The Mediocre Zone | #36 | Venetica - Gold Edition (2009)
5Wanted to write my own troughs about this but then i seen Resoula comment ... it perfectly summed up the things i wanted to write :
You want to play Venetica? Well let me tell you what you'll have to look foward to.
+/- A decent story from what I could tell. Unfortunately with one-sided characters that are interesting at first, but become very boring once you learn how they are.
- A "karma"-esque system that gives you no feedback whatsoever. If you're going to give me karma, then tell me the results of my actions.
- The illusion of "Freedom". Many decisions to make in-game, none of them with any effect in the form of an epilogue. Just a slightly altered dialogue line (if even)
+/- Beautiful and artistic MAIN character models (Because everyone else's literally suck)
- The graphics other than the main characters literally suck. Textures were done better in 2008.
+/- Good music, when it actually plays. And its a shame I've only heard 5 different tracks now that I've played for 9 hours.
- Graphical glitches! In the form of light flickering, shadow flickering, textures overlapping, birds that disappear, and textures simply becoming fuzzy.
- Very annoying hitboxes. You have to clip into some monsters to hit them, made me miss a lot of skill attacks, which waste "mana" btw.
- Physical skills costing the game equivalent of "mana" as well as spells. This is the single stupidest design choice I have ever seen in a game.
- TOO. MANY. LOADING SCREENS! What happened? Did your engine suck that bad? 2009 was the 2nd biggest revolution of graphics card tech and CPUs did not suck back then either. I shouldn't need a loading screen for every building and every "area". Especially if every area can be run across in 10 seconds.
- Bad optimization. For the few areas that are not as small as 10 seconds to run across, the game takes a ♥♥♥♥ in performance. I can run the witcher 30 with well over 60 fps, so this is on the devs.
- Recyled monsters.
- Recycled quests.
- Recycled dialogue.
- Dialogue repeating twice in the same sentence by the same NPC.
- Dialogue not matching the subtitles.
- CRASHES. SO MANY CRASHES. One breaks the game about 2 or 3 hours in and forces you to run the game in compatibility mode for Windows XP (SP 3). Makes no sense for a game released the same years as Windows 7. The rest occur randomly when entering new areas or talking to people. Oh yea btw, talking to your brother in Venice? Breaks the game. Dev is aware of this and has done absolutely nothing. Also, game crashes very time you alt-tab.
- No ability to sprint..just jog at a slow-motion speed and watch your sluttilty-dressed female protagonist's hair move as if the game was playing at half speed.
- A SEVERE lack of quality animations. Some of the walking animations in this game are hysterical to look at. Some doors "teleport" open. Seriously, were you so lazy that you could only program quality animations for the main character?
Overall, I give this game a 1/5. It was horrendous. I was enjoying the story but there's so many things wrong with the game that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how many breaks I took. Every time I closed this game I was red-faced with stress, anger, and disappointment. This was 9 hours of my life I am never going to get back, and about 20 of yours if you get this game and play it to completion. AVOID THIS GAME AT ALL COSTS.