This is one hell of a missed opportunity of a game. The combat mechanics are very good, if I had to compare to a souls, it would be Bloodborne rather than traditional soulsfare, particularly if you make a build around lighter weapon and having a quick dash, it's very reactive, handles well and it has one of the most interesting magic system in a game of the genre, the controls UI make using abilities sweet (while changing which spell you cast from a list in souls sucks). The bosses aren't very inspired/unique enough, but they're pretty decent souls clones.
This is where the good ends. The art style, even if you can stomach animu, can get really bad, it's not horrendous everywhere but the anor londo clone area for example feels really cheap, with basically one texture pasted all over the place and very little variation in architecture or unique details to rooms, it's needlessly big and confusing to navigate for all the wrong reasons. You can feel how cheaply made it was by the level of repetition of the underground areas you can teleport to for goodies too. I think the developers behind this game could have made something quite good, but lacked the financial backing to make something less undercooked. You can very much sense throughout the game that this must have been the thought behind the financing : "souls games are at a peak of popularity, we must push this game out quickly to ride the wave".
Levels just aren't fun to explore and lack the atmosphere and sense of discovery and that's a major minus in a game like this.
Enemies are also very repetitive. Needs a lot more variety in the roster.
Still, it's a mechanically sound game, much more so than many other souls clones of the market, and it understood the qualities of the fast paced soulslike combat from Bloodborne better than From themselves did when they made DS3 faster than other souls without delivering the right mechanics to the player. I legit want to see Code Vein's combat system in a better, more properly made game.
