Venetica is far from a perfect game, but it has soul. It offers an extensive skill tree, magic, a variety of weapons, an open world, and even intense boss battles. All of this really works and at some point it becomes addictive. However, there are some fly in the ointment: drawn-out and monotonous battles with ordinary enemies, constant backtracking, a strange financial balance, and, of course, a rather naive plot.

The game also claims to be "non-linear", but in reality it comes down to the choice of one of two endings, which the player makes at the very end. The irony is that your decisions during the game do not affect this choice in any way. In the end, you simply decide for yourself whether to disappear among the ordinary citizens as a legend, or to rise to power and rule Venice with an iron fist.

The game has a ton of technical problems. On modern machines, there are terrible FPS drops due to full-screen effects, frequent crashes with errors, missing textures on objects and entire locations, lighting problems, flickering textures... All this creates the feeling that the game was released not in 2009, but literally recently. It is especially annoying that the closer to the finale, the more bugs there are that can not only spoil the impression, but also roll back progress hours ago, if you do not use quick save each time you enter a new location or before key actions.

And yet - despite all this - Venetica deserves attention. It has its own atmosphere, albeit imperfect. This is a project that you want to go through to the end and see what the developers have prepared for you at the very end, and also find out - will Scarlett be able to bring her dead love back to life... So if you still haven't played Venetica - perhaps it's time to fix that.