Venetica

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.