Code Vein (Deluxe Edition)

Code Vein is Bandai Namco's answer to the question nobody was afraid to ask: what if Dark Souls went full anime, swapped covenants for blood codes, and let you bring a buddy to every single encounter? The result is a third-person action RPG with deliberate, stamina-gated combat, a labyrinthine post-apocalyptic world called the Ruined City, and a character creator that will eat your first forty-five minutes before you even see the opening cutscene. You play as a Revenant, a vampire-adjacent undead who feeds on blood to survive, and the whole narrative hangs on recovering lost memories while keeping your fellow Revenants from going feral. The blood code system is the real hook here. Instead of a locked class, you cycle between codes like Ranger, Berserker, Fighter, and Caster mid-game, each carrying its own stat scaling and a library of gifts, which are Code Vein's name for skills and passive buffs. You can mix gifts across codes once you've mastered them, so late-game builds get genuinely creative. A strength-heavy fighter wearing a caster's passive buffs and firing off ice gifts feels different from a pure melee build, and the game rewards experimentation more than it punishes it. If you've ever wished Souls games let you retool your character without a full respec, this is the closest approximation outside of Elden Ring's larval tears. Combat is looser and flashier than FromSoftware's output. Dodge windows feel generous, and the AI companion system means you almost always have a partner handling aggro when you need breathing room. The flip side is that some bosses feel tuned around that partnership, so solo runs can spike in difficulty in ways that feel arbitrary rather than earned. The Successor bosses in particular, which are the game's named story-critical fights, are where the writing and spectacle converge and where most players will spend the most time dying. Environments loop back through the same grey, rubble-heavy aesthetic a little too often, and a few mid-game areas are clearly there to pad the map rather than deepen the world. The story is more earnest than it has any right to be. It is melodramatic, absolutely soaked in anime tragedy, and completely sincere about it. If you bounce off visual-novel cutscene density, the pacing will frustrate you. If you lean in, the companion arcs, especially Mia's, land with real weight. The writing does not reach Disco Elysium's literary tier, obviously, but it does know what emotional notes it is playing for, and it hits them more often than it misses. The Deluxe Edition includes the Season Pass, which adds three DLC packs with new maps, bosses, and the Alternate Mia Set costume, meaningfully extending the run time if the base game clicks for you. Code Vein is the game for Souls-curious players who want the combat loop served with anime aesthetics and a more forgiving co-op structure. Veterans looking for the ruthless precision of FromSoftware's work will find it softer than they'd like. But anyone who wants flexible class-building, a story that takes its dramatic swings seriously, and a world with genuine visual personality beneath the grey dust, this delivers more than its mid-range Metacritic score suggests. Monika, Scout Team