In any given year, I play a whole lot of video games. A good chunk of what I play sticks with me in one way or another. Maybe it’s a deeply meaningful game like Despelote that makes me reflect on the real world. Perhaps it’s something like Mindseye, a game so memorably bad that it takes up rent in my head for years to come. Or maybe it’s a game that’s firmly in the middle, but at least excels in one particular area that gets me thinking. It’s not too often that I play something that just goes in one ear and out the other entirely.
Code Vein 2 is one of those rare games. When Bandai Namco’s Soulslike sequel launched, I was eager to give it a try and see how it was iterating on a popular genre. The bosses may have been plentiful, but the insight I craved never came. After several sessions, I walked away from Code Vein 2 with barely a lasting thought to share on it. It is a textbook definition of a Swagless Game.
What in the hell does that mean? It’s a “you know it when you see it” sort of thing, but let me try to define it anyway. A Swagless Game is one that feels like it was pulled out of a filing cabinet. It tends to be as middle of the road as they come, remixing what’s popular on the market right now into a serviceable alternative built for “if you like this, try this next” recommendations. The story has nothing of substance to say. The art direction doesn’t offer any surprises. The combat is broadly fine, such that it doesn’t hurt to sink a few hours into it.
They aren’t cheap productions by any means; they tend to be big-budget endeavors more often than not. Instead, they are defined by the fact that there is no swagger in their step. As in, there’s no boldly confident risk-taking happening that will allow them to be either an innovative hit or an interesting failure. These are safe bets.
That’s the dynamic I felt immediately in Code Vein 2. It’s not that the action RPG is doing anything particularly wrong. It’s a competent Soulslike that delivers everything fans of the genre have come to expect. There are plenty of tense fights against giant bosses, which require players to learn attack patterns and practice evading them in order to earn their shot of serotonin. A slew of weapons can be found out in the open world, leaving room for discovery and exploration. And as an added twist, a companion system acts as a handy tool that turns FromSoftware’s summoning system into a built-in assist for players who want a breather during battles.
But there’s little about Code Vein 2 that catches my attention beyond its fundamentals. Its story is a jumble of yawn-inducing proper nouns, using hollow lore as a stand-in for narrative depth. I don’t think I could tell you any character’s name so far, nor anything about their personality. The anime-inspired visual styling that made the original Code Vein novel in 2019 is less of a standout feature in 2026. The vaguely ruined open-world fails to leave much of a mark. And as functional as the combat is, nothing about the run-of-the-mill hacking and slashing stands out from countless other games with the same “avoid and attack” action formula.
If this whole description sounds vague, that’s part of the ethos of a Swagless Game. They are so nondistinct that they are interchangeable with the trendy games they are building on. In fact, there are several Souls-inspired games released in the past few years that fit the bill. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, Lords of the Fallen, Steelrising, and Mortal Shell all come to mind as games that I have barely any specific recollection of. These perfectly fine action RPGs stand in contrast to the genre greats that took wilder swings, whether it was Lies of P’s delightfully oddball Pinocchio premise or Hollow Knight’s valiant attempts to condense the format into 2D.
The label isn’t confined to Soulslikes; you can apply it to any breed of trend-chasing game. The post-PUBG battle royale craze gave us plenty of forgotten Swagless Games, like Ubisoft’s Hyper Scape. Godfall, a loot-driven action game whose name I just struggled to recall for several minutes, is another perfect example. And then you’ve got plenty of gacha games hoping to follow the barnstorming success of Genshin Impact, like Where Winds Meet and Tower of Fantasy. To me, these games all occupy the same space as Code Vein 2. It’s time-killing content that’s unlikely to leave much of an impression.
It’s not a phenomenon that’s specific to video games. Every art form has its version of this: a disaster movie starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson that hits theaters in February, or an Oscar-season biopic that fails to nab any awards (see: Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere) aren’t far off from Code Vein 2 either. When you try too hard to engineer something that should be a success according to raw data, you usually end up with a bland imitation. There’s a good reason that Elden Ring is a generational game, while nothing that’s tried to copy its notes has yet to match its power.
The Swagless Game is a subjective thing. There’s no perfect definition that will let you scientifically sort games into the label. It’s something you have to feel, letting a game completely wash over you with no reaction. It’s the games you see during a Summer Game Fest showcase and completely forget about by the time the next reveal begins. It’s the free multiplayer game you try once with your friends and never speak of again. It’s the game you play for three hours and tell yourself that you’ll return eventually, knowing damn well that you’re not coming back. For me, that game is Code Vein 2. I’ll get back to that boss I’m stuck on soon enough. Sure.
