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tl;dr - trash.

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In detail.

After playing Sekiro, I wondered how Souls games would feel afterward. I decided to launch Code Vein, since I'd had it installed since last year "for the future," and hadn't played past the five-minute, very tedious tutorial.
I had hopes for it as a decent way to spend time, especially in an anime style, but it didn't work out. Let's start with the main point: all its maps are complete garbage. This isn't hyperbole or just using strong language, not rudeness for the sake of rudeness, but harsh reality. Remember someone higher up the thread joked that Souls is like rummaging through guts? Show this person the levels in Vein. It is LITERALLY a thin intestine, curling in own loops, occasionally with small branches, and the ability (necessity) to jump from an upper gut to a lower one. And visually they are indistinguishable from each other, meaning you can't tell by texture or any landmarks—which don't exist—a gut on one part of the map from a gut on another part of that same map. The mini-map doesn't help at all because the loops of the intestine often run over each other, and you can't determine if you've been here or not. Ultimately, you have to run like a rat through a labyrinth that merges into one, pulling levers and looking for shortcuts. I won't say this is necessarily very bad or difficult, rather just tedious and done to stretch the playtime. The exploring, which could have balanced this fuss by rewarding it, gives nothing. All rewards, items, pickups you can find by scouring the map are absolute unusable generic trash. Furthermore, the maps offer nothing interesting aesthetically or in terms of lore. They're just some caves, just some cliffs, just some bridges. There isn't even anything on them. A random texture from a random JRPG used for dozens of random dungeons. And it's like this throughout the game without break—you exit the gut of one biome into a boss room, and from there immediately enter the gut of another.
Monsters in these guts are placed around every corner and on every balcony, specifically so they can "sneakily pop out" and hit you with a chip shot. The first couple of times this might work, but then you already know (and see) the mob behind every corner; after half an hour, you're tired of even rolling your eyes and just lure out the next ambusher with an indifferent face.

The combat, apparently, is balanced for co-op, because if you miss a mob's hit, it can take away more than half your HP in one blow, while one gulp of Estus heals about twenty percent. Therefore, it's better not to get jump-scared from around the corner and generally not to leave yourself open. But this wasn't enough for the devs, so additionally they gave every second mob the ability to stagger your character with any hit; those rotations that many dislike—not just 360, but 720, and in some cases even 1080 degrees—and they love to place them in packs. Meanwhile, you mow these mobs down in packs similarly with one or two hits or one use of some ability (like in Dota), so ultimately it all comes down to autistically baiting them into an ability/hit. Btw, the ability system amused me at first, but soon became extremely tedious. I won't go into details about this, just say that I absolutely disliked this implementation.
Bosses suffer from everything mentioned above, only to the extreme. They kill the player character in a couple of hits, hitboxes pierce several meters away from the model, while you also shred their HP very quickly, and their movesets are practically identical, differing only by special effects.
On the first run, I played and enjoyed it despite the flaws felt from the first minutes. On the second run, I realized the maps and combat in the game aren't great; the enjoyment was cut off. On the third run, I realized I was pushing through tedious, uninteresting levels, spitting at the cheap combat, and it wouldn't get any better; in other words, I was winding up an unpleasant substance. And I dropped it.
The worst soulslike of all those I've played, worse than Immortal Unchained (which is surprising).

***

Then I decided there was nothing to lose and tried *Demon's Souls: Remastered* again. Once I played it as a strength-build tank with a halberd, finished about 75-80% (to be precise: completed the second game fully, the third almost fully up to the credits except for the last boss and the Nameless King—got too lazy to try the latter), then stopped playing. Not because I got stuck somewhere, but just stopped launching it. Thought maybe Souls had just gotten a bit stale and I'd finish them someday, but forgot... And now I understand why that happened.

