Code Vein E3 Impression 3

If you hear people call this game “anime Dark Souls” know that they’re pretty right. First off, I was literally given just five minutes with the game, timed with an annoying kitchen timer, so my impressions are going to brief.

The first of which is that wow this game has an overwhelming number of options. Seriously, there were four abilities on the screen, four magic spells on the screen, a bunch of items on the screen, and multiple build archetypes that I could equip that somehow change how the game played, though I had nowhere near enough time to figure out how.

I also had some sort of crazy drain attack that no one knew how to use or what it did. My guess was that you could maybe use it to refill MP, since there didn’t seem to be any way to get that back without dying. Dying, of course, being something that you do a lot of in Soulsborne games, and this one is no exception.
 

 
In fact, the demo seemed to be constructed to have you die a lot. It was set on a mountain path that had sheer falls on both sides of you. And enemies could easily push you to your death. Or in my case, I was pushed inside walls a couple times, necessitating some jumping to be permitted to fall to my doom.

As usual, there’s a respawn point that you return to when you die. Upon which the enemies all respawn, taunting you to get good in your five-minute demo. Which is a special sort of madness.

The enemy designs themselves, are best described as spiky anime monsters. With lots of extra parts and pieces. I didn’t have to face them alone, however, I had an AI partner with me. He was cool for one reason: he’d heal you when your health hit zero. Now, this would only happen a couple times, but it was a really nice way to be slightly forgiving of player mistakes.

 

 

Not that it helped me. Between the cliffs, monsters, and glitches, I died at least fifteen times in five minutes. That said, I’m hopeful that if the glitches persist into the final game we’ll see some really cool speed runs come out for it.

Which is probably going to be the extent that I experience this game. It simply felt bad to play. But hey, I’m also terrible at these games so I’m definitely not the target audience. If Code Vein is more your cup of tea, you can look for it on September 27, 2018, on PlayStation 4 and XBox One, and September 28th on Steam.

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