To say that the role-playing game market has become over saturated is a bit of an understatement. In the years since the start of the current console generation, it seems that every couple of months there’s yet another blockbuster RPG released. While (in the eyes of many games journalists) Bioware remains the king of the hill in a highly contested market, there are still many other companies out there trying to get quality role playing games in the hands of eager gamers. One such publisher, Atari, was kind enough to send a copy of their recent RPG release Venetica to us and I definitely want to thank them for their generosity. Unfortunately, while I would love to say that the game is an unheralded classic, Venetica is simply a fun title heavily weighed down by a bevy of technical issues and questionable design choices.
In this German-developed RPG, players assume the role of Scarlett; a young woman living happily in Italy during the Renaissance period. As is the trend of every video game, the idyllic peace of the protagonist’s life is immediately shattered. After having her village assaulted by a clan of assassins and watching her boyfriend sacrifice himself to save her life, Scarlett comes upon a startling discovery. She is visited by Death itself and is told that she must journey to Venice in order to stop the evil schemes of a powerful necromancer and restore balance to the world.
Venetica plays out as a traditional action-RPG with a few twists added in. Being that she is the daughter of Death, Scarlett is armed not only with conventional weapons but also has the power to interact with the spirit world. As players progress through the story they unlock new abilities which allow them to use powerful spells against enemies, journey into the realm of the dead, and even speak with the deceased on some rare occasions. One particularly unique feature in the game comes in the form of “twilight energy,” an energy pool which allows players to get a second chance and resurrect in combat should they die.
Although these abilities all sound exciting on paper, Venetica is really a game which feels altogether generic and dated. RPG fans will feel a definite sense of “been there, done that” here as the game plays a lot like the original Fable on Xbox. Combat is skill based as players can target enemies, chain together combos, and evade or block incoming attacks. While there is a bit of exploration to be done, most of the areas in the game are enclosed spaces that are segmented and load from area to area. Had the game been released back in 2005, most critics would be quick to judge it as a knock-off of Fable.
That is not to say that Venetica isn’t a fun game. The combat can be quite enjoyable as raw skill and good timing matters more than statistics and equipment. When the game does introduce some larger areas such as the catacombs beneath Venice, there’s plenty to be discovered and treasures are hidden throughout. Scarlett’s potential abilities are mostly action-based and it can be fun to map different moves to the controller to pull off interesting combinations of spell and steel. But while there are some good times to be had here, there are also a lot of problems that make the game a whole lot more frustrating than need be.
Each enjoyable part of Venetica is equally opposed by some poor design or broken feature. While combat can be fun, the camera constantly gets stuck to the player or snagged on a wall. Where it comes to treasure hunting, most of the loot found is usually gold and ultimately not very interesting or useful. Gaining new abilities can be a hassle as players must travel across the game’s central city in order to locate a trainer who can bestow new attacks or spells. It’s a lot of small things such as these that can be very annoying to all but the most persistent of gamers. However, there is one particular feature which can truly infuriating and tempt most players to end their quest before it has truly begun.
Finding quests or completing the game’s plot is all the more frustrating due to an absolutely terrible map and horrible quest tracking system. Many missions in Venetica boil down to running from location A to location B and talking to an NPC. While players explore the expanse of Venice, they’ll quickly realize that their maps only refer to certain buildings by their type and must scroll through each available target to read what they are. This lack of detail in combination with poorly described quest objectives can be the bane of any Venetica player’s existence.
In one frustrating quest, Scarlett must travel to a particular home and bring an item back to the quest giver. Unfortunately the location of the house in question isn’t described and the quest tracker shows the target as being the center of a canal. The ability for the player to send a raven guide to the objective doesn’t work within the confines of the city, nor has it ever worked correctly the entire game. After searching over a dozen different homes to find the quest item, I eventually turned to an online walkthrough in order to find the right house. This happened over the course of nearly thirty minutes.
While this particular quest is a worst-case scenario of sorts, the fact remains that the map is about as useless as can be for the entirety of the game. Sometimes the map will glitch upon use and not properly display anything or the objective marker for quests won’t show up at all. Considering how abstruse some quest requests can be, most players will spend a lot of their time trying to figure out where to go rather than slaying beasts or saving innocent town folk. Overall the game handles quest tracking in the sort of archaic way that most players haven’t seen since RPGs on the original Xbox.
Also, during my time with the review, I ran into a game-breaking bug in the form of a scripting error. To put it plainly, I decided to explore a side area before completing a part of the central quest. Afterwards, whenever I tried to approach the required destination for the main quest, the game constantly froze and eventually I had to start a new game and lose three hours worth of progress. While this is definitely an issue it’s made all the more outrageous due to the fact that it happened in a role-playing game, the exact genre in which exploration has always been a hallmark feature.
If the rough game play design does not turn off RPG fanatics, then most will be turned off initially by the game’s graphics. To say that Venetica is a rough looking game is to put it kindly. While the lighting and character models are competently done and look interesting, there are a lot of blurry textures which are very apparent at any given time. Also there’s the issue of the game’s frame rate, which can go from silky smooth in indoor environments to chunky and unpleasant in larger areas such as the city of Venice. At its best, Venetica is graphically similar to an Xbox 360 launch title, but more often than not it looks like a late entry in the original Xbox library of games.
The sound design in Venetica doesn’t do much to enhance one’s opinion of the game. Voice acting tends to err on the stiff side as characters read off their lines like they’re trying to leave for lunch. The music is boring, generic fantasy fanfare and instantly forgettable in pretty much every instance. Most gamers who make it at least a third of the way through the game will eventually load up a custom soundtrack to reduce the tedium.
At the end of the day, the biggest problem with Venetica lies in its overall presentation and the current state of the role-playing game market. Had the game been released when the Xbox 360 launched, it would no doubt entertain those fans craving a decent action-RPG but be forgotten quickly thereafter. However, gamers now live in a console generation where there is an incredibly memorable and critically acclaimed RPG every month; not to mention enough downloadable content to keep them engrossed with such titles for months on end. Sadly, it’s tough to recommend Venetica except as a title for those RPG aficionados that have exhausted all other options. It’s an enjoyable game, but it just has too many issues and too little to offer to compete with other, higher quality role-playing games.
RPG fans looking to pick up Venetica can pick it up on Xbox 360 or PS3 for $39.99. It is also available on PC for $29.99.
