Venetica Review

Venetica PC Review

You're also able to periodically unlock various magical and spiritual attacks. These mostly prove handy for thinning out crowds when attacked by a healthy group of antagonists, but are again restricted enough to make sure that they don’t make things too easy to battle through the hordes.

Thankfully, while certain absolutely essential skills will be handed over at story specified points, the rest is all down to your happiness to explore. Trainers appear in usually fairly well hidden points as you quest your way through the main storyline, and will happily teach you various new methods to despatch your enemies. There's nothing absolutely different to typical RPG fare, but the introduction of fresh abilities does help liven up combat enough to restrict things from becoming stale or too repetitive.

Basically the combat is the one area that’s obviously been worked on with a bit of love and care. While it doesn’t initially seem anything above simply solid, once a few more useful abilities and tricks raise their heads, you can find yourself having a really good time.


Sadly, we were left with the distinct impression that the game hadn't been properly optimised for PCs, especially when it comes to controls. Scarlett is quite an agile lady, able to move effortlessly from rolling dodges to unblockable counters, but whether you can master her moves depends on whether you're using a gamepad or a keyboard. If playing with the standard keyboard and mouse system, you will be at quite a hefty disadvantage even in the initial few hours when your opponents are fairly dumb and easy to overcome.

Boss battles aren’t quite as enjoyable as smaller encounters either - not only are they prone to unleashing massive, unblockable attacks, but they also rarely have an easily identifiable weak spot. If there was a brief moment of exposition that made you aware that most of what you’ve learned is suddenly tossed out of the window, then you could perhaps forgive these spikes of difficulty. Instead, you'll repeatedly curse your way through a multitude of deaths.


The localisation effort is almost entirely poor too. NPC's will frequently utter pieces of dialogue oddly different to the text appearing on screen and what voice acting there is is of terrible quality, with some obviously cheap labour dragged in to populate the game world. The first male voice you hear during the intro provides no emotion or excitement, which is odd since that’s the character dying attempting to save the life of his girlfriend. If you can't find yourself drumming up a touch of emotion at that point then you might as well give up.

Venetica is a bit of an oddity. It's obviously dated, technically poor, and is a huge step below the more epic modern RPG's like Oblivion and Fallout 3. However, the combat is simplistic enough to feel initially satisfying, yet gives the impression of enough depth to still feel enjoyable all the way through to the conclusion. It's certainly not going to go winning any awards, nor will it pique the interest of anyone outside the most obsessive of RPG fanatics. That it might keep you ticking over for a weekend otherwise devoid of play time is the best you can hope for, but even then it's a far from stellar experience.

Score Guide