Venetica - Gold Edition

The story, cutscenes, third person camera, sword swinging animations is completely made on Fable 1's engine. AND FABLE 1... is a baby's rpg. That's not bad, it just means it can be anyone's 1st rpg and anyone can easily do well at building the character. I personally don't want to play a Necro, but the skill tree gives you choice on how to stack up your powers. However, it wasn't as fun as Fable 1's melee combat, magic abilities, or stealth. It's more clunky. The clunk is just a bit too much for me. I wasn't convinced to finish my 1st playthrough and that's it. You get an ability to go in and out of some shadow realm/ underworld to access hidden areas and kill certain enemies but it wasn't for me.

Where to even start? I like stylistics. Venice as a city is really enticing, with monumental buildings, many levels to explore and overall ambience. But as a game, it fails on multiple fronts. Combat is simplistics, using active skills proves no overall advantage over simply slashing combo attacks. Hotbar is a mess, with 4 weapons and skills dedicated to each one separatetly, you can either consantly remap it to current weapon or abandon idea of ever using them. Boss fights are really slow paced and badly designed. I never felt pressured, never in danger - damage was always so low that I could just chug potions and hack away at a target without even bothering to dodge. With abundance of resources, building up backpack of healing items is really easy. Design of levels is terrible, there is so much empty space you end up traversing over and over again - worst offender would be order of the holy seal headquarters, only important NPC is at the very end of building, behind narrow corridor that is frequently blocked by order members just roaming around. As you have to do this journey at least 3-4 times (including only quest returns, not counting combat trainings) it gets pretty frustrating really fast. There are also small bugs, mostly connected to collisions, displaced dialogue lines and situations when you could not loot enemies because they were killed too close to interactable object, like signposts. Then we have deliberate design choices that I cannot comprehend. Sometimes after entering location you would face entrance, so if you carelessly run forward, you will go back to previous location. In one missin when you have to guide nps through arsenal, he would not use platform, we had to run down entire district. There is no easy way to go back to home village (at that point game already shown us, that it can just move us to a location if it wants to)... With so many other games to choose, I don't see reason anyone should pick this one.

1) Better love story than twilight. 2) There are some graphical changes that can't be altered from in-game settings menu, but make the game look better, play better, and stop crashing. Go to/users/your_username/documents/venetica and alter the ini file: - If you are crashing, try turning vsync off. Fixed crashes for me completely. - You can change the FOV. Default is 50, around 60 - 70 looks great and more modern. 80+ starts distorting too much. Personally I settled on 69. - Set multisampling to 8, immediate improvement - You get separete controls for Gamma correction, Saturation, Brightness, Contrast and a few others 3) You can also get texture mods on moddb, or mod them yourself, most files aren't encrypted. 4) Game has a cool mechanic where you can die and respawn for lore reasons, and enter an alternative dimension, which is how you are supposed to navigate some fights, so use your brain if you start losing. Skills are fun to use (send swarms of crows to eat enemies over time) Also, always wear the best armor you can find and remember that different weapons have diffrent purpose (hammer destroys objects and is good against some animals, undead can only be damaged by moonblade, etc). There are some glitchy bosses, but you can see how to avoid glitching them on Youtube (don't dodge sideways against tentacles on first boss). 5) I'd take one star away for jankiness except it's more funny than annoying.

Yes: because the story, lovely main and other characters, environment, sound, music, atmosphere etc. is nice, the hack and slash part is also OK. I played with keyboard and mouse. It has manual and auto saves. I didn't mine the backtracking and the chest opening "puzzles/memory game". Howerer, the later can be exhausting after a time, so get youself a pen/pencil and paper. No: because of bugs (objectives sometimes don't trigger, objects, that should disappear, sometimes stay on the map, floating), and since I had many crashes, C++ Runtime Errors. Most time this happens when you enter a house, room, cave, catacomb, etc. Oh and not to forget the graphical glitches, when loading a different area some elements look OK, but the background is black. 😔 In that case you need to exit and restart the game and load the last savegame. Sadly, I cannot give it more than 3 stars because of these problems. For resolution etc. you need to edit/modify settings-user.ini. For addition info look on PCGamingWiki website. I finished the game in around 23 hours, but didn't find/look for all the secret/hidden treasures. And didn't go in every house/roof. But was in most of these. Played on: Intel Core i7-1260P with Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, 16 GB RAM, 2 GB SSD, Windows 11 Home version 23H2 (build 22631.2861).

Venetica has redeemingly qualities demonstrating the consideration that went into design and production, but the many criticisms it received when originally released are apt. Being the tedious and one-dimensional combat, the average writing littered with errors, the numerous bugs, oversights, frequent crashes, etc. But let us outline why it's such a terrible shame that Venetica is lacklustre. In every department great compliments that can be given, but equally so there are fundamental flaws which negate the effort. For the time the graphics are praiseworthy; the environments and scenery are complex with shimmering water in labyrinthine city streets, with small immediate decorative details and distant landscapes. Yet some textures are awfully low resolution, the narrow corridors of houses or caves with monocromatic walls, objects may clip through one another, and the awkward camera ensures that you are often looking towards the ground. When arriving to a new location, there is much to see in a dense area, but once explored it can be realised that there was nothing but coins in chests and each location is formulaic and alike. The world is filled with people who have individually mapped schedules throughout the passing day, yet do nothing of interest, say nothing, are no-one. The dialogue some have is bland and doesn't change appropriately- NPCs will say conversations meant for other times (including cutscenes) at the wrong moment; merchants retired at night will sell goods, the men at the starting village will speak as though you never left. The combat has a variety of spells, numerous weapons with skills, and damage types. But the enemies are low in variety, and the combat is coded so that wailing with a primary weapon and mashing one button is best. Most other ways are simply annoying. The plot has planned but banal themes exploring how desire for power and revenge corrupt; how good or bad deeds are difficult to distinguish. Better games released before and since.