The latest edition to PopCap’s family of casual games is a little Venetian title about a boat and some artifacts.
The game offers four modes of play to challenge different levels of casual gamer. You must save precious artifacts of ancient Italy while floating in a golden gondola and work your way through 72 unique levels. The game will fit into any family and challenge the most competitive player while allowing anyone to pick it up and play with little to no gaming background.
Venice is a hybrid puzzle and arcade title mixed with the precision of a billiards game requiring quick thinking and decisive actions to break the high score. You’re goal is simple; shoot artifacts of unique shapes into a silhouette puzzle plate which matches the shapes form.
If you were an addicted Peggle gamer, you’ll be walking into a familiar environment. The music score is perfect for the environment, the level of challenge increases much like their last game release and you’ll find yourself going back for more and spending late nights redefining the world “casual.”
Journey Mode
You start in the canals of Venice as the water slowly rises and sinks the city. Your objective is to rise with the water in your gondola, placing the artifacts in the correct plates and save the building from the flood.
Once you’ve reached the top most part of a building and complete the puzzle the water will fall and you’ll be rewarded with your score so you can move onto something a bit harder. After you’ve completed a set of stages you’ll be given a bonus round to earn a large quantity of points, but you only have one shot to get all the points or walk away with nothing.
The greatest challenge to Journey mode is re-catching failed artifact shots. If you launch an item into the air and it misses the intended target plate it will fall back towards the water. If you fail to catch a failing artifact it will sink in the water and you’ll lose a life. You only have three lives, so it is highly recommended that you catch falling artifacts.
Once you’ve completed Journey mode you’ll be granted access to Trick Shot mode.
Trick Shot Mode
This mode gives you a chance to practice your precision shots and billiard style bumper bouncing. You’ll be randomly given a set of stages to complete before being given new challenges. Each stage is a single shot attempt to clear all the artifact plates using the “tumbling effect.”
To tumble an artifact you must fire it into the upper most plate, which allows it to “tumble” and cascade down to lower level plates of the same kind. In other modes, tumbling rewards you with special power-ups, but in Trick Shot mode it is your only method to clear a level containing more than one plate.
A few stages are very intricate and require a single precise shot for the win. If you fail to complete a stage you’ll have plenty of opportunities to try again.
Flood Mode
Where Journey mode was a relaxing intellectual challenge, Flood mode is a fast paced action puzzler. Like Journey mode you will rise in the water in your gondola and complete challenges. However, Flood doesn’t have a stop-and-go experience—the water continues to rise as you sit and think out your shots. Quick precision is rewarded with a slight lowering and pause of the water while failed shots raises the water level quicker.
Journey mode can be completed with patience but Flood mode requires reflexes and a good deal of persistence. You’ll find yourself re-running many stages before moving to the next challenge, often feeling the rage to toss your mouse at your inaccuracies and failure to concentrate.
Your only saving grace in Flood mode is the ability to drop failed artifacts into the water. If you miss a shot you can ignore the sinking piece and take a slight penalty in raised water.
If you can complete Flood mode without a heart attack, you’ll be rewarded with the unlocking of Survival mode.
Survival Mode
As if Flood didn’t get your blood flowing, Survival mode is all about bragging rights. How long can you survive the endless flood on a building that doesn’t have a roof? This mode plays much like Flood without the stages; it is one long level of plates and artifacts.
The Controls
The controls are simple, you move your cursor around the screen and your little gondola follows in the water below. Point towards the direction you want to launch and left mouse click to eject the artifact into the air.
Your gondola is nicely equipped with two artifacts at a time; right click to change to your secondary artifact. This can come in handy when you know you can launch a specific piece higher to gain a tumble (and extra points) and switch back to your primary item for a traditional shot. This feature is a bit like holding back a piece in Tetris for a later shot, but a bit more basic.
If you have a mouse with a right and left button you’re fully equipped for Venice. It’s so basic you’ll figure out the control scheme in thirty seconds.
