Venetica German Demo

When it comes to role-playing games, fantasy and magic are usually the norm, given the fact that wizards, dragons and various other creatures are part of the landscape on a regular basis. However, things usually make some sort of sense in the said world, even if they certainly don’t when taken out of context. Moreover, they are also somewhat believable and well explained, to make the experience that much easier to remember on the long run.

Venetica is an action-RPG that tries to make too many people happy at the same time, but it fails to impress through anything in particular. The mistake is quite common in video games, which means that this title is not necessarily bad, only unremarkable. There is nothing memorable about the story, most of the characters are generic and the combat itself is repetitive and lacking in imagination.

Speaking of which, the events take place in Venice a long time ago, although you should not assume that the environments have anything to do with the actual place, other than the similar architecture. You play as Scarlett, a girl who one day loses her boyfriend to a necromancer attack on the village and also finds out that she is the daughter of Death itself. Since all that takes place in the first five minutes, you might think that you are in for quite the ride along the way, but things soon slow down to a crawl and it all resumes to a few repetitive quests and a lot of button mashing.

There is an interesting gimmick that might make things a bit more bearable, which is the fact that your relation to Death gives you the ability to enter the Twilight World and interact with the environment in a manner of different ways. This doesn’t affect the gameplay very often or too much, but it does look nice and it’s something to keep you going and see the end of the story.

Thankfully, the game looks quite good, although the animations kind of ruin the illusion from time to time, especially if you pay attention to the characters during dialogue and see that their faces only switch between two or three animations, which is very annoying. The environments are majestic and very detailed on the other hand, so you might have a good time exploring ancient Venice at least.

All things considered, Venetica is the kind of game you can play just to pass the time, given the fact that you are left with nothing after you complete it. However, the repetitive combat system and the annoying mechanics might make it difficult to get through all of it anyway, especially if you stumble into something better in the meantime.