I've been wanting to get a new game to play on the side of Final Fantasy XIV lately. I randomly checked my wishlist on Steam yesterday and saw that Code Vein was on sale. This is an anime style souls-like that I've been wanting to play for a while. I've been pretty weeby since I started FFXIV so why not give into it a little more? Even though it was on sale I decided to give the demo a go before buying it.
I pretty much got stuck in the character creation for the first hour trying to create my perfect anime waifu. There's a ton of customization options ranging from different hair styles to a wide variety of accessories and decorations you can put on pretty much every limb and body part. As soon as I found the cat ears I knew I had to give her pink hair like my FFXIV waifu has. I also gave her the same name; Juicy IPA.
As expected the game starts off with a tutorial. Sadly this tutorial is boring as shit. You're just dropped into a platform floating in space with some woman you can talk to. There's a ton of stuff to read, more than I was able to remember, and every now and then an enemy spawns in that I have to kill. I would have preferred if they would have showed me these things as we go instead of just dumping it all in my lap from the get go.
When the game finally gets going we get stuck in a pretty long cutscene. Our first taste of some gameplay is just us walking around in a jail cell talking to people. We then have to watch yet another cutscene before we finally get to see some proper gameplay.
This is where the game gets interesting but at the same time where it gives me my first doubts. We start off with a pretty shitty weapon that barely damages enemies. We also have an NPC companion that follows us around and kills everything for us. What's the point of that exactly? Luckily it didn't take long before I found a better weapon and also be able to ditch the NPC. Turns out the whole NPC companion thing is optional. Thank god.
As soon as I was on my own the game got a lot better. The game was barely trivial with the NPC companion but when I was alone it got more challenging for sure. It's still nowhere near Dark Souls levels of difficulty though. At least not yet. The combat seems pretty fun but there's a ton of things I need to get used to. The combat is quite souls-like but there's so much more depth to it.
Basically we have these things called Blood Codes that acts as classes which we can change on the fly. Some might give us more Strength for melee combat while some might give us more of a magic or ranged focus. Some are also more tanky while some are agile and fragile. This basically means that you never have to fully commit to anything which is something I like.
Each of these Blood Codes also has something called Gifts which is basically different skills and abilities. There's both passive abilities and active abilities that can be activated to help us during combat. These can be damage buffs, shields for damage reduction or pure battle skills that deal damage. These Gifts also seem to level up the more we use them. Pretty cool!
I don't quite understand what the story is about yet. All I've managed to gather is that the world has gone to shit and apparently everyone is thirsting for blood. I'm not sure if everyone are vampires or something but everyone is pretty much searching the world for blood. There's also some talk about a red mist and a Queen of some sorts but it's all pretty vague so far.
The demo doesn't give us much more than that in terms of story. It takes us through the tutorial and what seems to be the first level or region of the world. We eventually fight a boss which is pretty trivial due to the fact that they force us to have a NPC companion alongside us. So stupid, but at least from here on out it's optional.
We then get transported to a sort of hub or base of operations where we can upgrade our gear and other stuff like that. Upgrading gear is pretty similar to Dark Souls in that you can level them up to get better stats but also infuse them to deal different kinds of damage or scale differently. The character leveling system is really simplified though. you basically just level up and get an automated allotment of stats. That's kinda boring.
And that's pretty much where the demo ends. Even though I had my doubts while playing it it got pretty fun towards the end. I decided to buy it and it's downloading as we speak. Gonna jump straight into it when it's done!
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.