Anime Dark Souls forgot one thing: a reason to keep playing.



Code Vein looks cool. You've got a pretty great character creation menu, gigantic weapons that Cloud Strife would be jealous of, and a kind of shimmery world with interesting enemies and friends.

Code Vein is relatively easy to play for a soulslike. There aren't a million different combinations of buttons to learn, the armor and weapons have a bunch of stats but not an unmanageable number, and the addition of a teammate (NPC or multiplayer) makes most monsters not impossible. I would say the game does feel slow, however, but that might be because I was using a giant axe for most of my play time.

However, Code Vein doesn't seem to have a compelling story line for me. Sure, you're cyberpunk vampire-like beings fighting in some post apocalyptic world for survival, but that seems kind of like the whole story. Perhaps I didn't play long enough to get to the good parts, but as far as I could gather from the typically cryptic anime-style dialogue, the whole goal was to get food for the emo vamp crew you gather, and that's about it. There is some flashback items you can find to learn the story of Kevin (and others), but if you watch the plodding flashbacks out of order (like I did), it never really gives you a chance to care about Kevin, or the steampunk vampy boy who remembered him. You just get your skill, go back out into the wild and die or kill some monsters.

I gave up after a few hours and found myself not really wanting to open the game back up no matter how cool my character looked.

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