Rise of Venice: Beyond the Sea Review (PC)

good
key review info
  • Game: Rise of Venice: Beyond the Sea
  • Platform: PC
  • Show system requirements
  • Gamepad support: N/a
  • Reviewed on:
Rise of Venice: Beyond the Sea

Kalypso Media is a well-known video game developer and publisher form Germany, that has made quite a reputation with the extensive list of strategy and simulation games it has on its resume.

Such is the case with Rise of Venice, a historical trading simulation set in the Renaissance era, that pits players against other noble families based in Venice, at the center of the internal struggle for wealth and influence, both within the city limits and overseas, against Venice's main rival, Genoa.

We have already reviewed Rise of Venice, and both its good points and bad ones have been highlighted, the pleasing graphics and attention to detail, the political layer and extensive tutorial that makes picking up the game so easy, as well as the shallow council mechanics, bugs and monotony.

In short, the game has you make money by the age-old method of buying cheap and selling at a profit that has transformed intrepid seafarers into wealthy noblemen over the course of history, complete with court intrigue and diplomacy that more often than not include bribing, espionage and sabotage.

The game also supports multiplayer, and has maps with clearly defined goals such as a target total wealth, so as not to trail on forever.

Rise of Venice: Beyond the Sea expands on the original game, adding a 50 percent larger world map with an additional 13 cities, now raising the total number to 38 and extending the player's reach up to Portugal.

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Profitable convoys, prosperous city, the works
The townsfolk are enjoying the overseas swag
Additional family missions and doge tasks have been added, and family members will now start pestering you with stuff to do for them, as any regular family would, not just extend their courtesy and allow you to send them in missions that only benefit you.

While the game is quite robust and at first the amount of available things to do is overwhelming, the tutorial is well-structured and carries you by the hand quite nicely, making everything a breeze. Well, at least everything apart from the poorly designed automation options and lacking report screens, which become a nuisance when you decide to brave the world on your own.

Starting the game, the nice graphics, such as the gorgeous turquoise of the Mediterranean and the detailed and unique cities, the sounds of the seas and the city life when you zoom in, they will all prove a real treat.

Next, the simulation will kick in and you will be busily establishing the foothold of your trading empire, then starting to plan automatic trading routes, buying trade licenses and bribing the local authorities, starting to develop cities with housing and production buildings of your own.

Trying to step up in the world, you will start amassing wealth and climbing Venice's ruling hierarchy, sending your relatives in diplomatic missions, donating money to the church, bribing and going on errands for local nobles in order to win them over and get their support to ultimately become ruler of Venice.

You will start going head to head with Genoa and its allies, your ships will reach far and wide and you'll have intricate transportation routes that will deliver goods from distant lands to your warehouses, in order for you to maximize your profits.

It really is an enjoyable experience, and even more casual fans of the strategy genre will enjoy it and value the political aspects involved, swaying whole cities in your favor in order to be able to harvest sorely needed crafting materials that you can then transform into goods, ultimately selling their own resources back to them at a hefty premium in true imperialist fashion.

There are also naval battles, but the minimal controls and lack of true involvement makes them schematic at best, and dealing with pirates and enemies soon becomes a question of numbers more than one of enjoying fun gameplay mechanics.

There are pirates to take care of, though, so you have to make sure that your ship convoys are properly stocked with crew and ammo, enough to stand on their own in any confrontation.

The court politics aspect is unfortunately not overly complex to begin with, as you can easily bribe everyone into loving you, which does break the immersion somewhat. The new additions are well-met indeed, but they just seem like something that should have been included in the game to begin with, and lack the required quantitative criteria to offer politics more depth.

And there are other unfortunate factors that detract from the quality of Rise of Venice: Beyond the Sea, the most notable being in the automation section. Ships cannot automatically recruit new crew members in ports, captains are not very bright when it comes to buying and selling stuff, and warehouse managers are even worse.

As such, you will find yourself doing a lot of micromanagement that is perfectly normal and enjoyable when starting out, but that you really shouldn't have to do once you've climbed the social ladder, in order to maintain order and profitability.

While in the beginning there are plenty of things to do, it quickly becomes apparent that the interface is lacking some features that would have been really handy for min-maxing or at least for managing your enterprises, and would have conferred more depth in the economic simulation area.

In the game's current state, you will have to fiddle a lot with the automation controls in order to strike a balance that will be broken after you begin investing into real estate and production facilities.

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This is where the magic happens
And here are the results
While generally once you set up three convoy routes you're set for life, you will have to micromanage warehouses and ships a lot if you're not careful with your selections. And even if you are, you still have to sell the 2000 lemons that are incurring prohibitive extra storage costs by hand, as apparently good help is impossible to find in the Middle Ages.

Also, if you afford a little more creative freedom to your captains and your warehouse managers, you will find yourself bleeding funds rather quickly, which is annoying because it has to be addressed by fiddling, with no clear financial reports to go through. Balance can only be restored by trial and error or by setting smaller quantities for every automated option in order to prevent things from quickly escalating.

That is the area I would have liked to have seen improved most in the expansion, being able to set more detailed goals for clerks, to have people notify me when a certain threshold is reached, to see where every little penny goes, who sold what where for how much, and encourage or prevent such behavior from occurring again.

As things stand, there have been some fixes made, some bugs addressed, but combat is still uneventful, the interface design is still lacking, as you have to remember what each city in a trade route makes. You can't just see its production by hovering in the route planning section if you want to give more specific instructions, and there are many other small examples that hamper the overall gameplay.

Conclusion

The game is still fun, it plays better, the world is now considerably bigger, but the overall feeling is still one of shallow and limited interactions, especially as you progress in rank, and it is very frustrating to figure out how to work automatic routes and warehouses, which should be the bread and butter of the game and really simple and intuitive to use.

There still are a number of issues to be addressed, unfortunately, and the expansions fail to bring enough new content to make the game considerably better than it was. Not implementing more detailed financial reports and the inability of stewards to perform at least marginally well are the main things that bring the game down, along with the clunky interface and the still limited political interactions.

Rise of Venice: Beyond the Sea is an expansion that brings more of the same, not much better. If you liked Rise of Venice, you'll like it too, and if you found it lacking in any way, you'll find Beyond the Sea lacking in the same areas.

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story 7
gameplay 6
concept 8
graphics 8
audio 7
multiplayer 7
final rating 7
Editor's review
good