A Fresh Look at Venetica

You may not have heard of Venetica, an action RPG for the PC and Xbox 360 developed by a small team in Germany. That's okay. We have some coverage of it for you.

Venentica was announced several months ago with about 3 screenshots, a YouTube trailer, and a short summary of the game's premise. It was an eyebrow raiser, but not much more than that. Well developer Deck13 has made an appearance at the currently ongoing Games Convention in Leipzeig Germany and has released a plethora of new screens and some more gamplay details.

The game's story follows Scarlet, your average action female lead with a low-cut shirt, tight leather pants, and quick slashing combos. What sets her apart is her dad, who happens to be Death. Apparently there has been some confusion in the afterlife, and a bunch of supposed-to-be-dead souls have escaped and are running around Venice all undead-like. Which, you know, isn't supposed to happen. So Death sends his daughter out to clean up. (I suppose Death is just too busy to be bothered with these kinds of things.)

The game features a heavy emphasis on action, encouraging the players to work on exploiting their enemies' weaknesses rather than just button mashing, and gameplay will reportedly change depending on what weapon you have equipped. Many of these weapons will apparently have other uses than just combat, such as a large hammer which can be used to smash certain walls.

So far, the screenshots of the various locations Scarlet will be visiting are looking quite nice, though I'm not completely sold on the character model of Scarlet herself. The game still is quite a ways off from release, with the developers shooting for sometime late next year, so there is certainly still plenty of time to tweak.

From what I've seen and heard about this game, it looks like some sort of interesting mix of Fable, the Legend of Zelda, and a straight-up action title. Not necessarily bad source material, and I'm a lot more interested in the game since I learned that it is the same developers behind the quirky PC title Ankh. So here's hoping Venetica holds up when it sees release around Q3 2009.

You can check out IGNs hands-on with the game here, or look at their full screenshot gallery here.