Venetica - Gold Edition

Tedious and frustrating gameplay you cannot love it but you cannot hate it either. Graphics: Starting from graphics quite impressive for a 2009 game however i noticed graphical glitches and some areas didn't properly loaded leading to floating objects dark background and fighting invincible enemies. Story: Proceeding to story you got your cliche typical RPG story about revenge. Your spouse dies and it's time to go out for your revenge leading to choises that don't really matter because whatever you do the result is the same. Why do i given a choise when there is only one way to finish the quest? it's beyond me. Combat: Moving on to combat oh boy how can i put this sometimes it's ridiculously easy other times ultra hard for no f****** reason unbalanced even on normal difficulty. Smash the attack button. Sometimes enemies forget to block your attacks other times they remember that when it's too late for them. Magic: Speaking of which magic is fine in the game maybe the best aspect of the game. You got various spells to choose from and it's fun combined with melee combat. Notice that when you level up you have to find a teacher to buy skills leading to back and forth. Skills: As far as it concerns skills you got for magic, melee combat, swords, axes, warhammers etc. So i guess it's totally fine no complains here. Maps and Quests: Prepare to get lost like a lot. The map is fairly long seperated in districts there is no fast travel so you have to go anywhere on foot at least in the beginning and by the way there is no mounts.Moving on to quests it's a mess.Sometimes there is an indicator where to go other times you have to figure this out by yourself wandering around like an idiot searching for the quest item or the quest target gets tedious real fast. And when there is an indicator it sometimes lead you to different location. Music and Voice Acting: Lack of proper music and in general not good.Voice acting is okay though Conclusion: Mediocre RPG with many flaws.

why wasnt it more popular? a few crashes is not gonna stop me from playing

I hovered between 3 and 4 stars for this review because this game was mostly a very enjoyable experience for me despite the many obvious faults to be found here. Ultimately, I went for 4 stars, because I found a lot of heart in both the good aspects of the game as well as the poorer parts. As an example of this, something I found especially humorous (for both the wrong and right reasons) was the dialogue - some of it is hilariously cheesy and can be delivered in a very hammy way, which really delivers that "they wanted this sentence to mean so much more than it does" kind of feeling. The thing is, this is kind of emblematic of the game as a whole - they wanted it to be so much more than it is, and the game is dripping in that kind of charm, but also those kind of bugs. If you can put up with bugs galore, combat that is too easy, and just a general lack of polish, I think the rest of the game more than makes up for it.

Underated gem from the ps3/360 era

Sometime in the renaissance, a village in the mountains overlooking Venice is having a mid-summer feast. Local beauty Scarlett is seeing her beloved off to become a knight, when the village is attacked by masked assassins. Scarlett picks up a weapon to defend her village, and sees her beloved die. Then she is visited by Death and told it's her mission to find a discarded balde that can kill ghosts, and use it to stop a cabal of necromancers who seek to usurp Death itself. Thus begins your journey to, and across, the city of Venice. It's a 3rd person action-RPG, with combat most reminiscent of Witcher 1- input your next attack at the end of the animation to trigger a combo with a damage multiplier. You also need to switch to your Moonblade (the sickle bit of death's scythe) to do damage to some otherwordly enemy types. Scarlett also gets to go into Death's realm a la Soul Reaver for short periods of time- this is sometimes needed to find portals to move around obstacles and solve puzzles. There seems to be a morality system tied to your dialogue choices, but I'm not quite sure how instrumental it is to the game. The game is based on a tabletop RPG, so some of the skills can be a bit clunky- you need to be trained to block for each weapon, and using the block isn't a dedicated block button, but your skill key. But rolling mostly works, except for one boss fight, which I think requires the spear block. Game can be clunky, and I've had some bugs where level geometry wouldn't load, and this required a hard restart; but otherwise, it playes well, and it's definitely a curio of its age. The story and the art direction in Venice are quite nice, despite its age, so I'd recommend this one, if you enjoyed Witcher 1