Let me level with you folks right up top: Code Violet is a bad game. No judgement (some judgement) if you saw tasteful (and sometimes not) screenshots and trailers featuring its beautiful brunette protagonist mixing it up with dinosaurs and felt compelled to pick this up just to ogle. But if you want anything else from Code Violet, like a compelling story with interesting characters or an engrossing crucible of tense and savvy action horror to conquer, then you’ve come to the wrong raptor-infested space station. The best it can give you is terrible third-person shooting, boring level design, and technical blunders that make stalking through this futuristic bloodbath feel prehistoric.
Code Violet’s story is unapologetically tropey science fiction, mixing far future space colonization, genetic modification, and more to make this final girl survival story as impenetrable as possible. Bits and pieces of the tale are interesting, though that’s mostly limited to side stories and lore found in the journal entries of victims scattered among the wreckage. But almost everything you play through and watch in cutscene form is derivative, awkwardly animated and acted, and forgettable. Avoiding spoilers, even when things get truly bonkers towards the end (in a similar fashion to developer TeamKill Media’s Quantum Error from 2023), all the new and drastic revelations that should be monumental to the story at hand instead feel rushed and full of twists and turns that are either undercooked or entirely too convoluted. The very few other characters you meet are barely more than one-note exposition dispensers who you’ll watch your hero, Violet, worry and cry over and never really understand why.
Violet herself is a hollow shell with no motivations outside of doing what others tell her to do, as well as being incredulous and weepy when weird and sometimes difficult events arise. She’s meant to fill a sort of Jill Valentine or Lara Croft archetype of tough gals that can think their way through most challenges, and shoot their way through the rest. But while those two video game legends have agency and capability developed through their laundry lists of heroic feats, snappy dialogue, and sometimes dense inner monologues, Violet’s own thoughts about the happenings around her seem absent from most interactions. She only feels particularly good at anything when I’m in the driver’s seat, tip toeing down hallways and filling dinosaurs full of lead.
This is doubly damning. Outside of being a missed opportunity to introduce a good new character into the greater video game lexicon, it also makes Code Violet’s leering, pervy camera work and extensive dress up options feel like it’s crossing the line from fun into creepy. There are tons of characters in games who successfully make being sexy or flirty a major part of their schtick, and the best ones are those that come across as completely in control of their own image while they do so. So its an unfortunate irony that in a post-Baldur’s Gate 3/Stellar Blade world, one where people have never been more ready to accept hunky himbos and skimpy seductresses, Code Violet found one of the few ways to do it wrong.
A few parts look good at a distance, but textures can get muddied up close.
I played on a regular PlayStation 5 rather than a Pro, and at mid-to-far distances, a few parts of Code Violet really do look good. That’s especially true in the more creatively designed areas, like when you’re outside looking up as islands float in the purplish void of the sky. When you get up close, however, textures can get muddied and metallic surfaces reflect light in gaudy ways that seem off putting for the grunge and grime that sometimes smears them. And most of the heavy metal halls you’ll skulk down are uninspired sci-fi staples that don’t feel any different than any other game that asks players to escape from a locked down hellhole of a science facility. Doom 3 pulled this aesthetic off far more effectively over 20 years ago.
There’s occasional flair, some statues that would look more at home in a medieval castle than a space base, for instance. There’s no real explanation for them, though you can make inferences based on some late-game happenings, but at the moment they come off largely as “it’s here just because.” One curious thing I did always stop to look at were the soda machines and various oil paintings that stick out like a sore thumb in this setting. Not because I found them to be particularly riveting (some were admittedly cool-looking), but mostly because I couldn’t stop trying to determine if they were AI generated or not – I’m no expert, so the jury is still out on that, but they certainly give off that vibe.
Those cool outdoor skyscapes hang over the rote and bland grasslands you’ll have to trudge through to get from one building to another almost mockingly. The limited time you spend in these zones is transitory. They basically serve as long hallways with bundles of tall grass to crouch behind when enemies are on patrol. You don’t even get a map to use, and you won’t need one as it will be very obvious where you need to go next, with very little opportunity to diverge from this critical path. Maybe these sections were meant to serve as some reprieve from the dark, claustrophobic halls of the various facilities on this planet, but other than having a brighter color palette, they feel exactly the same to navigate through.
