Venetica

[Konjad]

Venetica is a game I expected to be average at best. Moreover, the first three hours are terrible, you start as a village girl and just follow the corridor, whack some professional assassins, listen to uninteresting dialogues and whack more poor assassins. I was at the point of abandoning the game, because the sole looking at ass and arms of cute Scarlett was not enough to keep me interested.

I just decided to force myself to play it until I get to the Venetica city as the village at the beginning is basically a training. And once I got to the city, wow, what a sudden turnaround.

In the city the game became good out of the blue. Writing wasn't deep but Scarlett got a sense of humour and quests were aplenty and often no more about killing assassins or killing at all. Boring hack'n slash transformed into a role-playing game and the place wasn't so much of a corridor anymore (albeit still somewhat was as the parts of the Venetica open up along with the storyline). The story is bad and some dialogues are cringeworthy, but many of them are decent and usually the writing is okay. Unfortunately, many of dialogue choices are not only fake as to leading to the same outcome but worse - quite a lot of them lead to once short answer until you choose the "correct" one. Kid doesn't want to tell you something? Intimidating him to cut off all his fingers? Trying to be nice to him? Forget it, you can do these all you want, but until you choose "here, have some sweets" option you are getting nowhere...

In spite of the above, the quests make up for it, and so is the setting. Dialogues, albeit with all their drawbacks, are decent enough and the game is just fun. You may enter every single house in the city too, stealing from its residents (for the greater good of course). The city districts vary a lot and there are also catacombs and so on, hence why locations are interesting and have a different feeling to them as well.

Overall, it is a very decent game, definitely worth playing if you enjoy cRPGs. If only the beginning wasn't so bad, the game would probably gain much more popularity. Nonetheless, it is worth to go through the boring start and then find a very enjoyable action role-playing game.