Hi, Monika Muddy here! Glad that you made it this far into the magazine! The game that I have to review here is Code Vein. This is the first premium giveaway that I won from the magazine. Many thanks! I must admit that I didn’t know much (if anything…) about Code Vein, so this is a game I played blindly and discovered along the way, without any preconceived notions about it. This is also my very first true Souls-like! I did play games that featured elements from Souls, but I never experienced games where it was the core of the gameplay. So this is a genre that I discovered with this game! Did it go well? Was it any good? Let’s delve into that together with this review. Hope you’ll enjoy the reading!
I-1) Presentation
So, what is this game? Code Vein is an anime-style third-person A-RPG/Souls-like that was developed and published by Bandai-Namco. It was announced in April 2017 and released on the 27th of September 2019. It was made by the same team that worked on God Eater.
Code Vein is playable alone in solo mode and features a 2-player online co-op mode.
En garde!
I-2) The plot
The game is set in the near future, in an apocalyptic world. A tragic event known as “The Great Collapse” happened. Huge thorns emerged from Earth, and some horrid monsters started to pop up. In a desperate attempt to contain those dreadful abominations, humanity had a wonderful idea to use a particular kind of medicine: the BOR (Biological Organ Regenerative). Previously untested and supposedly miraculous, it is some kind of parasite that turns people back alive and was used to create the first bunch of revenants that would serve as an undead army to fight back those atrocities.
The revenants are very similar to vampires: they are immortal beings that can only die if their hearts are destroyed. Otherwise, they are doomed to come back alive again and again. Revenants need to feed on blood too! Not doing so only leads them to frenzy and transform into “the Lost”.
The Lost have… lost their minds (haha!) and turned into some sort of zombie-like creatures, attacking anyone trespassing nearby. On top of that, they emit a dangerous fog that will accelerate the bloodthirst of any revenants and considerably increase the risk of frenzying and turning into a lost too.
As the Lost became a menacing threat and kept appearing more and more, a solution was yet to be found. Silvia Cruz decided to volunteer to become the “Queen of the revenants”, a powerful creature able to eradicate the population of the Lost. Unfortunately, she frenzied as well, worsening the situation.
Her father, Gregoria Cruz, decided to take the relay and created a second bunch of revenants to fight back against his own daughter in a half-successful operation called “Operation Queenslayer”. Despite vanquishing the queen, the toxic miasma remains, and the population of the revenants now has to face a major problem: lack of food, caused by overpopulation and the blood bead sources (blood beads are fruits that are similar to human blood and literally grow on trees—heh, vegan blood, someone?) starting to dry up.
The character creation is very complete here.
II) The Gameplay
1) Overall gameplay
As the game starts, the very first thing you have to do here is create your character. From my side, I must admit that I spent 3 hours making the perfect character that I wished for. The game hasn’t even started, and I’m already having a lot of fun here, personally! But heh, I’m one of those people who loves to spend a lot of time managing every detail in character creation. And I was gladly surprised! It’s really complete here, and you have many options to personalize your character the way you want, and many options available to pick up for each category (physique, hair, face...)! It seems to have a larger amount of choices for the girls from what I’ve heard, though (~5 haircut options for men against ~50 for women, for example).
So, yeah. After a few moments spent (hours for me 😝) in the character creation, you can now play the game for good! Almost! The very first thing you have to do here is follow the tutorial. It’s always nice to get introduced to the game with the basics. The tutorial here wasn’t too long while being explicit enough to learn how to fight. You can stay there as long as you want, and, in case of doubt, the tutorial is always available to come back to later if you feel like it!
While it isn’t too hard to get started, I want to mention that the game uses its own kind of vocabulary, which can be a bit confusing and takes a while to get used to. For example, the classes here are called Blood Codes, the skills are called gifts, the mana is called ichor, etc. Thankfully, just like the tutorial, you have access to a hint section at any time with definitions for each of the words (along with some general tips), in case you forgot about something and want to refresh your memory.
Once you feel confident enough to quit the tutorial, your journey finally starts! You can feel a bit lost about the story (I’ll come back to that point later), but as you start your game after waking up, it seems that you’ve lost your memory. It’s a really classic move that lets you discover the game alongside your own character and experiment with the universe in parallel.
