Venetica - Review @ PC Advisor

[Dhruin]

Another Venetica review, this time at PC Advisor. I'm unclear which version they played but despite appearing to like the gameplay, the score is only 2/5 because of bugs:

Venetica's fast-paced combat is fun. The Moonblade, a scythe-like sword, may be Scarlett's primary weapon early on, and while it's essential for taking out certain enemies, you find a few other tools of death along the way: swords, hammers and axes, and spears and shields. Venetica's combat system is pretty basic: You time your blows to score bigger hits that produce flashier animations. It's not fancy, and certainly isn't as deep as Devil May Cry or God of War. It's also fun to fight with axes and hammers: While slow, these weapons do massive amounts of damage, and skills associated with these heavy hitters knock foes to the ground.
I did have fun with Venetica; at times, a lot of fun, but I can't forgive its bevy of bugs. I lost several hours whenever the game froze during saves. And, of course, we've got the problem of crucial text dropping out for lines of miniature 1s and 0s during a boss fight. I'd love to give Venetica a higher score, but dtp entertainment should'n't allow a game to reach the market in this state. If I wasn't required to finish the game for my review, I would have put it back in the box after a few hours.

More information.

 

[Dasale]

Yes I don't see what he means by lost hours because of game froze during save, nor the text dropping out.

Anyway, I'll wrote it directly, this guy is an idiot that should stop review video games.

He pretends have finished the game an for him the fight are only:
"Venetica's combat system is pretty basic: You time your blows to score bigger hits that produce flashier animations"

Lol if he did only that during all the game he got smashed a lot during the fights, if you do that stupidly you get punished, unlike in The Witcher.

Poor guy I'm very sorry for him or he played The Witcher instead of Venetica.

 

[KasperFauerby]

Sounds like his system needs an overhaul because I had very few bugs myself during my playthrough of Venetica. I had two cases where my character was stuck and couldn't move until a restart of the game. No crashes, no corrupted text bugs.

 

[srabuseen]

Poor guy. I only had one quest-bug and that's all.

 

[Madigan]

I had not a single bug or freeze.

 

[Alistair]

I didn't pick this up becuase the demo repeatedly gave me a hardlock I had to reboot from. Worst crash I can remember...

 

[Dasale]

I didn't pick this up becuase the demo repeatedly gave me a hardlock I had to reboot from. Worst crash I can remember…

From people that played the game it seems crash are very rare with the full game and its last patch.

Myself in close to 30 hours of play I crash once, funnily few after I disabled the autosave. But I had manually save at right time.

I haven't finished it yet, but played quite more of it now. It hasn't the same level of polishing than most big RPG recently released. It's a great pick because it has original points very well done but the overall quality suffer a bit of some points. That's why I would advise it only to fans of RPG. It's strongest points are:

• Places design and graphics, but caution it's not standard realistic style, it's even a strong style, so check various snapshots of the game to see if it's compatible with your tastes. For me it matches and it's the most visually stunning RPG I ever played.
• 3D levels design, quite amazing, The towns areas and even few dungeons use a design in 3 dimensions as I never saw. The town thematic help a lot, but it's not first RPG town I see but it's first time 3D is that well used. It generates tricky secrets and progressions.
• Very good secrets, there are even some character skills that are dedicated to secrets. One allow see through the eyes of the closes raven. And this is used a lot to give hint about a little secret or a mid hidden passage, and that's really a good way to implement hints and really helpful in the intricate 3D area that are setup. There isn't much puzzles and no really good one, for the few puzzles the trick is only to find and decipher the hint. But there are many good secrets with a good hints implementation. Some are tough and some are too easy but all in all I spend good time in searching some. There's also treasures maps you can find and you need identify where is the place corresponding to the bit of map and red cross and then dig at this point to find the treasure (once you find the tool to dig later in the game). It's not very complicated but funny anyway.

The main other good points but not as impressive than those above:

• Good voice acting, but in my language I didn't tried in English.
• Good quests design there's a good diversity and even if some gave me hard time to solve them, all in all and with few exceptions there's enough good hints to guide you without to have a compass pointer to guide you by hand. I almost never used the ability to activate indicators on map for current quest, in fact in such 3D environment such indicator is only a little help, also it seems buggy on some quests.

Now the points that sometimes drop down its global fun:

• Fights can be good, but also not that good during a long part. In first parts you learn the system and it has subtle points and it is fun. Once you arrive in the town it starts be a bit too easy and is too easy during first two part of town. In those parts the game also fails to offer new opponents forcing you find new tactics. This is a significant part of the game and this drop down significantly the global fun in those parts. Thanks in third part of the town the difficulty come back to better levels and opponents offer some more diversity. But all in all, if sometimes fights are quite fun, it's definitly the weak part of the game because of its uneven quality level and some lack of opponents diversity, a lot more work was required to polished the fights but that would have change a fun feeling of the game so it would have worth it.
• The funny and incredible 3D design of towns involve complex merging of progression though outdoor, houses or towers with multiple levels and roofs and ladders. It's great and makes tricky and very interesting many progressions. But this involves many load time. Often but not always enter a house is fast but exit is always less fast, it's a lot faster than the problem that had the Witcher with loading, but unlike the Witcher, the game requires often many area changes and it is probably missing a cache of the outdoor area to reload it faster. So despite it's relatively fast loading, it's frequent and not fast enough, so this put a burden on the exploration fun of some parts.
• The writing and the story is ok, I can't quote it really as one fo the bad points of the game. But if it isn't boring or not even tedious, it will hardly capture you and will rarely boost your interest. In parts where fights fun low down, and pure exploration and research related to secrets or quests are the only parts to sustain the game fun, a more captivating story telling is almost a flaw by absence, good wasn't enough during those parts.

Very interesting RPG, some design elements that I hope will a day influence some other RPG, like the numerous adventure skills, 3D design, secrets design tricks, try something else than purely realistic graphic style, and some more. But some lack of polishing, and the game would have been a top one with better tuned fights and by solving the reload of outdoor area and minimizing number of load.