Code Vein 2 Review
I just finished Code Vein 2 a few days ago, and it took me around 57 hours to complete everything. Honestly, that’s a pretty short time for 100% completion in a modern open-world RPG.
Overall, I had a great experience. The story is solid, the worldbuilding is strong, and the exploration is fairly straightforward. That said, there are a few design choices and mechanics that could frustrate some players — especially those going in with certain expectations from their experience with its predecessor.
Combat
Code Vein 2’s combat is pretty similar to the first game. I pretty much compared it to Elden Ring as well, with its base combat mechanics having light and heavy attacks, as well as focusing on stamina management. Defensive actions can be taken by blocking, parrying, or dodging. All except parrying consume stamina—unless the parry is unsuccessful, which also consumes stamina and costs health.
Equipment
Different weapon types are available: Two-Handed Swords, One-Handed Swords, Twin Blades, Rune Blades, Halberds, Bayonets, and Hammers. Oddly enough, Axes are placed under Hammers as well. Bayonets are also unique, as they mix melee and ranged attacks.
From what I’ve seen, all weapon types can be used effectively in different situations, but the Two-Handed Sword is probably the hardest to use against bosses, as they are usually agile and will interrupt your character’s wind-ups. On the other hand, I believe the Bayonet is the strongest weapon, and there are certain builds out there that outright render enemies’ strategies or attack patterns useless.
Different abilities can also be linked to your weapons, called Weapon Formaes, each doing their own thing—such as providing supportive buffs, dealing great damage, or covering distances. You can link up to four abilities to your weapon, but certain limitations are in place, as each weapon has its own “capacity,” which is consumed in different amounts by different abilities.
Aside from weapons, you would think armor would be discussed next, but the game does not have any armor customization. Instead, it has Offensive and Defensive Formaes, Blood Codes, Jails, and Boosters.
Offensive Formaes, also called Bequeathed Formaes, are unique weapons that allow the player to perform a single unique action that deals great damage to enemies. Defensive Formaes are equipment that provide defensive actions such as blocking, parrying, or lunges that can be used as dodges—not to be confused with regular dodges.
Blood Codes are tied to Revenants you encounter. These are essentially their powers that you can borrow, providing certain stat boosts, with each one favoring specific stats over others. There are different levels of Blood Codes that can be unlocked by using them multiple times.
Jails are pretty similar to Offensive Formaes but also provide stat boosts. They are also used to drain Ichor, which is a resource consumed when using Formaes.
Lastly are Boosters, which are pretty straightforward: you equip them to gain stat boosts and other types of buffs (or even debuffs).
All in all, Code Vein 2’s own “equipment” system is pretty unique and was a refreshing way to let players mix and match different mechanics and playstyles.
Allies
Player loadouts aren’t the only thing that directly affect the game’s combat difficulty.
Players can bring companions they meet throughout the story. They are pretty formidable, and each offers different forms of support through different weapon types and combat styles. A neat, unique feature that Code Vein 2 has with its companion system is that damage dealt by companions heals over time. This means you can’t just sit back and let your companion fight for you—you have to fight as well and try to deal the killing blow. Only one companion can accompany a player at a time.
Companions—officially called Partners in-game—can also be “stored away” through a mechanic called Assimilate.
Assimilating a partner stores them in your “Jail” (I know, it’s confusing—Jails are also their own thing under the game’s equipment system, but let’s just move on), and grants the player stat boosts or traits. Assimilated companions can be taken out of the player’s Jail by Summoning.
I particularly like the Assimilate and Summon system, as it lets players decide if they want to play alone or with an ally. Hardcore Souls fans criticized Elden Ring players who constantly used Mimic Tears pretty heavily, but I hope they don’t see Code Vein 2’s summoning system the same way, since there are objectively positive points and trade-offs to both options.
Oh, before we move on to the enemies—players also get a “second life” when they lose all their health. Their companion can sacrifice their own health to revive the player through a mechanic called Restorative Offering. I would say it’s somewhat similar to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice’s revive mechanic, but it can happen multiple times after a cooldown. Also, just to be clear, when Restorative Offering is used, the companion is forcefully assimilated into the player’s Jail and cannot assist for a period of time.
Enemies
There are a lot of things I do not like about the enemies in Code Vein 2, but let’s start with the good points. I think there is a fair amount of variety with the enemies encountered in the game, and most are pretty easy to deal with using any type of weapon. The bosses are also well-designed visually, making me react in awe at their reveals.
Now, for the “bad points,” and there are a lot. Almost all enemies do not stagger when you think they should, even when you use heavy weapons. Most of the enemies are also health sponges that take forever to kill.
There are quite a number of enemies roaming the open world that can only be damaged significantly at certain weak points. Having weak points and non-weak points isn’t a bad thing, but the difference in damage dealt when hitting one over the other is too significant. More than that, the weak points are nearly impossible to hit unless they perform one or two out of their five or six attack patterns, which provide an opening for the player to attack that weak point. And even with that opening, you only have an incredibly brief amount of time to land a hit.
