Complete Guide to Playing Code Vein 2 Made Me Wonder Why More Soulslikes Don't Have...

The anime soulslike returns with a time travel story and, more importantly, firearms.

There are two obvious reasons you could already be excited for Code Vein 2. One: it's a soulslike made in-house by the publisher of FromSoftware's Dark Souls series. Two: anime melodrama. If you love characters scream-crying through their emotional beats more than reading FromSoft flavor text like "If the soul is the source of all life, then what distinguishes the humanity we hold within ourselves?", this action RPG holds great potential for you.

I can't say that the anime Dark Souls angle grabbed me in the three hours or so I spent playing it at a preview event in December, but Code Vein 2 is also, depending on how you choose to play it, Dark Souls But You Have a Gun. Now that's got some pull.

It feels like wielding a forbidden instrument. Illicit. I'm harnessing a power typically reserved for comedic punctuation. Do I just think that because I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark at a young age and instantly formed a new personality the moment Indiana Jones Smith & Wesson'd that sword guy into oblivion? Who can say.

Anyway: Playing Dark Souls With a Gun rocks. I spent a good chunk of my time with Code Vein ignoring the timing of my multi-hit combos and reading attack patterns by standing 10 feet away from every enemy and calmly shooting their faces clean off with a rifle. (And yes, I know it's not the first or only soulslike to incorporate firearms, but it's nonetheless still a rarity).

Aside from its proper noun-heavy time travel anime plotting, Code Vein 2 is a soulslike hyperfocused on layered combat systems, with seven distinct weapon classes and a slew of abilities to find and equip to suit your mood, like Elden Ring's Ashes of War. Using those abilities pulls from a mana pool, except here your mana is blood.

To get blood, you have to bully enemies with regular attacks before hitting them with a "Jail" finisher, which slurps up all the blood from their open wounds. A Jail is a whole other category of gear you'll equip, alongside Defensive Formae (types of shields or dodges) and Bequeathed Formae (basically magical ults, like a bigass bow or axe), and Blood Codes.

Blood Codes are anime AI partners bound to your soul, who will fight by your side unless you choose to absorb them into your body to boost your own attacks. Doing so, to me, seems rather rude, but I've never traveled through time to thwart an anime apocalypse so maybe I'm just not quite on their waveleng

Source: PC Gamer