The Graphics
The title is a typical cartoony rendering similar to many Pop Cap titles. They’re not ground breaking graphics but the artwork is well designed, sharply colored and in an environment that looks much like buildings in Venice… if Venice was a colorfully vibrant city in a cartoon.
The art objects you’ll toss into the puzzle pieces are unique but memorable. This becomes an important part of the title, while in Flood mode you’ll rely on instincts to launch the correct shapes into the proper puzzle piece. For instance, a golden key or bright blue star must be quickly identified so you can find the correct shape on the board to fire off the artifact. Adjusting your aim to the highest level of puzzle piece will give you bonus points and allow you to quickly complete the stage.
The Sound
The sound track feels casual and cute. The music is appropriate for the stages, upbeat and happy which gives you a sense of being part of the game. The sound is accompanied by effects, which bring the title to a professional level.
It is well known that shorter casual titles require less development effort compared to a huge production cost gaming title, which stresses the power of your PC or home console. Yet, PopCap continues to focus its effort on the over all “feeling” of the stages and the sound plays a big part in the feeling and entertainment value in the game.
Power-ups, Obstacles and Combos
There are roughly nine power-ups that you can acquire throughout the stages; some are only available in certain modes. You gain power-ups as a reward for great tumble combos.
Artifacts will tumble down from upper level plates into lower plates of the same type. If you manage to hit a plate that’s four levels up you can typically tumble down three additional times. You’ll be rewarded with additional points, cleared plates (so you don’t have to do them later) and potentially a power-up coin.
Some power-ups will grant you point multipliers, wildcard artifacts to fill in any type of plate, wings to fly up to the plates with your gondola and even a power-up to shoot through obstacles. Each power-up will make your life easier and becomes extremely important on harder stages and in Flood mode.
As you advance in stages you’ll encounter many obstacles to challenge your skills. Just when you think you’re a Venice master you’ll be up against bumpers, locks, blocks, bricks, little firing cannons called chutes, and others. The worst of all is the teleport obstacle, which warps your artifact to a destination warp point on the screen. This always seems to happen when you’re not prepared.
Tying It Together
What Venice offers gamers is a casual title with modes of play for everyone. Puzzle gamers will find it a challenge and arcade gamer’s will like the fast pace stages. Most importantly, the game doesn’t require a huge investment in time.
For the price, this game has a large set of unique states and modes to mix up the experience.
Casual Concerns
Initially a major concern was the immense difficulty in Flood mode. But, after going to work one day and coming home and having the wife tell me she beat Flood mode while I was away I realized it wasn’t a major concern. I was just not patient enough and precise enough with my shots. When I asked, “how did you do it?” her response was “I just didn’t miss.”
Trick Shot mode doesn’t seem to be as structured as it should. It randomly places you on a stage and you must complete it. It would be a little more comfortable if the stages were built into “sets” or ordered linearly, requiring me to beat one before moving onto the next. This would make it more consistent with the other gaming modes.
The power-ups are very useful but there could be a few more intense power-ups more like the fireball or space blast in Peggle. The power-ups were themed well with the game but many were a bit boring. The power-up which doubles your score would be extremely useful if Venice had a mode that required you to gain a specific score on a level to defeat it.
Venice boasts 72 stages but this includes the one-shot bonus rounds, which are very basic stages with one or two obstacles and roughly 5-seconds of gameplay. It is hard to count these as real stages.
Overall
It is hard to argue with the content of a casual title that costs USD $19.95. If you count the amount of hours you’ll spend playing through all the modes of Venice you’ll have more than your twenty bucks worth of fun.
Flood mode and Journey mode will expand the replay value in the game and allow different type of gamers to play the type of game they want. Certain gamers will be attached to the high level of challenge in Flood mode while others will take their time in a thought provoking Journey mode.
It was difficult to find downfalls to Venice. PopCap Games continues to play by the “keep it simple stupid” methodology and provide cheap entertaining casual games for all ages.
If you want to check out the demo, you can download it now!
