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But when I switched to a long-range class, I liked fighting alongside Yakumo, the resident brawler.
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When using a heavy class, for example, I preferred bringing along the team’s leader, Louis, who uses quick attacks and magic. Since you can’t control them, I found it better to think of each one as a complement to your own loadout.
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Code Vein’s other primary innovation is its reliance on playing with an AI-controlled partner, one of the other revenants from your team with their own Blood Codes and fighting styles. It also helps that you have a partner to take the edge off. Above all, I found it freeing that Code Vein gives you permission to try lots of different options with no penalty.
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Switching tactics, especially when you’re figuring out how to apply said tactics to the attack patterns of a powerful boss, can be really tough to wrap your head around, but it's often a puzzle worth solving. After going toe-to-toe with an early boss in a heavy armor class and getting crushed consistently, I was able to quickly dispatch it simply by switching to long-range class with support skills and a gun to keep me away from its poison-laced attacks. Though you can often get by with focusing on just one or two, I found it essential to change Blood Codes and strategies to beat certain tough enemies. Active Gifts run the gamut of typical RPG abilities, from buffs like Iron Will (which enhances your defense), situational skills like Venom Trap (which poisons enemies), and attack spells like Draconic Stake (which launches a spike made of blood at your enemy): As your repertoire of Blood Codes grows, you build a sizable array of options. “While the 25 classes I found don’t feel all feel unique – truly, they boil down to magic-users, rogues, and tank archetypes – by mastering their gifts you can mix and match skills and stat variations, turning each Blood Code into a unique loadout. There are save points called Mistle that recharge your healing item Each twisty, turny level has shortcuts that allow you to bypass certain sections when you have to work your way back to where you died combat demands precision, requiring you to play cautiously, dodge often, and choose your moments. If you’ve played any of these games – Dark Souls, Bloodborne, The Surge (or The Surge 2, which also came out this week) – you know the drill. You spend hours and hours exploring the labyrinthine caverns and city ruins of the revenant world, cutting through enemies (referred to as the Lost) in typical Soulslike fashion. For all its twists and turns, most of the story in Code Vein feels very separate from what you actually do.
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I don’t have a problem with this kind of secondary storytelling, but I wish that more of these more interesting stories could have been better integrated into the main plot, rather than bringing the pace to a crawl to develop its characters and deliver important details about the world. “While the main plot relies on cutscenes, many of the individual characters' stories play out through blood echoes, slow-moving story sequences where you walk (very slowly) through corridors with still images that sync up to audio logs.
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