There are two obvious reasons you could already be excited for Code Vein 2. One: it’s a soulslike made in-house by the publisher of FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series. Two: anime melodrama. If you love characters scream-crying through their emotional beats more than reading FromSoft flavor text like “If the soul is the source of all life, then what distinguishes the humanity we hold within ourselves?”, this action RPG holds great potential for you.
I can’t say that the anime Dark Souls angle grabbed me in the three hours or so I spent playing it at a preview event in December, but Code Vein 2 is also, depending on how you choose to play it, Dark Souls But You Have a Gun. Now that’s got some pull.
Oh! There’s also a whole system for weapon upgrading and customization, more gear for boosting specific stats, and good old fashioned leveling up. Code Vein 2 is mercifully free of the loot barf that plagues Team Ninja’s otherwise excellent Nioh games, but otherwise it seems closer to Nioh than Dark Souls in terms of how many dials it gives you to hone in your buildcrafting. Across a full game I think the number of variables to fiddle with here could be quite exciting, but trying to take them in all at once and figure out how much I should care about a weapon’s Bleed Factor or Max Ichor is more overwhelming than invigorating.
Hence my enthusiasm for: Gun.
Shoot ’em up
Rifles are the odd man out weapon type in Code Vein 2, offering a light attack bayonet slash in line with a basic one-handed sword but a far more useful heavy attack that charges up a big shot, liable to knock the average enemy on their ass. To balance this out bullets are a limited resource you have to craft and replenish at bonfires mistles, but I spent a good chunk of my preview stepping just close enough to enemies to get their attention and then decking them with a lead hello. It felt like getting a leaping heavy attack knockdown on a Souls enemy to start the encounter, but from far enough away to have my feet casually kicked up on the edge of the desk.
This strategy did not hold up against the first boss I fought, a four-armed behemoth lady who could and did leap across the room to piledrive me straight to hell with a single hit. So, Dark Souls With a Gun is still Dark Souls.
That boss fight forced me to stop bullet cheesing my way through fights and put together a build that required actual effort, eugh. But in the end I had the most fun pairing a set of magical rune blades with an ability that let me suspend them in midair like a buzzsaw, dealing constant damage to the boss while I danced around its attacks.
While Code Vein 2 adds a whole lot of anime cutscenes on top of an otherwise pretty straightforward soulslike setup, it couldn’t match FromSoftware’s flare for level design in the dungeon I previewed, a quite bland series of steel gangways and corridors. The vibe I got, from that area at least, was that the focus is very much on story and combat and not much in between, the level layouts devoid of much stimulation when walking from one fight to the next.
Code Vein 2 does not have Elden Ring-caliber ambitions, which I would say is fine—welcome, even, if it knows where its strengths are and isn’t trying to be best-in-class on every axis. But at $70 and launching just a week before Nioh 3 I think it might be picking a fight outside its weight class, even if it is bringing a gun into the ring.
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