The game starts slowly, and the first area serves as a way to teach you how the game plays. It's kind of like an extension of the tutorial and a preview of what to expect later on. You can finally practice the fight against real monsters, discover the savepoints and the leveling system, explore the whole area, and meet your very first friend too (Louis :3)! And then, your very first boss! A revenant you met earlier is unfortunately frenzying in front of you. All of this covers everything that you’ll find in Code Vein!
As you end the misery of the poor guy, he drops a vestige of memory. It's something supposedly very dangerous. But since you’re the hero of the game, you’re able to touch it and, after a bit of suffering, discover that you can use it to reveal the memories of the revenants. It is really useful to learn more about the stories of everyone. And on top of that, you discover that you have the capacity to absorb the blood codes (classes) of the others and unlock their gifts (abilities)! Finding more vestiges lets you upgrade the blood code, giving you the opportunity to learn even more skills. Aside from the vestiges themselves, you can sometimes unlock extra codes by talking with the NPCs, for example.
After that first boss fight and discovering your particular ability (which looks like no one else but you is able to do so), you can finally get access to Louis’ base hideout. This place will serve as your own base as well, and as a central hub. Here, you will meet a bunch of other friendly NPCs, including this girl in white! (Turns out she’ll end up giving you her real name afterward.) She is here to help with upgrading your blood codes and revealing forgotten memories. Two of the other NPCs are merchants and will sell you useful items or upgrade your weapons and armor (blood veils here). The two others can be asked to follow as partners to fight with you. The last guy you’re discovering here will allow you to visit depths.
Depths are special levels that are unlockable when you find a particular item (a map of the depth). They are short levels that play similar to dungeons or instances and allow you to get extra items. You can retry them as much as you want, and it can be worth it to visit them to grind a bit of haze and find some important items there, but they are clearly just a little bonus.
As for your hideout, I must admit that your new house looks rather cool! There is even more to discover here in this place. You can test your newly unlocked moves against a dummy. The mirror in the small bathroom part lets you (partially) change your appearance. Outside, on the terrace, you have access to a hot spring. Aside from looking really cool, it allows you to see the previous cinematics again.
Back inside, if you’re ever feeling lost, you can check your objective on the board behind the sofa. It will tell you what you’re supposed to seek and where. Aside from that, there are a couple of other fun details. Personally, I absolutely love the piano and the fact that you can actually play it! I could spend so much time trying to learn how to play anything! This is really a small thing, but such a cool addition from my point of view.
Sing us a song, you're the piano man girl ♪
But hey, so far, I’ve been focused on the beginning of the game! Now that you can have a bit more freedom and start exploring the world to accomplish your mission, let me talk about the game from a more general point of view.
Code Vein is a Souls-like. From my perspective, this is my first try in the Souls genre. I have the vision of someone who has never played Dark Souls at all. From what I’ve heard, it should be an easy one and be a good introduction to the genre.
I must say that, at first, I had such a bad time getting used to the game. It took me such a long time to get used to the game after the introduction, and I got really frustrated a couple of times at first, to the point that I considered offering Code Vein back to the magazine and stopping reviewing it myself. But hey, I kept persevering, and once I got used to the gameplay, I realized that it wasn’t that hard, and I started to enjoy the game way more.
The game allows you to bring an NPC partner with you. You have the choice between two of them at first, and then a few more will join the party later. Code Vein allows you to play without a partner at all if you prefer to play that way. That's a way to pick between easy and hard difficulty. I personally kept my favorite partner for my whole adventure. Between the two first choices, Louis may be the cutest, but my favorite mate was Yakumo, and despite trying to play with all the others later, I always went back to him.
To be totally honest, your companion here is very efficient. The AI is really good, and, most of all, your friend is going to carry everything by themselves. They’ll literally babysit you, aggroing and distracting the enemies while supporting you and trying to resurrect you if you fall down.
Your partner isn’t perfect and may die as well or be unable to revive you, but they’re generally very reliable, and that’s really pleasant. Maybe a bit too much, since you may tend to rely a bit too much on them.
Watching the sunset.
The difficulty itself is expectable, since it’s one of the core elements of the Souls genre. It is, however, very tempered by your partners if you decide to pick one. It really depends on how you want to play the game. I feel like it has been made with two players in mind, though.
boss fights are a strange thing. Bosses can be either really tedious, since they tend to spam skills and attacks very quickly, or very easy to beat (as for someone who played with a NPC mate). In the end, once you get used to the game and know how to deal with it, it is perfectly manageable, and you can keep going quite fluidly through the game.
