Venetica - Gold Edition

This game is eurojank defined. Its not irredeemable, but I highly suggest making any alterations to the settings in the INI files and making frequent saves in separate slots. And make sure you don't alt tab or lose focus on the game. This is highly likely to cause hang ups and freezing. The 8 times out of 10 the voiceacting is terrible the basic lip syncing is ridiculous and the animations (espically in the intro) is silly / janky. The story is serviceable given it has gone through a translator and by the end, I felt like I had a good grasp on all the characters and their motivations. Combat starts off a bit iffy, but by the end of the game I found every fight a breeze. Like my character had actually become good at fighting and the skills I had selected mattered not that I was just powering through it like a toddler with a hammer. Much to my surprised the final boss fight is actually good. Too many games crap out on the final boss fight not here though I even enjoyed the ending simple as it is. All in all if you like Risen or Gothic this game isn't for you because its actually good.

After a few hours, the first bug I hit was that the attack button stopped working (would start to attack then stop). Temporary workaround is to try to release the button as quckly as possible and don't even attempt combos. Solution, thanks to a long list of Venetica bugs I found on the web, is to unplug your game controller if you are using keyboard and mouse (might need a game restart, not sure). There is also a dialog that crashes the game every time that the developers have known about for years and never fixed. Luckily there should be an autosave shortly before it happens and you can just not talk to that person. I also encountered a few random crashes in the second half of the game (I recommend saving frequently and after each cut scene, at least the longer ones, since they seem to be unskippable). Check the forum for a possible solution if you get this too often or want to try to avoid it completely (it only happened a few times for me). Subtitles are often slightly incorrect and in one case the spoken first line of a multi line dialog from the main character was something like "see you later" rather than what it should have been. Overall: frustrating and occasionally amusing bugs but (sadly) not the worst on GOG. They should really have a warning for games with this many bugs. The story sounded interesting, but what you read in the description is if anything more than what you get in the game in terms of story. Character interactions are often painful to watch. Words and characters are obviously put there because they seem to roughly correspond with the desired game mechanics and flow. There is no coherent story or world. The game mechanics aren't all that great either. Combat features uninterruptable sequences if you time it right that can deal damage for the full health of your enemy (or you in some cases; luckly your enemies calmly wait halfway accross the room rather than all attacking at once or you would really be in trouble).

Trying to play on the Rog Ally and having no luck. Just doesnt start at all.

Endless and repeated unskippable cutscenes? That's a dealbreaker already. If that wasn't enough to put you off, both gameplay and plot look extremely simplistic (admittedly based on less than 1h gameplay). It might be ok for a children's game, but children would want modern graphics I suspect. I don't see any specific appeal nor any reason why anyone should play this game in 2024.

The game looks good, it might even have a good story, but... it's completely unplayable! Very early in the game, when speaking to the people it keeps crashing. Changing settings, using compatibility mode - nothing really helps. Sorry guys, but older games presented on gog were supposed to be optimized for new machines to run smoothly. Maybe there are some user-made patches to fix it, but if that's the case - I'd expect the gog team to at least put such info here.