Going into Code Vein I was apprehensive because I'm not an anime fan at all - but however since its the most famous Souls clone out there I had to check it out, especially since it is co op.
Starting up Code Vein the first impression was mixed, getting into the game I was greeted with stereotypical cheesy anime characters and melodramatic writing, but I thought "its a soulsclone, lets see how the combat is" Well, I played the entire game in CO-OP, and just like Souls it requires you to actually essentially beat the entire game twice. Each player has his own world, and in order to progress together, you have to join eachothers world and complete every area and boss twice to be able to continuiously join eachother.
After we found this out, we were sort of weary, because it turned a 25 hour game into a 50 hour one. But we figured its worth it, because its a famous soulslike.
Well in the first 5-10 or so hours the game was looking promising. The basic structure and combat is indeed of Souls nature, you have the lock on system, the same familliar mechanics like the bonfires, respawning enemies when you use them ,health potions etc, so this seemed promising. In the first 10 hours the mechanics were simplistic, and we felt like there was some chance this could be a good game. It was looking like a solid 6 out of 10 or maybe 7 at this point.
However, things started to unravel themselves very shortly after this. The flaws just kept being too glaring to ignore, and the enjoyment rapdily declined. For starters, the mechanics in this game are just totally bullshit and overcomplicated and convuluted. The main RPG mechanic in this game is something called 'Blood Codes' which is basically like switching skill trees whenever you want, and at first you only have a few of these to choose from, its like Classes. But as you progress in the game you find so many of these fucking things you basically start to have 100 skill trees.You might think this would be something interesting and fun to explore, but the way its laid out is very unintive and awful to navigate. For starters you can choose a skill tree, and unlock abilities inside that, but you can also unlock abilities from other skill trees, and also spend extra to be able to use them with any other skill tree. The whole thing is a mess. The UI is a clusterfuck and not fun to navigate. To top things off, you have all these hundreds of abilities (called gifts) But none of them actually display any stats of what they actually do, They just have a vauge description of what they'll do. So all of this crap ends up feeling more like League of Legends or World of Warcraft than Dark Souls. I hated it. At some point in the game we started getting so many of these fucking skill trees that we just sat around navigating menus reading horribly vauge descriptions that we just gave up on it and basically ignored it .
The levelling system is equally as pathetic. You dont choose any stats when you level, you just sit there and hit 'Level up' and thats it. It just gives you some health, damage, etc. Theres no choice. The choice is suppose to be in the skill trees, but as explained its just not fun to interact with. Besides all this , you have equipment you can find - But the equipment is limited in variety. You can only find One piece of armor to equip, and weapons. Thats it. And all of these statistics and equally as poorly explained and convuluted as well, basically all we ended up doing was looking at weapon damage and armor mobiility speed and spammed a few abilities every fight, it didnt feel that strategic. You have an NPC partner with you the entire game, which felt awkward, and they have this ability to randomly revive you for an arbitrary amount of times after you die. It doesnt make any sense. Sometimes youll die, and get revived once, other times youll die and get revived 7 times in a row, other times youll die once and NOT get revived. I never understood how the fuck it worked. The mechanics are ambiguous and shit. I just ended up picking skills like "gives your weapon more damage with flames' and things like this. I used a one handed sword, but all of the weapons looked equally stupid.
So the RPG mechanics out of the way, ill address the elephant in the room: The characters, dialogue, writing, story, is horrible. One of the worst I've ever had to sit through .The game is so fucking arrogant to keep shoving LONG WINDED , BORING, MELODRAMATIC, teenage fan-fiction cutscenes in your face constantly. If this is a 40 hour game, then 20 of those hours are spent watching horribley pathetic and generic third rate anime soap operas. It was fucking awful. Every SINGLE time you beat a boss me and my friend would be like "Ok, see you in 20 minutes" because we knew the game would essentially throw us into a stupid anime episode. Its not just the fact that its anime, the writing is so pathetic and corny that it was hard to stomach. Every detail of the story is overly described in such a verbose detail that it becomes nauseating to listen to. What happened to enviormental story telling and letting the player figure things out on their own? I don't need a 20 minute long slice-of-life anime soap opera with big boobs jiggling around all over the place every time I finish a boss. Its just fucking stupid. None of the writing is cool, imagine the most parody soap opera version of a teenage fanfiction.com story and thats all it is. The voice acting is equally as stupid and just sounds like a 19 year old college girl trying way too hard to sound overdramatic. Awful.
So the RPG mechanics, characters, itemization, story, dialogue, overly long cutscenes, all suck. What else to address?
The level design. For the first few hours it was OK, nothing to write home about, a couple generic damp caves, city street, a swampy water level. These were ok, they had a few little puzzles like flipping switches to unlock doors , things like this. They were medicore to average quality, and kind of linear. However, frequently you would progress and kill a boss and then have no idea what to do - Only to go back to the home base to look at an objective board, and it will essentially tell you 'Go back to the area you were just at, and walk around randomly until you find this new door you can unlock' This was horrible, as most of the time we were already sick of the area, and since the enemies all respawn, it meant go do it all over again. So we would usually just look up where to go on youtube. Shitty design.