If you get hit by the attack that provides that fleeting opening, you will have to wait 20 or 30 seconds to get that same opening again by baiting that specific attack or cycling through the enemy’s different attack patterns.
Bosses, while incredibly well-designed visually, seem to be poorly designed in their attack patterns. All—and I mean all—of the bosses are incredibly aggressive and mobile; some more than others. Weapons such as Hammers or Two-Handed Swords, which have long wind-up times before their attacks, are almost impossible to use, as bosses either interrupt you during the wind-up or simply move away before you can get your attack off. It is truly obnoxious.
This might be a nitpick on bosses, but I also hate the fact that all “large” bosses are now mobile and pull off quick attacks. I know it’s pretty “generic” to think that large bosses should only have slow and lumbering attacks, but that’s honestly what you would expect for most of them. I’m not asking for all large bosses to have slow attacks, but I sure hope not all of them have quick attacks and great mobility.
Second to the last on the list of things I hate in combat is the camera and boss arenas. I know these are two different things, but they are pretty connected. A lot of the boss arenas are pretty small, and since the bosses are very mobile, you will eventually get stuck against a wall or end up on top of or below the boss itself. The camera’s distance from the character just makes everything incorrigible, and oftentimes, you don’t even know what is going on on-screen.
Finally, aim assist is the bane of my existence as a Two-Handed Sword user. For Two-Handed Sword users, there are three things that are very important in combat: anticipation, timing, and positioning. It takes focus and energy to properly read an enemy’s attack. Doing so allows the player to time a dodge or an attack. This is incredibly important for Two-Handed Sword users, as all of their attacks have pretty slow wind-ups. Not only are timing and anticipation important, but the Two-Handed Sword user also has to be positioned correctly to actually get their attack off without getting hit. Aim assist completely destroys all of that because it tries to chase the enemy’s current position instead of the anticipated position that the player has read. The game is egregious when it tries to “assist” me in aiming my attack at the enemy.
This is also worsened by my previous point about weak points and the very brief window when they are actually hittable.
Setting, Themes, and COncepts
Okay, from here on out my thoughts are pretty mild, and my “negative” thoughts are more nitpicks than anything else.
The game is set in a pretty distant future from the first game. The world is ruined, and the goal is to save it by time travelling and hopefully resetting the timeline to a better “present.”
Different themes and concepts are tackled, such as family, loyalty, friendship, and love—all of which are pretty generic and normal for RPGs.
That’s pretty much it, honestly. I don’t think they did anything too unique that makes it stand out in terms of setting, themes, and concepts.
Characters, Story, and Storytelling
Code Vein 2 has a lot of characters that are important to the main story. Only a select few are “less” important, and I find it incredible that the writers were able to make use of almost every character in a major way.
As I said before, Blood Codes are borrowed powers from Revenants, and there are a lot of them.
The character designs are pretty much hit-or-miss for me. All of them are good-looking, but about half of them are “unique” from my perspective. There is one particular character design that I truly do not like because they are basically in their underwear, which really ruins the serious beats in their storyline.
Aside from how characters look, the voice acting is top-notch—even the English version, which is often criticized as subpar in non-Western-made games.
The stories of the main characters aren’t necessarily told exceptionally well, but the emotions conveyed are pretty heavy and well-executed in my opinion. Most of the backstory is told through fake gameplay, which honestly could have just been cutscene flashbacks.
Exploration and Optimization
Last but not least, here are my thoughts on exploration and optimization. I combined the two into one subsection because I don’t think my thoughts are long enough to create separate sections.
Exploration is fine—nothing too complicated. People might enter the game expecting a FromSoftware-level of intricacy with environmental storytelling, hidden loot, or secret locations in far-off nooks and crannies, but there’s nothing of that sort here. This was a minor disappointment for me. The map is also large enough to feel tedious if you’re walking everywhere, but thankfully, there’s a motorbike that lets you traverse distances pretty swiftly.
For optimization, I noticed missing audio in certain attacks—from allies, regular mobs, bosses, and even my own player. There are also missing textures or late texture pop-ins that occur both during gameplay and cutscenes, which is pretty egregious. Finally, frame drops and stutters happen for a lot of people—including me—despite having a pretty powerful PC (not a 4090 or 5090, but still solid).
Is Code Vein 2 A Good Game? Is Code Vein 2 Worth it?
I think Code Vein 2 is a good game but it comes with a lot of flaws. It is a pretty short game in comparison to most modern open-world RPGs as I have said before.
The combat can be a breaking point for a lot of people, but gamers who have a pretty old hardware would be more concerned about the game’s optimization as I have seen tons of reveiws and reactions where they can’t run the game over 30 FPS with the graphics settings already at Low or Medium—and that is concerning to me.
The game is pretty expensive, so unfortunately, I would say it is not worth it at full price.
More Code Vein 2 Screenshots
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