Code Vein 2 Review: Is the Sequel Worth It?
▼ Summary
– The reviewer found the game’s visual style garish and ugly, and its overall presentation to be cold and unengaging.
– The narrative starts with unique ideas but becomes tedious due to repetitive storytelling, overextended arcs, and frequent exposition dumps.
– The world and dungeons are described as dull, confusing, and filled with repetitive enemy encounters and unimaginative settings.
– The combat system offers extensive customization but fails to inspire experimentation, as repetitive enemies make a simple playstyle more effective.
– The boss fights are mostly frustrating or mediocre, with issues like poor camera angles and unfair attacks, though a few exceptions exist.
Exploring the world of Code Vein 2 feels like being an unwilling guest in a gothic castle, you want to escape, but the doors are locked. Over a forty-two hour journey, this sequel to the 2019 Soulslike offers a chilling experience, though not in the way developers might have hoped. Its visual presentation clashes distractingly, the narrative’s initial promise fades into repetition, and a combat system bursting with potential is let down by uninspired enemy encounters and level design. Finishing the final boss brought a profound sense of relief, a sentiment that unfortunately defines too much of the playtime.
Players begin by crafting a detailed Revenant Hunter using a genuinely impressive character creator, only to be plunged into a convoluted, jargon-heavy plot about preventing global collapse. The ambitious story is poorly served by a garish art style that often feels like an eyesore and voice performances that fail to make the high stakes resonate. A dramatic, rock-infused Baroque soundtrack provides some auditory flair, but it’s a rare highlight in an otherwise lackluster presentation.
The narrative structure, which jumps between a ruined present and events one hundred years in the past, starts with intriguing promise. Discovering how past alliances devolved into present-day monstrous conflicts offers a compelling reason to explore. However, this mechanic quickly grows tedious. Objectives frequently lead to a frustrating cycle of loading screens and brief cutscenes, while ghostly memory corridors become predictable exposition dumps that players will sprint through just to reach the exit.
While one of the game’s four main story arcs delivers surprising depth and engaging twists, the others suffer from poor pacing, boring dungeons, and predictable characters. Had this not been a review assignment, there were numerous points where putting the controller down for good would have been a tempting choice. The incentive to push forward often simply wasn’t there.
Traversal is another significant weak point. The overworld is dull, hampered by confusing map markers that must be destroyed to reveal the landscape and tedious pathing that makes travel by foot or motorcycle a chore. The bespoke dungeons fare little better, recycling stale enemy types and unimaginative settings, from underground power plants to laboratories to prisons. Boss fights typically fall into two disappointing categories: too easy to be exciting or too annoying to be fun. The fair checkpointing and straightforward dungeon layouts, which make retrieving lost resources painless, are minor consolations in an otherwise monotonous exploration loop.
At its core, the combat system has compelling ideas. It provides a vast toolkit for crafting a unique playstyle, featuring primary and secondary weapons, special Jail weaponry with Ichor-sucking abilities, stat-altering Blood Codes, consumables, and a helpful AI partner. Despite this expansive suite of options, the enemy design and dungeon environments do little to encourage experimentation. Most players will find, as I did, that it’s easier and faster to rely on a simple, repetitive strategy like swinging a large sword, even in the final hours.
The few genuine combat challenges usually arise from frustrating boss design issues, such as poor camera angles, questionable hitboxes, and attacks that seem to ignore the game’s own rules. A handful of late-game bosses break this pattern with engaging movesets that are satisfying to learn, but they are exceptions. Overall, enemy encounters feel flat and mediocre. This lack of harmony extends to the menus and UI, which resemble a cluttered MMO interface and contribute to the game’s overall messy presentation.
It’s tempting to search for a hidden gem beneath Code Vein 2’s flawed execution. What you’ll find, however, is the unmistakable skeleton of other, better games in the genre. This vampiric sequel feeds on their inspiration but fails to transform that sustenance into its own compelling life force. Strip away those borrowed elements, and what remains is an experience that is, ultimately, unremarkable and forgettable.
(Source: Game Informer)