Back indoors, rooms that might have something to investigate or shoot are separated by long hallways with nothing to spice up the transition from one action zone to another. This almost never changes across the handful of maps you’ll explore, creating a predictable, slogging pace between rooms. Part of what makes games like Dead Space so tense is that any and every room feels like one you could be maimed in. In Code Violet, you can be reasonably sure that most of its rooms exist just to be walked through by you and nothing else. Scoping out extra upgrade materials to strengthen your weapons or finding hidden keys or combinations to open certain lockers are the only good reasons to stray off the path, and even then I learned to go without these things pretty early on because the effort often wasn’t worth the prize – they usually meant enduring the crumbling fossil of Code Violet’s combat system for longer than necessary.
The camera can render some indoor encounters a completely unintelligible mess until it’s refocused.
Violet herself is agile and swift in line with most third person games of this ilk, and even has a Resident Evil-style back stepping dodge, which you will use a lot to create space between yourself and incoming dinosaurs. In a straight up skirmish with these scaly foes, a well-timed dash back can really befuddle the raptors, shattering their simple gameplan of running at you, taking a big swing, pausing, and doing it again. There’s limited space before you hit a wall or a door that might have automatically closed behind you, though, so you can only backdash so much before making yourself a much easier snack to catch. The camera will collide with these barriers far sooner than Violet will, rendering any encounter that doesn’t take place in the dead center of the room a completely unintelligible mess for as long as it takes you to get the camera refocused. Indoors, this was a frequent headache, and lingered like a second, scarier jump scare waiting to pounce after a raptor bursts out of the wall.
The variety of these jurassic jerks is a let down, with large or small velociraptors and poison-spitting dilophosauruses making up the bulk of the non-boss foes. Each type has its own behaviors, but they are shallow and predictable. Big raptors just run and swipe at you until either you or it are dead. Small raptors are usually in packs and make a conga line toward you, taking a swipe before running away, only to immediately turn around and do it all over again. The spitters just stand in one place and shoot, opting to close the distance only when you do so first. You’ll encounter some gator-like creatures in the last third of the approximately six hour campaign, but they barely bother to deal with you so long as you don’t enter their waters, making them extremely easy targets.
Jarrett Green’s Sci-Fi Horror Ho-down
A very good list of some very good sci-fi horror games
Any challenge I got from these mouthy menaces came from how erratic and stupid they could be, often getting caught in the environment while attempting to reach me or disengaging once I simply walked the other direction. Their bullet spongy, stun resistant nature also means that they can just run up and take a bite out of you before they die, not quite becoming a danger, but definitely becoming an annoyance since any hit from them could potentially cause you to bleed, which can kill you if you don’t treat it in time. This is all true for the remarkably few boss fights as well – you may be facing a scaly man-dino hybrid now, but almost nothing about the strategy of walking backwards, dodging on time, and then countering with a face full of lead has to change.
At the same time, all these lazy lizards have a sort of supernatural omniscience. Even when you make your best attempts to sneak into or around a room, there’s a great chance that they already know where you are and are on their way to kill you. On top of that, so many encounters involve you opening a door to see dinosaurs staring directly at you or are scripted events where they have the drop on you, so there aren’t many attempts to stay quiet to begin with. Unless you’re using the GlassVeil function of Violet’s suit, which can render you sometimes comically invisible for a short period, stealth is a large waste of time in most areas. I say comically because you can use it mid-fight with a dinosaur, and there’s a good chance they will simply give up any attempt to find you and return to milling around aimlessly when you do. Hilariously, this strategy even works on bosses, who will completely stop and wait for you to reveal yourself, usually with gunfire, and then make a half-assed attempt to follow up until you reappear.
The real enemy are the myriad bugs that can’t wait to bite and peck at your progress. Sometimes the sound mix will run off the rails or a very important skybox, one that might hold valuable information about a puzzle, simply won’t load. Weapons sometimes display the wrong ammo counts, or just disappear from your inventory all together – which I guess is a fair trade for the fact that every item I used directly out of my storage box didn’t actually expend it in the review build we were provided, meaning I could always heal to full at any safe room I made it to. (TeamKill Media tells us it’s already aware and working on fixes for some of these bugs, such as the infinite storage item issue, but didn’t say when those might arrive.)