If you ever come to lose and die (hopefully, you’re a vampire undead revenant, so you come back to life every time), and that’ll probably happen quite a lot, you will lose all your money available. Another feature inherited from the Souls genre. But don’t worry much; you will have the opportunity to get it back if you manage to survive the road without dying once again. You may also get to the hot spring at the base and get your money back that way, at the cost of losing half of it. It really depends on how you feel about it.
Your money (it’s called Haze in Code Vein) will be useful for quite a lot of things. It will let you buy items and weapons, level up, get new skills, etc. Hopefully, you’ll earn enough Haze to actually manage everything. I don’t remember having any issues with that in the game.
Speaking of leveling up, it’s quite automatic. You just have to go to the nearest “Mistle” (those are checkpoints in Code Vein) and, like I wrote previously, spend your well-earned Haze and... that’s it. You don’t even have to care much about your stats; they are growing independently of your current class.
As for the class system (Blood Codes), you start with three of them, which will allow you to discover the three main roles in Code Vein. By that, I mean you can play as the fighter one, the ranger/distant one, or the caster/mage one. As you go through the game, you will be able to find a good bunch of new ones (for a total of 32 in the main game, excluding the bonus Blood Code from pre-order and the one from the season pass). They offer a good amount of variety in the gameplay and can be changed at any time, without you having to care about managing your stats. They adapt themselves to the class you pick and get influenced by the weapons and armor of your choice. Those new Blood Codes let you become a “tank” fighter, an offensive caster, or even a support that can regen your partner and come along with supportive skills (Gifts).
Those skills need to be learned at the Mistle as well and can be unlocked after spending some Haze. Once you play long enough as a specific class, those skills get permanently unlocked and can be used as you’re changing roles! That is very cool, and again, it gives you many options to create the build that you like. I do really enjoy that freedom here!
Anecdotally, as I had a lot of trouble in the beginning of the game, I started to play mostly as the Ranger, with a rifle weapon. I switched from time to time to the caster, then ended up picking a more tankish class, as you get good defensive stats, and despite being quite slow with a two-handed weapon, you’re very deadly and deal a massive amount of damage.
Alongside your classic set of attacks and skills, you have the possibility to deal a special drain attack by doing a back attack. You also have the ability to perform a charged drain attack. Both of them will let you absorb some of the Ichor of the enemies. Of course, you have some defensive moves as well! You can dodge attacks or parry them. You do have a special drain parry move as well, which will let you get some extra Ichor if you’re able to do it at the right time. (It does require some good timing to parry properly, though.)
Code Vein's main story quest is classic and pretty straightforward. You have to explore the levels to complete the objectives, kill every Lost that comes your way, solve a couple of puzzles eventually, and then beat the main bad guy in the area.
Revisiting some older places can be useful as well. You may have missed something, and usually, NPCs tend to pop up and need your help. They give you side quests, which are a good way to get some rewards. What a shame that they aren’t that interesting and repetitive. There are always two options. Either you have to kill a particular enemy or find some items. It is not necessarily the best part of the game, but it still gives you the opportunity to do something else rather than just always going forward.
If you’re still looking for extra items, Code Vein has this gift system (no, not the skills here!) that lets you gift a particular kind of stuff to one of the friendly NPCs at home. Doing so, you will accumulate points that can be traded afterward with what the NPC has in reserve! That’s cool too, as you can even unlock their weapons that way!
As for the game length, HLTB mentions that you can beat the main story between 26 and 34 hours, and 59 hours for completionists. I did finish the game myself in ~55 hours, doing the game story, all the side quests, and finding all the vestiges. I still have 7 achievements to unlock, however.
After finishing the game, you are able to continue in New Game+, keeping everything that you unlocked and playing at a higher difficulty. As the game has a couple of endings as well, Code Vein gives you some reasons to keep replaying it!
About the achievements, they shouldn’t be that hard to unlock. A good bunch of them are story-related and can be completed in your first playthrough. There are a couple of achievements related to the different endings, and a single one that is quite grindy. But aside from the fact that they are time-consuming, Code Vein shouldn’t be a hard game to get 100% of the achievements.
II-2) Level design
Code Vein has a dozen different levels. They are built vertically. By that, I mean you have a lot of ladders to climb, a couple of jumps to do, a few elevators to take, and even a few secret roads located below your path to find! If you keep looking at the horizon, you may miss something!
