This isn't so much a bad game as it is the complete stagnation of two different good series. As someone who loved Patrician III, I can say that this game basically just copy-pastes most of the good ideas from that game, dumbed some of them down or made you arbitrarily incapable of trading trading certain goods until you unlocked them, and went piddling on ahead with them. Like Patrician, you basically just get a boat to buy low and sell high repeatedly until you can afford to buy more boats or build a business that lets you make things directly for less price than buying them, then turning around and selling them for even more money you can use to buy more stuff to make MORE money... This system is dumbed down compared to Patrician, with less interconnected supply lines and with prices much more strictly tied to an "average" price to the point where you don't need to do anything but look for whether something has two or more green bars before you buy it and only sell when it has no green bars. To this, it adds Port Royale mechanics that make no sense in a game supposedly about the RISE of Venice. Venice rose in the 9th Century, due to its heavy trading with the Byzantine Empire, but the game starts during the period of the fall of Venice after Constantinople was conquered. Why focus a game on the "rise of Venice" on a period where they were actually declining? Because that's when cannons were brought to Europe, and Kalypso didn't want to have to rethink their pirate combat system to work with ballistas... Additionally, enjoy such traditional Venetian activities as collecting pirate maps to search for buried treasure that totally aren't just ripped straight out of their pirate-themed Port Royale. Combat is poor, but this is pretty par for the course for naval combat. There is almost no strategy in a battle with few units on a featureless plane and only a few attacks to choose from. Add to this, however, that any ship you aren't manually controlling (one at a time) will flagrantly disobey your wishes, and charge headlong at the wrong enemy (no control on who it attacks) even when you want them to retreat. Further, the fire arcs are TINY, (and slightly behind your ship, so you often have to be sailing slightly away from the enemy to hit them,) and the only way to steer is to right-click in the direction you want to go, but the only way to fire is to click on the enemy... and because of that tiny fire arc, you need to constantly babysit your angle relative to the enemy while also instantly clicking on the enemy the instant the firing ring turns green. Basically, there's no way to do it but to keep a button on the pause/slow down key, stop the game, fire, and then go back to steering whenever time is flowing. The only reason not to auto-resolve all of this, besides the fact that auto-resolve doesn't perform boarding, (for a bonus ship to sell if you capture instead of sink,) is that the AI is so blindingly stupid and trigger happy to fire at the instant something grazes along the edge of their fire arc that you can manual-fight enemies nearly twice your weight class. The game also completely lacks even the stakes that even Patrician managed to have. You have "rivals" in Rise of Venice, but they don't rival you in any meaningful way. This isn't a 4X where territory they take is territory you are shut out of, the "rivals" are just other random ships with colored flags that trade and build things, occasionally getting to a good deal before you did. Since the Patrician-style mechanics where all developments help improve economic development and "rising tides lift all boats" are in play, however, the existence of your rivals actually helps you, instead of hurting you. When you can't afford to keep pumping money into expanding housing, the rivals occasionally will, and that just creates a larger market for your trading empire to profit off of. Likewise, this isn't even a race to be doge first, those other guys are just THERE. They hypothetically can sabotage you, but only do so if you drop relations with them, and that only happens if you sabotage them, first. They have no personality, and there's not even any clear reason WHY these three other random yahoos are your rivals rather than any other random trader. Well, no, it IS clear - because "rivals" are just slots for multiplayer players, so in singleplayer, the bots replacing rivals are there, but they have essentially no relevance to the game outside being somewhat more likely to build housing and industry. Add to this lovely quest-breaking bugs, where you can complete a quest, but still fail it because the game doesn't recognize your success until time runs out, and you've got a very frustrating experience. This is a game that should have taken tried-and-true mechanics into a new setting to make something new and interesting, but instead, it's just a Frankenstein's monster with no identity of its own since these pieces of existing games were cobbled together with no rhyme or reason. It CAN be fun, but it's fun because of what was done better in other games. The city building and trade route management was better in the now MUCH cheaper Patrician III. If you like the piracy and combat, you should be playing Port Royale, because your opportunities for piracy are severely limited.

From the publishers of stellar Tropico series, here comes Rise of Venice, a strategy game with great premise of being a merchant with your own ship and goods to sell. It is kind of like Port Royal series, but without the fun of it, sadly. While the graphics and sound are pretty good, everything else is sadly not. First of all, there is no proper tutorial for the game and it can get pretty complex and overwhelming in the beginning with how many options you have to choose from. No customisation of the character is also a letdown, since the merchant is "you" and not hilarity of el presidente. Also what is worth mentioning is that the game has poor pathfinding and trade system is straight ripped off from X3: Terran Conflict, only difference being that here trading doesn't matter much, since AI will have always the same prices, which kind of kills the purpose of this game. Overall, it is a game that has a lot of promise, but is incredibly unwelcoming to new players and loves to leave them in the cold. If you're Port Royal veteran, you will like this game and its expansion, but if it's your first time with this type of game, you better try something else or pick it up when on sale, because you might not like how unforgiving this game can get.