This time I completed it fully, including DLCs and all optional locations, and it took me a little over thirty hours. Of all these locations, I only liked two—the starting castle and the golden castle with knights; one or two were tolerable, absolutely all others I disliked very much, I spat at them. The dungeon crawler part is too much, you wander too dullly through corridors and small rooms of random gray-black-brown biomes, the developers' attempts to make the player suffer from slow character movements and simple traps/mechanics with pushing into abysses/some trap/being swarmed by a crowd of meat look too forced—for a non-first-timer not just in the series, but in games in general, it causes yawning.
Locations in terms of exploring and rewards are certainly made normally (especially compared to Vein), but being in the locations themselves is simply unpleasant, returning to them is unpleasant, and not because of some oppressive threatening atmosphere, but simply because they are unnecessary, meaningless, and fail to spark interest. I often caught myself thinking that I felt a certain sensation that my character shouldn't be walking here. Not because the locs are dangerous or surreal, but rather surreally poorly put together, as if I'm playing some action-RPG from the early 2000s like Gothic or Morrowind with poorly fitted assets in the editor; the game has aged so much in terms of both graphics and visual/conceptual design. Interiors and exteriors of rooms, dungeons (empty boxes with a table and stool, with low-poly textures stretched on the walls—there were such things even back in the first Thief); some random blurred boulders; hills, pits, bricks placed without clear reason or method. When I opened a DS 3 video after all this, I was amazed at how much of a quality leap had been made in this regard over these years—everything there is so beautifully and pleasantly designed (and yet at the time of playing it seemed to me that everything was quite gray and monotonous; thanks to DS 1 for opening my eyes).

In terms of gameplay, the years also affected the game very negatively. This is perhaps the most casual soulslike of all I've ever played. Remember someone wrote that knights in Souls can be bypassed from the side of the shield? I specifically decided to check this theory to refute it and laugh in that person's face, BUT I COULDN'T. Absolutely all enemies are bypassed from the side, not even by running but by walking, and they can do nothing about it because they are console-like sluggish; they can either spin after you (and even fail to do that), or start very slowly swinging some hit or combo into thin air at a honest 0 degrees. Almost all of them are very easily backstabbed after being bypassed.
Then I sighed and decided to check this theory on bosses, surely they shouldn't be as hollow. Well... Out of three dozen bosses, I could only not bypass two from the side; one is gimmick-based, and bypassing it from the side simply isn't possible because there's a cliff. All others are bypassed by walking from the side like console kids on servers merged with PC players in some online shooter, and while they do their 3.5 hits into thin air, you slice them up completely freely. Even those that come in groups or with minions; even those that are very large—in this case, you can just simply walk right under them head-on. How many times do you think I rolled my character over 30+ hours? No more than a hundred times. Of those, about 60 were at the bottom of Blighttown to move through the sludge faster; another 10 on the Taurus at the start of the game because he couldn't be bypassed from the side due to the narrowness of the fortress wall (this is the second of the mentioned non-bypassable ones), and I didn't want to abuse attacking from the roof, so I fought him face-to-face; another 20 to avoid toxic explosions from cancerous hollows in paintings or a jump into the air and an explosion in all directions from several bosses; another 10 to roll from ledge to ledge while exploring the map.

The game is very easy to abuse. The whole thing can be completed with any 100% shield, although even that isn't required because everyone can be bypassed from the side, and in this case it simply serves as protection against a random slightly wider hitbox once every half hour; on bosses—sometimes required if you're too lazy to dodge, and it doesn't penalize you for using it.
This time I played with a full dex build, and spent 95% of the game in random rags, thinking there would be an agile fast character, but it turned out that speed and rolls aren't needed, and the game pushes you into narrow corridors so actively that you can't capitalize on this. In the last one-and-a-half locations for a test (and out of boredom from needing to bypass mobs/lure them for 10 seconds in those locations where archers shoot at you from above and mobs swarm), I dressed in Havel for the first time, which I had used to complete all other parts and didn't want or plan to wear in this walk-through; I discovered that I lost only one tier of encumbrance, and then I even stopped bypassing from the side—it turned out that in heavy armor, unlike rags, you can just tank everything flying at you face-on even without a shield, and there are no restrictions even on a full glass build. I minced several bosses head-on, without moving from the spot, with one hand on the gamepad.

In short, Code Vein, despite its budget-cloniness, much more limited gear system, and clumsy combat, is an order of magnitude harder than the first Souls. But its level design is also much worse.

I can't say in the end that DS 1 brought me no pleasure at all during this playthrough, but I certainly didn't expect to get exactly this experience, and a couple of times I wanted to drop it due to lack of interest. Nevertheless, I'm rather glad that I closed the gestalt on it and could put a mental checkmark.
And my personal subjective opinion, not claiming to be an established fact: for me, this is the worst part of Souls, without any doubt. It is outdated, clumsy, raw, and it's clearly visible—both externally and internally. I wouldn't rate it above a seven, and even for a seven, I'd think ten times. And this isn't even the fault of Sekiro, which represents a qualitatively higher level—the game itself objectively just doesn't hold up anymore.