Code Vein (PlayStation 4) review "Heroic vampires taking on a mad scientist seems like the alternate version of a 50s movie that never got made. "

The fun test of my mental acuity I’m performing this week is to write a review for a game I finished a month or so ago, but didn’t have time to write about for various reasons I won’t go into here because they’re mostly work-related and, therefore, boring.

The game in question: Code Vein. Fortunately for me, this is one of the constantly-growing horde of titles referred to as “Souls-like” due to their abundance of similarities to FROM Software’s highly-regarded and very influential games. Even my brain can handle this task, right?

Okay, guys, don’t jump up and emphatically agree all at once…

So, this game was developed by Bandai Namco and a company called Shift. Those guys also created the God Eater series, which is tied into this game, although not in a way where you’d actually have to play it to know what’s going on. I’m pretty sure Code Vein’s plot comes off as the fever dream of a psychopath regardless of what knowledge you may have coming into it.

Imagine a large city in our world. Now imagine that some sort of catastrophic event happened that totally wrecked stuff. Not just in turning that large city into various collections of ruins, but also leading to things such as a barrier walling off that city from the rest of the world and many of its inhabitants transforming into vampire-like beings known as Revenants that rely on blood to maintain their innate humanity. Also imagine that a lot of those guys succumbed to thirst to become monsters known as “Lost”. And that there’s a society of upper-class Revenants trying to maintain some vestige of civilization and a mad scientist trying to shake up the order and probably a bunch of other stuff.

You’re playing a newly-turned Revenant, who immediately is press-ganged into duty to help collect items known as blood beads so that your new masters can meet the tithes they owe that upper-class society. You get teamed up with a friendly chap; whack some enemies in the local tutorial dungeon; watch plot stuff take that guy out of the picture; meet up with a different, but still friendly, chap; whack some more monsters and finally defeat the first friendly guy because, while off-screen, he turned Lost and emphatically took your former masters out of the equation.

The new friendly guy, Louis, takes you to the hideout that he and a few friends use as their base. You find out that you have special powers that other Revenants don’t have, which proves useful in both finding blood beads and getting to the bottom of just what is going wrong in the world. Which is accomplished by going from region to region, whacking all sorts of enemies, gaining levels, improving weapons, finding well-hidden items and all the other fun stuff that anyone who’s played anything remotely Souls-like is very familiar with.

One big deviation from the formula is that, unless you disable a setting, you’ll have a permanent ally fighting at your side. At the beginning, you’ll be able to choose from the versatile Louis or his pal, the powerhouse Yamato. Decide neither of those two are a perfect complement for you and, as you progress, you’ll obtain four more potential allies. These guys can be great help. If you’re dropped by a tough foe, assuming they have sufficient health, they’ll cast a spell that revives you at the cost of some of their life. They also are good at running interference against bosses and at least a couple of them are tough enough to go toe-to-toe with those creatures, allowing you to either fight from a distance or heal yourself from a location out of your foe’s range.

By making friends with those party members, as well as a number of other characters, you’ll get access to their Blood Codes. These essentially are the various builds you can have and can determine fun stuff such as what sort of weapons you’re best suited to equip and how much Ichor (magic) you possess for using spells and combat skills. Each one also has a number of skills and spells attached to it that you can spend some of your experience/currency to acquire. You can also learn more about the history of your party members and other characters by finding red crystals hidden throughout the world and having them read by a party member — which can result in obtaining more blood codes, as well as play a major role in which of three possible endings you’ll get upon beating the final boss.

Overall, I had a positive experience, but that’s to be expected. With how I’ve become addicted to Souls-like games over time, all I need is for one to be reasonably solid and I’ll be enthralled for hours upon hours. And that proved to be the case once again. Now, to be a bit more critical, there were a couple issues that prevented Code Vein from reaching the lofty heights of its inspiration.

While having a ruined modern city as its setting was a neat concept, it did not wind up creating an overly interesting collection of areas to explore. Turns out that I could only stomach so many debris-cluttered streets and crumbling buildings before I started wishing for a LOT more variety, even if they tried to differentiate between them with gimmicks such as one district being on fire to make it necessary to be very careful when you walked or another covered in sand that slowly drains your Ichor. Take away those city levels and what’s left isn’t really much more thrilling. A couple cave-like settings, an underground place full of water that slows down your movement and a pair of giant buildings where you navigate paths and platforms suspended in the air, hoping to find the correct route to progress, while avoiding the ever-present threat of deadly falls. The first of those was admittedly a pretty cool level. Sure, everything looked the same, but it was loaded with tough fights and was a pretty vast place. The second one? Well, it also had some good battles, but it was a far more linear and dull experience.

There’s also a fair amount of optional content that falls short of engaging. A handful of NPCs scattered throughout the world will give you what amounts to generic JRPG side-quests to kill a certain monster or find a certain item, leading to you backtracking to get a reward that usually isn’t much more than a couple items. You can also find maps to a place called The Depths and turn them in to one of the support people at your base to get access to a series of short dungeons that all use similar templates and end with rematches against bosses you’d previously toppled.

Regardless, Code Vein is a good game. It’s just not one of the top Souls-likes on the PlayStation 4. If you’re a person like me, who is addicted to this sort of action, you’ll have a good time even if you don’t bother with understanding the story’s fine details. It might not reach the highs of your favorite games in this genre, but a good game in a genre you love usually provides a better experience than a great one in a genre that doesn’t get the heart thumping. And for me, this one was able to hit the right notes to satisfy me. At least for a bit, before the itch to delve into another such game became impossible to ignore.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (April 10, 2026) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.