Venetica

A compelling enough adventure spoilt by shonky controls and shonkier visuals. [Feb 2011, p.93]

Think Syfy original movie. [Mar 2011, p.98]

Venetica has a few good ideas and a couple of characters that deserve further examination, but it just doesn't seem to be at all interested in them. That, I suppose, is why I wasn't all that interested by Venetica, either. Ratin

Venetica has too many flaws in just about every facet to make for an engrossing role-playing experience.

Venetica is a tough game to recommend. On one hand, there's a luscious and unique world to explore that is vibrant and astonishing. On the other hand, the story is muddled with poor dialogue and voice acting, and overly-simplistic combat that might not appeal to some.

Venetica is a neat idea for an RPG hamstrung by an engine that can't do the maths quick enough and some terrible production values.

Venetica contains hints of a compelling quest but feels like its development life was cut short. The end result is a potentially grand concept that just can't flourish within its forced, generic confines.

Once I had committed a few hours to the game and was deep inside Venice leveling up and completing quests, I was indeed drawn into the game. But the sordid path it took to get me there and the unnecessary complications of the map were beyond frustrating and would turn away most gamers.

Maybe they did bite off more than they could chew, but they at least had aspiration. None the less, Venetica's over-ambition is its own downfall. The many imperfections that would be ironed out from larger more successful RPGs have not been attended to rendering the game as frustrating, which is a pity.

Unfortunately, as soon as the game starts to get your hopes up, there is always something-like the fact that you need to constantly manually save your progress since the game does not feature an autosave whatsoever- that rears its ugly head and immediately reminds you that sometimes you get what you pay for.

The game is downright ugly. The framerate comes and goes, but the biggest offenders are the generally awful and low key environment textures, the way to similar to every other building design of Venice, and awful collision issues that the character models have. Scarlett will often clip through anything she has to interact with, which becomes even more noticeable in every cutscene that she has to hug her deceased love one in.

It's impossible to recommend Venetica to anyone when there are so many other better action-RPGs out there. You might be tempted to pick it up because it's only forty dollars, but don't do it... unless you've already played every other RPG on the market.