MCM Impressions: Code Vein

To cut to the chase; I sucked at playing this. I didn’t even make it to the boss, let alone find the access point for it. But that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy my time with it, in a slightly masochistic manner (kinda).

The demo featured an underground tunnel-like complex with secluded deviating passages with hidden enemies and exposed treasures ripe for ambushing the player. Yeah, it’s that type of game. With a lot of “borrowed” mechanics from From Soft games, I’ll start with the differences. The main core combat features a dedicated parry button and a slightly makeshift block. Blocking an attack is affected by the weapon used, but due to the limited time with the game, I couldn’t discern the differences between them. From there, the attacks seemed to be somewhat God Eater like with your attacks being slightly delayed and not always inflicting a strong level of impact or weight. There’s a special drain attack, but I couldn’t figure out what that did specifically other than guess it’s purely for recharging your Blood energy.

Wanna try that again bub?

It’s here that Code Vein starts to stem away from a From Soft game and into God Eater like territory for me. Containing the usual menu system and consuming items to survive each fight, you also have the ability to use (what I’m calling) Blood points to activate buffs and transfer some of your HP/Blood to your companion. This is a weirdly interesting component, where your companion is somewhat vital to surviving the onslaught of enemies. Both of you are capable of reviving each from the brink of death, however, the key difference between the two of you is that you die a lot slower if your partner is still up. This led to several instances of my partner dying before I could resurrect them, albeit after I spent a solid five minutes figuring out what each ability did with what I was given.

Going from a more spectator’s viewpoint of playing the game, the number of people who completed the demo seemed very low. With most of them not reaching the boss like me. Maybe 30-40% of the people observed made it to the boss. Some of them played it in a very Dark Souls manner, with one noted player treating it like Bloodborne. I didn’t see anyone beat the demo whilst jumping onto the demo every now and again. I also made barely any progress, where I died again, again, and again. Aside from gameplay, the demo ran solidly and there wasn’t anything that stuck out as inherently bad.

Blood Eater, sorry: Code Vein is slated for 2018.