Playing Code Vein 2 made me wonder why more soulslikes don't have guns, even if I could do with a bit less anime melodrama

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 wavelength.

Oh! There's also a whole system for weapon upgrading and customization, more gear for boosting specific stats, and good old fashioned leveling up. Code Vein 2 is mercifully free of the loot barf that plagues Team Ninja's otherwise excellent Nioh games, but otherwise it seems closer to Nioh than Dark Souls in terms of how many dials it gives you to hone in your buildcrafting. Across a full game I think the number of variables to fiddle with here could be quite exciting, but trying to take them in all at once and figure out how much I should care about a weapon's Bleed Factor or Max Ichor is more overwhelming than invigorating.

Hence my enthusiasm for: Gun.

Shoot 'em up

Rifles are the odd man out weapon type in Code Vein 2, offering a light attack bayonet slash in line with a basic one-handed sword but a far more useful heavy attack that charges up a big shot, liable to knock the average enemy on their ass. To balance this out bullets are a limited resource you have to craft and replenish at bonfires mistles, but I spent a good chunk of my preview stepping just close enough to enemies to get their attention and then decking them with a lead hello. It felt like getting a leaping heavy attack knockdown on a Souls enemy to start the encounter, but from far enough away to have my feet casually kicked up on the edge of the desk.

This strategy did not hold up against the first boss I fought, a four-armed behemoth lady who could and did leap across the room to piledrive me straight to hell with a single hit. So, Dark Souls With a Gun is still Dark Souls.

That boss fight forced me to stop bullet cheesing my way through fights and put together a build that required actual effort, eugh. But in the end I had the most fun pairing a set of magical rune blades with an ability that let me suspend them in midair like a buzzsaw, dealing constant damage to the boss while I danced around its attacks.

While Code Vein 2 adds a whole lot of anime cutscenes on top of an otherwise pretty straightforward soulslike setup, it couldn't match FromSoftware's flare for level design in the dungeon I previewed, a quite bland series of steel gangways and corridors. The vibe I got, from that area at least, was that the focus is very much on story and combat and not much in between, the level layouts devoid of much stimulation when walking from one fight to the next.

Code Vein 2 does not have Elden Ring-caliber ambitions, which I would say is fine—welcome, even, if it knows where its strengths are and isn't trying to be best-in-class on every axis. But at $70 and launching just a week before Nioh 3 I think it might be picking a fight outside its weight class, even if it is bringing a gun into the ring.