Code Vein 2 review: an early contender for 2026's worst Soulslike

Bandai Namco's sequel misses what makes good Soulslikes click

Sequels carry certain expectations with them, like the promise of building on the promise of what came before and correcting past mistakes. Bandai Namco’s Code Vein 2 is exceptional in that it manages to repeat its predecessor's mistakes and throw in fresh ones of its own, all while sticking to outdated design principles for no evident reason. It's a bizarre mashup that leans further away from what made the original Code Vein distinct and loses its identity in the process.

Code Vein 2 starts as the world is about to end. In the past, a catastrophe ravaged civilization and turned people into monsters until a group of heroes sealed its cause away. Now their seal is breaking, and the only way to stop it is by traveling to the past and preventing the heroes from sealing it to begin with. There's probably a better solution here, but Code Vein 2 operates on its own logic, logic that frequently makes little sense and takes wild turns only to justify a plot point. As luck would have it, there's a single revenant in the world who can travel back in time, and she just so happens to be bonded with you. Revenants are vampire-like beings who gain power from absorbing blood and share it, plus half their heart, with warriors they bond with. Sometimes these warriors are revenant hunters who don't hunt revenants and use their powers for other reasons; sometimes revenant hunters want to actually hunt revenants who are, apparently, despised and feared. The distinctions never get satisfactory explanations, which is okay, because they don't matter.

In fact, most of the script in Code Vein 2 doesn't matter, despite the absolutely massive amount of talking that takes place and the appearance of a story that's more involved than the first game's. Overlooking shallow storytelling would be easy, if Bandai weren't constantly shoving the bones of that story in your face. It's preoccupied with wanting to make you feel big emotions without giving you any reason to feel them. Companions you barely know speak at length about the power of your friendship and how loyal you are. You're expected to care when your first companion, Noah, has to cut down an old friend, but you've known Noah for all of 20 minutes and heard about his friend in a hamfisted flashback, in which he appeared for the span of two sentences. A rabid old man accosts you during your first main mission and babbles about the horrors that befall the person you're trying to rescue, how her family was tragically murdered and she bravely sacrificed herself for the benefit of others. After the rescue mission, you quickly see none of it matters to her, so it matters even less to you.

These are piles of facts, not characters. Plot details don't automatically equate to drama, and information about a character isn't interesting by default. There has to be some kind of emotional involvement for a story to work, and Code Vein 2 just doesn't have that. Not at the start. Not during bonding missions with companions, where you collect even more facts about them. Not when you travel back in time and change the course of history, despite being told not to. Nothing big happens anyway, and even if some disastrous consequence did manifest, it'd just be another meaningless detail to pad out the story of someone else's hollow life.

The general lack of inspiration extends to character designs as well. Code Vein's approach to women characters is vulgar and crude, though that's hardly surprising given how the first game treats them. But even as juvenile attempts at cheap titillation go, it's more low-effort than lowbrow, as Bandai’s designers figured, "Why bother with character design, when you can just give half the cast two-inch waists and make them breast boobily?" The usual double standard applies, as male characters are fully clothed with no exaggerated proportions, though they're just as dull from a design standpoint.

It seems all the style in Code Vein 2’s character designs was reserved for the character creator, which is genuinely exceptional. The tool gives you customization freedom on an almost granular level, with options for adjusting how the light reflects off your character's eyes and where the curl in curly hair starts sitting alongside more standard things like altering height or physique. It's almost setting a new standard for character customization, though the freedom does have its limits. Maxing out body size sliders gives you the equivalent of a Pretty Normal Body; no fluffy midsections or brick shithouses allowed.

A good story or well-realized characters would also give some incentive to keep plodding through the open world and maybe engage with some of the people occasionally found there. Code Vein 2 is badly missing that incentive. Its maps are bigger than the first game's, as Bandai Namco promised, but they're so full of nothing that I stopped wanting to explore after a few hours. It's a problem that dogged Bandai Namco's Tales of Zestiria in 2015, which was sort of understandable at the time, when developers were just catching on to the idea of open worlds. In 2026, another Bandai studio making the exact same mistake just makes me wonder what we're even doing here.

Perhaps the greatest affront is how uninspiring its environments are. Scarlet Nexus, also from Bandai Namco, is far more believable as a sci-fi apocalypse than the bland, blasted-out cities of Code Vein 2, and the ruined plains and forests of MagMell Island have none of the affective power of Breath of the Wild's blighted landscapes. Xenoblade does sci-fi better. Generic dark fantasy doesn't cut it anymore after Elden Ring. These environments have a lot less for you to do, too. Exploration — a word used loosely, since most environments and all dungeons are linear — largely consists of fighting enemies and picking up random collectibles. There's a handful of light platforming challenges as well, made annoying by how floaty and imprecise jumping is.

At least fights are occasionally enjoyable, though more often are either too easy or too annoying. Code Vein 2 takes the "overwhelm you with details" tactic from its storytelling and applies it to combat as well. There's a frankly ridiculous amount of systems at play in character builds, which would be neat, except you can ignore most of them without penalty.

The foundation of a combat build is a Blood Code, which you obtain, theoretically, by bonding with another revenant (though in practice they usually just give them to you without effort on your part). Some Blood Codes have passive attributes that activate when you meet certain conditions, and all of them change your stats, pushing you to specialize in specific types of equipment (strength for greatswords and so on). It's very Dark Souls in concept, though in my experience, weapon scaling differences were negligible compared to what you see in FromSoftware's games. 16 points in strength, for example, bumped a greatsword's attack power to 275. With 10 points in strength, it was down only to 262.

The thing is, Code Vein 2 doesn’t provide enough of a challenge for those 13 points to make much of a difference. So the central consideration when deciding on your build just doesn't matter except in a handful of circumstances, which means the passive traits and the "burden" (another system that gives you penalties or bonuses if your equipped loadout's stats pass a certain threshold) don't matter either.

It would've been far better to jettison that component and just focus on complete freedom of customization, of which there is plenty throughout: movesets, weapon abilities, combos, you name it. Code Vein 2 is at its best when you can string together ridiculous combos and go all out with unique multifaceted builds you've customized yourself. It's a strength so at odds with the idea of Soulslikes — with their methodical combat and builds centered on one or two specific pieces of equipment — that I wonder why Bandai Namco didn't just abandon that mimicry and lean into what makes Code Vein distinct to begin with.

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Code Vein 2 will be released on Jan. 29 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PS5 using a prerelease download code provided by Bandai Namco. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.