Venetica is a great RPG/ACTION/ADVENTURE game lead by a well written story.
While in the US people seem to ask for more and more visually stunning and violent games, here in Europe we care less and less for multi-million dollars production, and expect games with more sensibility, games rich of this "garage" feeling that gives the sensation of a RPG crafted "by gamers for gamers". What some call "old school", other call "human touch".
This has lead to a new generation of European CRPGs (and mostly German), like Risen for the immersion type, for example, like Drakensang for the table-RPG to PC conversion type, like Divinity 2 or Venetica for the action sort. And while cold and soulless games like Dragon Age are lost on many of the European gamers, games with smaller budget, and then, less perfect graphics and game-play, but with more soul, come to be misunderstood and under-appreciated by Gamespot's reviewers and the like of them.
Concerning Venetica, there is an aspect of the game that deserves to be applauded: the way the developers have treated Scarlett, the main character. She's a young women, and her creators succeeded in making a very realistic, charming, lovable assembling of polygons and textures. Scarlett is not the usual kind of female heroine, the iron-clad-cheerleader we meet in most RPGs. She's sane, decent, her armours cover more than her crotch and breast, she never conveys this sluttish feeling recurrent in the average sword-wielding girls of computer games. In some way, she redeems the image of women on a computer screen. Sensitive, strong, intelligent, she uses her charisma, wit and strength to win the game as well as to win the heart of the player.
Venetica deserves, from my modest point of view, 8.5 instead of the note I gave it above. The extra-point is to boost up the unfair average note due to reviewers who played a game that was not really aimed at them.