Code Vein

[MetalCaveman]

 

Spoiler

 

 

I wasn't really following this game, but still decided to sign up for the network test, after playing for a bit I can say I'm now really looking forward to it. There are a couple of issues but I'm confident most of them can be fixed before the game releases... sometime this year(?).

 

There's a lot to take into and when starting, it feels kinda overwhelming, though after a short bit you get used to it and it becomes easier to manage, still, in combat it may be kinda hard to keep track of all the stuff you can use.

 

In terms of gameplay, combat feels more like Bloodborne than Dark Souls, with several enemies being pretty fast and agile, and your own attacks being able to keep up with them for the most part, some enemies have attacks that are insanely fast, and obviously, bigger weapons are slower, but still, it feels even in terms of their attack speed vs yours.

 

Dying makes you lose your haze (souls) but you can recover them if you can get back to where you died, there's also an item that acts as your estus flask, complete with upgrades that increase how much health you get back from it and how many uses you have. This isn't the only way to heal though, there are other items that recover health and actually seem more effective than the estus thingy.  

 

Classes are interesting because they're not fixed, instead, you have this things called Blood Codes that basically determine what class you're playing as, including skill available, and you can change between them whenever you want, though you can only upgrade skills at bonfires... I mean mistles.  I didn't play much with the ranged classes as I stuck to the Berserker one as soon as I got it, but it seems that at least one of them has a skill that's very similar to the homing soul arrow from the Souls series.  

 

Speaking of skills, there's a cool mechanic called inheritance, which, allows a maxed skill to be inherited by other classes, so you could add some ranged spells to your melee class if you so desire.

 

You can have up to 8 skills available at any time, playing on Xbox, these are mapped to the four face buttons and the d-pad, you use the right trigger to open the skill selection menu and then choose which ones to use. Some skills grant you bonuses to defence/attack while others trigger special attacks and some can even transfer health from you to your coop partner if you have one. There's also passive skills that grant you bonuses specific to that class, for example, Berserker has a passive that increases health. There's even special skills depending on which companions you bring with you.

 

On the topic of coop, you can play with people online of bring some NPCs to help, bringing NPCs does help, but they may a bit annoying to some as they tend to be rather chatty. That being said, they can be pretty helpful for mobs and even boss fights as they can at least distract the boss while you heal.  Didn't try online coop myself, but I did read that some people had issues with player placement, the server saw one thing, their console saw something else, which lead to some deaths. Presumably that's going to be fixed (this was a network test after all  ).

 

Character customisation is insane, there's a ton of options for creating your base character, outfits can be customised, being able to remove certain parts of them, and you can add accessories along with everything else, definitively something I can spend hours on.  That said, it is a shame that your character will be covered by the Blood Veil when exploring/fighting.

 

But what is a Blood Veil? Good question! It's a coat (or some variation thereof), that affects stat bonuses, stat scaling and  other stuff, and unfortunately cannot be removed or made invisible, so like I said it'll end up covering whatever you created in the character customisation menu.  Blood veils also affect your parries, with each having a different animation for it with different timings to go with that.

 

Now then, on to some of the issues I had:

 

While combat does feel nice and was really fun, it's lacking some impact, hits from certain weapons lack bite, both in terms of animations and in terms of sound, greatswords in particular sound rather weak when they hit an enemy. Could also do with some more feedback when you're hit, there were several times when I thought I had evaded an attack only to look at my hp and notice that I had actually taken some damage.

 

Parries feel like that have too much of a delay between when you press the button and when the parry actually executes, you can get used to it, but it feels really awkward and with Blood Veils further changing the timing, it can be a bit annoying.

 

When trying to use a run attack, I had a couple of issues where the game would make my character turn 90 degrees and attack a different enemy than the one I was going for, even locking on didn't help.

 

There were also some minor graphical and sound bugs/glitches, but I can forgive those as they're likely to be fixed between now and whenever the game releases.

 

Overall it was a really fun experience, looking forward to the full game, though I do hope that they add the option to make your Blood Veil invisible.  

[MetalCaveman]

 

27th of September.

 

September == Code Vein

October == Ghost Recon Breakpoint

November == DOOM ETERNAL

 

It's going to be great I can't wait! \m/ \m/  

[Pojodin]

Did you end up playing it? I took a pass on it as I wasn't sure if it was something I would enjoy. It sounded Souls enough to pull me in, but I heard some gripes about combat stuff and a few other things.

[MetalCaveman]

Nope.  

 

Ended getting some other games and playing some other stuff in my backlog.  Still plan on getting it, just don't know when, it doesn't help that Amazon is the only place that sells it here, and I haven't seen it go down in price to where I could just jump in without issue.