Now, halfway through the game you have an Anor Londo copycat almost (called Cathedral of Sacred blood. Its this completely white, everything is copy pasted over and over, and its just one huge meandering maze. The routes to proceed are so niche and random, it was horrible. We got stuck for 3 hours on this level alone. You would climb across the same copy pasted structure over and over only to find out the route to progress was by dropping off the ledge on this specific random bridge, climbing up ladders, flipping switches that open doors on the other side of the map. etc. It was just horrible level design. We would run around in circles for 40 mins at a time trying to figure out WTF to do. Had to look it up on youtube multiple times.
The enemy design is varied, yes, but also a lot of them are copy pasted ad nauseum. And not many of them look that cool anyway, its hard to describe what the fuck they are. I dont even know. The aesthetics in this game are just strange. Yeah theres a lot of huge enemies that look cool to fight, the enemies are OK in general, i dont really have that much of a complaint. Oh yeah, the game has an 'invasion' mechanic which is a total disappointing turd, instead of Souls where it would spawn in Unique, one time encounters, Instead , the "invasions' are just random waves of generic copy pasted enemies for a few minutes, then it gives you a reward. Lame.
Not many of the levels are memorable, and the ones that are , are memorable for bad reasons. Theres a winter level, which was decent but also annoying as fuck because the ground would randomly break and youd fall through an die instantly. Theres a fire level which is just shit and not fun to play because the entire ground is on fire and you take damage and also flame walls randomly hitting you. Theres a level inside some big maze castle where the limbs would pop out of the wall and make you take huge damage. The levels were more annoying than engaging to navigate.
And now the boss fights, which is really the big thing for games like these. Many of the bosses are just straight up rip offs of Souls. You got ornstein and smough type boss, you got the butterfly, you got the giant wolf, yeah they play a bit different but its the same idea. Not many of the bosses are actually that memorable, but they probably are the most fun and engaging part of the game. Just like souls, atleast it makes you communicate and coordinate with your partner and you really do feel a sense of coooperation like you need to rely on eachother to succeed. The boss designs are rarely cool looking, but its a welcome and exciting break from the rest of the game when they happen. Not many of them are super hard, but a few of them were really frustrating. Notably the ornstein & smough copy, the cat boss thing, and the very last boss which is just a total pile of shit. When me and my buddy got to the end of the game, in his world he killed the last boss and his game ended - Credits.
However, when we did the same in my world, we killed the last boss and then for some reason it gave me ANOTHER boss 'Virgin born', he didnt experience this in his game. So we needed to kill an extra boss for me to complete the game. This in its self is awkward and strange considering we played the entire game together, but yeah this boss sucked hard and was more of a fight against a clunky and shitty camera system than anything its self. When it was finally over I was so excited to just uninstall the game and never think about it again.
Just nothing about the game is really anything id consider good. The graphics themselves arent nice to look at and when they are, its ruined by the total shit aesthetic of the game in general. Every piece of armor, weapon, etc, are so laughably anime it all ends up looking like Kingdom Hearts or something, its just not for me. The weapons dont look cool or the armor, which is kind of important. Makes you not care about the loot. And a lot of the loot in this game has really stupid names you dont even know what the shit youre picking up is. The UI sucks. Skill tree is a convuluted mess and feels more like a MOBA than an ARPG.
But really, the final cherry ontop of the shit cake is having to play this entire shit game TWICE for co op. For Souls it was tolerable, but why did they have to copy that aspect? Why? This would have been so much more tolerable if you could just join your co op partner and go about the game once , progressing with eachother naturally. But no - You have to join your friends world, progress until you find the next bonfire, QUIT your friends world so he can sit at it / regain health, JOIN AGAIN, progress until you kill ONE boss, QUIT, then ask your friend to join you and do the same thing! Its so fucking tedious! Theres so many god damned loading screens in between all this! Theres probably 8 hours of loading screens alone from the entire 40 hour experience. Horrible. Everytime you and your friend fail a boss you basically have to wait 2 minutes before you can jump back in, just going through menus, joining, loading screens, etc.
One more horrible thing is the save system. It seems to only save when you sit at bonfires, not automatically after every interaction like in Souls. This has drastic meaning. The feeling of consequence and danger and insecurity in souls comes a lot down to how it autosaves after everything, and you cant go back on your actions. In Code Vein, you constantly are losing progress, having to re-do boss fights, having to re-do entire areas, because maybe your game crashed, or your buddy quit to main menu trying to fix connection issues and forgot to sit at bonfires, etc. The save system is shit.
Going in, I knew I would never play this shit solo, but the fact that it was co- op made me overlook the fact that im not an anime fan, and the fact that its the most famous soulsclone meant I had to see it for myself - but no, its just not a good game. Out of the 40 hour experience I cant say I really had that much fun, maybe a few boss fights were fun, but thats it. Having to watch 20 minute cringe cutscenes after every single boss fight was not fun. Yeah I could just skip it, and infact there are these 'memories' that happen where you just walk around in a dream state where some idiot talks meaningless shit at you - Yeah , I skipped those. But the other cutscenes I sat through, because I cant just skip them all, its not right. But it was suffering, for sure. All I can say is atleast it was co-op, because despite everything playing through a game with a buddy and talking about it is atleast something. Wouldn't play solo for sure. Game sucks.
4/10
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