CODE VEIN II Widens the World and Loosens the Systems That Made the Original Work

The headline change from the original is a full rework of the weapon and Blood Veil systems, the two pillars that defined how a Revenant fought and customized their build. Where the first game kept those systems relatively contained, CODE VEIN II splits them into more separate, more granular pieces, offering finer control over how a build comes together for players willing to sit with the menus and learn what feeds into what. That granularity is also the game's most divisive decision. A meaningful share of returning players describe the new setup as disconnected and needlessly fiddly compared to the streamlined version they knew, more busywork than depth for the same practical result.

Core combat still runs on familiar soulslike fundamentals: measured dodges, parries, stamina management, and executions that let you drain an enemy for resources mid-fight. Boss encounters lean on the series' habit of throwing genuinely powerful, pattern-heavy enemies at you well before you feel ready for them, and the partner system remains the sharpest way CODE VEIN II differentiates itself from the wider soulslike field. Rather than relying on other players dropping into your world, you explore and fight alongside a chosen AI companion for the whole run, which changes the pacing of encounters and keeps the game approachable without turning it into co-op in the traditional sense.

Crafting fares worse. Several players single it out as a system that exists without doing much: it neither meaningfully improves your gear nor offers a compelling reason to gather the materials it asks for, making it feel bolted on rather than load-bearing. It is the kind of system a sequel usually adds to give players something to do between fights, and here it mostly just sits there.

The user interface has grown busier along with everything else. Menus carry more text and more nested options than the original's, and navigating them mid-session, especially while trying to compare gear or adjust a build on the fly, reads as inconvenient rather than deep. It is a small thing individually, but it compounds with the reworked systems into a game that asks more patience of its menus than most players expect from an action RPG.

Performance is the sharpest complaint in the community reviews, and it is a real one: multiple players describe frame rate drops that arrive unpredictably, with no clear pattern tied to what is happening on screen, on a range of PC hardware. More than one reviewer who otherwise likes the game underneath calls the framerate the worst they have dealt with in years. That said, the reviews are not frozen in time. Players who came to the game only after a round of post-launch patches report a noticeably steadier experience, which suggests a studio still actively working the problem rather than one that shipped and walked away. Anyone buying in now is likely getting a smoother build than the one that launched, though the persistence of the complaints in more recent reviews means the fix is not complete.

Where the game earns its warmest praise is in character creation, and it earns it convincingly. The tool carries forward everything that made the original's creator a minor cult favorite among soulslike fans and pushes it further, giving players an unusually deep set of sliders and options to build a Revenant that actually looks like theirs rather than a preset with a different haircut. It is the kind of system players screenshot and share, and in a genre where most character creators are an afterthought, CODE VEIN II treats its as a genuine selling point.

The world around that character holds up its end, too. Players consistently describe the visuals as striking, and the post-apocalyptic setting leans into the series' gothic vampire identity rather than defaulting to generic ruin, giving each area a sense of place rather than just a backdrop for the next fight. It is a good-looking game even by the standards of a genre that tends to invest heavily in its environments.

The tension running through the whole presentation is the same one running through the mechanics: a genuinely strong creative vision undercut, for a meaningful slice of the audience, by a technical foundation that has not fully caught up to it yet.