Those different areas let you travel across a good variety of biomes. Whether you’re in a desolate city, in the desert, or on a snowy mountain, it’s pretty nice to have so many ambiances to discover. Most of the levels are very narrow, though, and you’ll probably die because you fell off instead of being killed.
In the end, most of those levels are good enough, except maybe the Cathedral. Those who played Code Vein (or you, the reader, if you plan to do so at some point) will understand 😛. This level, in my opinion, wasn't a really good idea. The Cathedral area is way too long, built like a maze, and is very redundant and confusing. The whole area lacks color (it’s very white or grayish), and you can barely take any details as landmarks. Yeah, no. If it were shorter, it would have been manageable, but I was really in a hurry to see anything else.
II-3) The Multiplayer
I’ll be totally honest here; I can’t judge this part at all since I’ve been playing the whole game all alone. But I still think it's worth mentioning that Code Vein lets you play online in cooperation with another player. The matchmaking lets you play with a random player, or you can use a password to play with a particular friend.
Your companion is still available in this mode, so you can play up to three people, including the NPC.
As a way to communicate, Code Vein doesn’t seem to have any kind of chat, but you have a bunch of gestures instead. Oh well, that’s already something, at least.
II-4) The DLCs
I played the base game here, but Code Vein comes with a bunch of DLCs. There are three of them: Hellfire Knight, Frozen Empress, and Lord of Thunder. I noticed that the base game includes a free one: Venous Claw, which gives you an extra piece of armor that was supposed to be a pre-order bonus.
The three paid DLCs don’t really look any interesting, nor do they seem to add much more to the base game. They mostly add a couple of extra items, new boss fights, and new depth levels.
Looking at the Steam reviews, they go from very negative to mostly negative. People seem to complain about the lack of content, new weapons and bosses being just reskins, and new depth maps being uninspired. Well, it looks like you won’t miss much if you don’t have the season pass. The base game is already good enough without the DLCs anyway.
III) The Story
The game starts with you being woken up by a mysterious, unnamed girl. You’re in the middle of a city in ruin and don’t seem to remember much about what is happening. The two of you decide to walk toward a white tree. Its fruits are supposed to calm your thirst, but the tree is unfortunately dry. With a bit of your own blood, however, it suddenly grows those Blood Beads again.
It looks like it’s the main source of food here, for those of your own kind. But yet, the rarity of the beads makes it very hard for everyone, and the provisional government has hands on the sources and food stocks.
A nice and juicy Blood Bead.
After a while, you get caught by what looks like two agents of that provisional government and are forced into labor. That’s where you meet Louis, who sees in you the particular ability to absorb the vestiges and recover people’s memories.
After taking you home and presenting you to all his friends, it turns out that you will be a great help to them in their search for blood sources. That’s where the adventure truly begins for you.
I think that I’ll let you discover the rest by yourself! If the story is disconcerting and confusing at first, you will discover it all along your journey through the game. The further you go, the more you will learn about everything. It does come with a few plot twists as well.
From my point of view, I wasn’t very interested in the story at first (it really didn’t hook me in at all), I’ve learned to appreciate its evolution. Code Vein may not have the best story of all time, but it’s entertaining enough to make you want to keep going.
IV) The Graphics
Code Vein is a 3D anime-style game. While overall it looks decent, I must admit that I wasn’t very impressed here. It’s probably the weakest part of the game.
It does look a bit outdated, and some animations aren’t really good. But most of all, the textures are... meh at best, maybe even mediocre if I dare to say so. And it’s very unfortunate. I really wish that the developers would have done a better job here! I really appreciate the anime part and the variety in the levels! Some landscapes are really cool, too.
As for the cinematics, they seem to be done with the game engine, and they feel decent enough. The intro cinematic has been animated by a different team, though (Ufotable), and looks like a TV show! It is really a nice little detail here.
About the NPCS, most of them look really cute and... charming, to say the least. The developers seemed to be particularly focused on the girls here. You'll notice that quite quickly if you decide to play Code Vein😝
The game comes with a photo mode, and it’s really well done. I caught myself stopping by just to mess with it and try to take some nice screenshots and find the best filter to apply to them.
V) Sound and Music
I’ll start with the best part here! The soundtrack is really awesome! For me, this is one of the best points of the game, and I’m a big fan of the OST. So I’m probably not that objective here. But still, as soon as the game begins and the title screen appears, the theme is already epic.
