Engaging narrative and character customization options held back by clunky combat and awful level design.

CODE VEIN is an action RPG where the player takes control of a custom-created Revenant - an undead human who needs to feed on living human blood in order to survive. The game boasts a wide variety of features, such as a fully voice-acted narrative, high-octane real-time combat, multitudes of options for customizing your character, and a wide variety of environments to explore, but only about half of these meet an acceptable standard of quality, making for a clunky and inconsistent experience.

Starting with the things the game does well, it must be noted that the character customization options in this game are phenomenal. An extremely detailed character creator allows players to design almost any type of human they can think of, and a plethora of costumes and accessories allow them to give their characters a unique sense of style. Throughout the game, players will acquire "blood codes" - combat archetypes through which new skills can be unlocked. By obtaining many blood codes, players can obtain a multitude of skills that result in thousands upon thousands of different ways to build their character's combat prowess, and the game makes it easy to change skills and stats at any time, encouraging experimentation.

Additionally, the game's narrative is interesting and manages to stay engaging throughout its ~25-hour main story, in spite of having a silent protagonist. The supporting characters are well-developed and have relatable struggles that they learn to overcome. The blocking and direction of the cutscenes are cinematic, and the voice actors' performances range from great to serviceable. Tons of lines of dialogue were recorded for the player's companions, who appropriately react to the player's actions during gameplay, deepening immersive feeling.

Although it's incredibly satisfying to experiment with different combat loadouts, the actual combat of CODE VEIN is pretty hit-or-miss. Players obtain "ichor" by landing basic attacks on enemies that they can later spend to unleash their powerful skills, which keep battles more interesting than they would be if players could spam their strongest skills all the time. However, enemies deal high damage, move quickly, and many of their attacks launch with breakneck speed and little wind-up, requiring the player to sometimes predict when to dodge in advance of an attack instead of reacting to an wind-up with a dodge, which creates a frustrating experience. Furthermore, many skills and actions the player can take during combat have significant animation locks, easily punished by the quick attacks from enemies, which can discourage the use of many interesting combat options the players have. With practice, players can circumvent these issues, but they create a steep learning curve that feels more irritating to climb than it does satisfying. The game is difficult in ways that aren't intuitive, and learning how to account for this is a long part of the process to "get good" at it.

The design of CODE VEIN's levels are, unfortunately, inexcusably terrible. Aesthetically speaking, most areas in CODE VEIN look aesthetically identical, save for some slight changes to the color palette between ruined cities or monochrome cathedrals. Many levels are very confusing to navigate; although there is a map that tracks the player's movement through a level to help them see where they've been and where they have yet to go, the map does a poor job at communicating vertical differences and there are often very few environmental details for players to use as landmarks as they navigate identical looking empty hallways and corridors. Enemy and trap placement are interesting at first, but quickly become repetitive and predictable due to how little differences there are between one level and the next (with a few exceptions).

There could be a fantastic game somewhere within CODE VEIN's programming, but unfortunately it's muddled by its desire to copycat the industry leader in the ARPG genre instead of standing on its own original ideas and mechanics. Overall, I enjoyed my time with CODE VEIN, but I probably wouldn't recommend it to most players; only to people who have a passion for dark, punishing ARPGs that allows them to look past the inconsistent combat and poor level design.

Engaging narrative and character customization options held back by clunky combat and awful level design. CODE VEIN is an action RPG where the player takes control of a custom-created Revenant - an undead human who needs to feed on living human blood in order to survive. The game boasts a wide variety of features, such as a fully voice-acted narrative, high-octane real-time combat, multitudes of options for customizing your character, and a wide variety of environments to explore, but only about half of these meet an acceptable standard of quality, making for a clunky and inconsistent experience. Starting with the things the game does well, it must be noted that the character customization options in this game are phenomenal. An extremely detailed character creator allows players to design almost any type of human they can think of, and a plethora of costumes and accessories allow them to give their characters a unique sense of style. Throughout the game, players will acquire "blood codes" - combat archetypes through which new skills can be unlocked. By obtaining many blood codes, players can obtain a multitude of skills that result in thousands upon thousands of different ways to build their character's combat prowess, and the game makes it easy to change skills and stats at any time, encouraging experimentation. Additionally, the game's narrative is interesting and manages to stay engaging throughout its ~25-hour main story, in spite of having a silent protagonist. The supporting characters are well-developed and have relatable struggles that they learn to overcome. The blocking and direction of the cutscenes are cinematic, and the voice actors' performances range from great to serviceable. Tons of lines of dialogue were recorded for the player's companions, who appropriately react to the player's actions during gameplay, deepening immersive feeling. Although it's incredibly satisfying to experiment with different combat loadouts, the actual combat of CODE VEIN is pretty hit-or-miss. Players obtain "ichor" by landing basic attacks on enemies that they can later spend to unleash their powerful skills, which keep battles more interesting than they would be if players could spam their strongest skills all the time. However, enemies deal high damage, move quickly, and many of their attacks launch with breakneck speed and little wind-up, requiring the player to sometimes predict when to dodge in advance of an attack instead of reacting to an wind-up with a dodge, which creates a frustrating experience. Furthermore, many skills and actions the player can take during combat have significant animation locks, easily punished by the quick attacks from enemies, which can discourage the use of many interesting combat options the players have. With practice, players can circumvent these issues, but they create a steep learning curve that feels more irritating to climb than it does satisfying. The game is difficult in ways that aren't intuitive, and learning how to account for this is a long part of the process to "get good" at it. The design of CODE VEIN's levels are, unfortunately, inexcusably terrible. Aesthetically speaking, most areas in CODE VEIN look aesthetically identical, save for some slight changes to the color palette between ruined cities or monochrome cathedrals. Many levels are very confusing to navigate; although there is a map that tracks the player's movement through a level to help them see where they've been and where they have yet to go, the map does a poor job at communicating vertical differences and there are often very few environmental details for players to use as landmarks as they navigate identical looking empty hallways and corridors. Enemy and trap placement are interesting at first, but quickly become repetitive and predictable due to how little differences there are between one level and the next (with a few exceptions). There could be a fantastic game somewhere within CODE VEIN's programming, but unfortunately it's muddled by its desire to copycat the industry leader in the ARPG genre instead of standing on its own original ideas and mechanics. Overall, I enjoyed my time with CODE VEIN, but I probably wouldn't recommend it to most players; only to people who have a passion for dark, punishing ARPGs that allows them to look past the inconsistent combat and poor level design.