with a lot of promise that slowly wore down my enjoyment until I couldn't be bothered to keep playing.

I played this game for about 17 hours. Made it up to the second to last boss and just couldn’t stomach it anymore.
Story? Couldn’t follow.
Mechanics? Janky and clunky
All around experience? A waste of my time.
It was to be a fromsoft game so bad but the really bad repetitive enemies and hot boxes that are horrendous, I just can’t go on.