From the second Code Vein was announced I was interested. With the promise of using ghoulish powers to defeat demonic creatures in a dystopian future certainly makes for an interesting premise. As more information was revealed, it turned out to be less like God Eater and something closer to the Souls series.
Code Vein’s demo makes a couple things perfectly clear. You must understand hitboxes if you want to be successful, the edge is not a valuable resource or terrifying obstacle and it doesn’t quite get what makes Dark Souls a beloved franchise.
The concern is rather simple. Enemies have weird motions and odd attacks, both of which do significant damage, all while not putting up much of a fight. Imagine you have a fairly easy game and you want to make it hardcore in the simplest and cheapest way imaginable and that is basically what is going on here.
None of the enemies I encountered required a real tactic to defeat, with all the challenge coming from high damage numbers. This becomes a bit of a problem later on when you face multiple enemies at once. Defeating one or two isn’t too bad, where as four or five might get you, if only for the fact any mistake is costly.
While this might not paint the most optimistic painting, there seems to be a fair number of spells and weapons, both of which can be used to make fights a bit more tactical. For instance, I saw another player attack an enemy, bring it to a narrow bridge and use that to fight a number of foes.
It will be interesting seeing what the final version has or what additional tactics exist, but for now, hopefully it will be more than an easy game with high damage enemies.
