It’s fitting that Code Vein II is set in a world of vampires. As I hunted down these bloodsucking creatures in the present and 100 years in the past to prevent the collapse of the world, I felt trapped within its clutches, like a castle guest desperate to escape but unable to do so. Across 42 hours of monotonous game, I found little warmth here. Its skin, a distractingly garish and ugly visual style, is as cold as its blood, a combat system that struggles to fuse original ideas onto a skeleton sculpted better elsewhere in the genre. Even its narrative fangs, which begin in earnest with unique ideas, lose their bite as repetitive storytelling devices and overextended arcs drag on. As I plunged my hunter’s stake into the game’s final boss, the biggest smile yet stretched across my face – finally, I could lay Code Vein II to rest.
After creating a custom Revenant Hunter in Code Vein II’s excellent character creator, I was quickly thrown into a world-ending story filled with proper nouns and jargon that immediately bounced off me. It didn’t help that this world is wrapped in clashing visual styles that make it an eyesore to view, and forgettable performances struggle to sell the ambitious stakes. A rock-infused Baroque soundtrack helps the game’s lackluster soundscape, but I was otherwise uninterested in most everything I saw and heard on screen.
Jumping between the apocalyptic present and 100 years in the past was interesting at first, as Code Vein II uses inspiring stories of what once was to explain how the world became what it is today. I enjoyed learning why once-allies became monstrous creatures I had to defeat in the present, and jumping back and forth to complete objectives is a nice change-up from the genre’s typical exploration. But before long, it became tedious with objectives that led to loading screens, followed by quick cutscenes, followed by more loading screens. Ghostly hallways where memories play out appeared as exposition dumps far too often, and I sprinted to the exit door each time.
My favorite arc of four within the wider narrative is in-depth and full of surprises, but it’s the outlier, as the others are poorly paced, filled with boring dungeons and predictable characters, and struggled to find a hook – had I not been reviewing this game, there are moments a plenty when I would have ended my time with Code Vein II long before the credits.
The overworld is dull, with confusing map markers that must be destroyed to unobscure its features, and tedious pathing that makes traveling on foot or by motorcycle a chore. Code Vein II’s bespoke dungeons are largely just as uninteresting, filled with enemies that quickly grow stale, unimaginative set dressing that ranges from underground power plant to underground laboratory to underground prison, and boss fights either too easy to be exciting or too annoying to be fun. Fortunately, checkpointing is fair throughout, with dungeon pathing that makes collecting resources that drop after you die a welcome reprieve.
Code Vein II’s combat, which follows in the footsteps of its 2019 predecessor with Soulslike action, has some compelling flair but is trapped in a world of dungeons and enemies that did little to entice me to experiment more with its mechanics. It’s doing a lot to let you craft a unique playstyle – there are primary weapons, secondary weapons, Jail weaponry with Ichor-sucking abilities, special attacks that use Ichor, equippable Blood Codes that drastically change your character’s stats, plenty of consumable and throwable items, and an AI partner that can bestow buffs or help you fight outright, but little inspired me to utilize this expansive suite in combat. I mostly fought the same types of enemies in Code Vein II’s final act as I did in its opening hours, and though I tried forcing myself to experiment and play with the many tools at my disposal, it was simply easier (and faster) to swing a big sword over and over.
The few times I did struggle in combat were against frustrating bosses marred by poor camera positioning, annoying hitboxes, and unfair attacks that don’t seem to follow the same rules of physics my moves do. Some bosses, like the final adversaries of each arc in the game, buck this trend with engaging movesets that were fun to learn and counter, but overall, boss fights, like the other enemy encounters in the game, were flat and aggressively mediocre. Even its menus and UI, which are reminiscent of a player’s screen hundreds of hours into an MMO, struggle to find harmony in this game’s overall messy presentation.
I want to say there’s something enjoyable, interesting even, buried beneath the flawed execution of Code Vein II, but that something is the corpse of other games in the genre this vampiric creation is feeding on for inspiration. Remove it, and what remains is an unremarkable and forgettable experience.