The music was composed by Go Shiina, a Japanese musician who also worked on God Eater previously. Most of the tracks are orchestral melodies, sometimes with a chorus over them, and a few of the songs here are rock songs. They really fit well, and they are really sublime! It’s probably one of my personal favorite OSTs. And I did share one of them in this monthly issue 😊. Don't forget to check the playlist if you want to listen to the song I’ve shared!
As for the dubbing, Code Vein lets you pick between English and Japanese voices. I did pick up the English version because I generally prefer the English one. The actors are decent enough. Nothing exceptional, but they just feel good enough. It’s just a shame that your own character is mute most of the time, despite having the option to personalize the voice. You will mostly hear your own grunts. You may hear your own voice when you do one of those multiplayer actions, but that’s basically it.
What more can I add? The sound ambiance is nice; the sound of your weapon crushing the enemies is cool enough; the grunts of the enemies are okay too.
Oh, yeah! A thing that I liked as well were those vestiges that you have to find! They’ll emit voices from the revenants that previously owned them! That’s a really cool feature and will make it easy to localize and find them!
VI) Fun Meter
Such a hard point to judge. It’s very subjective, and even I really hesitated about the rating here, as it kept changing all throughout the game. Let me explain how it evolved for me: the game started slowly and wasn’t attracting me much more than that. It was kind of hard for me, as it was my first Souls-like. I had to get used to the conventions of the genre, and the difficulty didn’t help much. At some point, I found myself stuck for a couple of hours. And yeah, I had to rage quit…. At this point, I was so mad that I was really close to giving up.
But then I got to sleep, rested the whole night, and decided to try again until I could manage to advance in my journey. And I was able to do so! And the more I kept going, the more I got addicted to the game! I really regret judging Code Vein this badly at first. In the end, I had so much fun messing with the different classes, trying to find the perfect builds, trying to kill the Lost more efficiently... I can say now that I really had a great time with the game, as soon as I got used to it. It’s definitely one that I’ll consider playing again in New Game+. I kind of regret not trying the multiplayer part, though. I can imagine that it could be even better with one of your friends.
VII) Technical Performance
According to Steam, the game requires at least an i5-2300, 6 GB of RAM with a GTX 760 computer. An i5-7400 8 GB of RAM with a GTX 960 would be otherwise recommended.
From my end, I personally played the game with an i7-8750H, 16GB of RAM with a GTX1060 6GB laptop.
I played Code Vein with high performance without any major issues. It worked fine. The game crashed only once because of an ALT-TAB. I probably did it at an unexpected moment. I did notice a slight FPS drop from 60 FPS to ~30 or 40 FPS in the most demanding moments.
Once again, the only problem I have with that game would be the graphics part, which could have been better. Some enemy animations were broken at times, and the facial animations sometimes didn’t work. It’s pretty weird to see a mouth closed while hearing the NPC’s voice.
VIII) Final thoughts
To conclude this review (good job if you managed to read everything!), I want to say that, despite what it made me endure at first, I learned to appreciate Code Vein. If it was a really rough start, I must admit that I enjoyed it in the end and had fun playing it. The gameplay is hard and takes a bit of time to adapt to, but it gives you a lot of freedom and the opportunity to create the build of your choice. Which is really cool since it can perfectly fit your playstyle!
The story is interesting enough and offers you a couple of turnarounds. A good reason to keep going! With its multiple endings, it’s another reason to keep going through the New Game+ mode.
The music is awesome, and I keep listening to it despite having finished the game! That’s really something I loved.
I just regret the graphics part a bit; that could have been better, despite having a nice anime style that differs from other Souls-like games.
It would be hard not to recommend this game. It’s a really good game overall and a good introduction to the Souls genre. But be aware that the difficulty can be disconcerting. It was my first try here, and it made me think twice about getting further into the genre. If Code Vein was an easy one, Souls may not be my cup of tea after all. But hey, I learned to love it anyway and had my share of fun! That’s all I ask for in a game, and I’m really glad that I was able to discover it because of the SteamGifts Magazine! I wasn’t expecting much from this game and probably would have missed it otherwise, and it turned out way better than expected!
The graphics (3/5) The gameplay (4/5) The story (4/5) The Audio (5/5) Fun meter (5/5)
Pros & Cons: ✅
- In the end, I had a lot of fun!
- The music is awesome
- Character creation is quite complete
❌
- The texture aren't that good
- Some animation are meh
