Rise of Venice

I have a soft spot for economic sims that make you feel genuinely stupid for the first two hours before clicking into something satisfying, and Rise of Venice absolutely fits that profile. From Gaming Minds Studios, the same small German team behind Port Royale 3 and Patrician IV, this is a supply-and-demand trading sim set across roughly 25 Mediterranean port cities in 15th-century Venice, and its core loop, buy cheap in one city, sell dear in another, reinvest into bigger convoys and production facilities, is both the game's greatest strength and its most obvious limitation. The progression structure is worth understanding before you buy. You start with a single ship and access to only three ports. Senate rank gates both your tradeable goods and your port licenses, so you are constantly chasing the next tier rather than free-roaming from session one. Buying licenses with rival-city Genoa-aligned ports costs extra, and bribing harbor masters is a routine budget line. The Council of Ten controls your promotions, and if they dislike you, raw wealth is not enough, you need to run political missions, lean on rival families, and occasionally arrange a little financial sabotage. That political layer is thinner than it sounds on paper, but it stops the game from being pure spreadsheet optimization and gives you a medium-term goal beyond simply stacking gold. The tutorial is the game's most divisive element. Setting up automated trade-route convoys, the bread-and-butter action you will perform hundreds of times, is not well explained, and a large portion of the mixed Steam reception traces back to players bouncing off that specific friction point in the first hour. Here is the honest breakdown for a newcomer: treat the story campaign as the tutorial it functionally is, accept that the first few hours are essentially an unpaid apprenticeship, and do not skip the tooltip text. Once the convoy automation clicks, the mid-game opens into something genuinely absorbing. Managing multiple fleets across Alexandria, Tripoli, Constantinople, and Rome while feeding production buildings and watching supply prices shift is the kind of quietly compulsive loop that makes you look up and realize it is 2am. Combat is the weak link and most reviewers across the board agree on this. Naval battles against pirates and political enemies exist, are unavoidable in some campaign missions, and are not particularly fun. Ships handle poorly in manual combat, camera angles are unhelpful, and the boarding mechanics feel unfinished. The game does allow you to resolve most combat through automated resolution, which I strongly recommend defaulting to unless you enjoy watching galleons circle each other for ten minutes. The campaign missions themselves also have a nasty habit of demanding fleet strength you do not yet have, punting you back to a save to grind your way to viability. That campaign structure frustration is real and not something you can patch with patience. Sandbox and leaderboard modes offer more free-form play once the campaign has taught you the systems, and multiplayer for up to four players exists via LAN and internet, though the online population has always been thin. For players who have already worn out Patrician IV or Port Royale 3, Rise of Venice lands somewhere between a lateral move and a modest step forward, it is more polished visually, features rival-family dynamics, and has a more forgiving production-chain system than its predecessors. If you have never touched the Gaming Minds back catalogue, this is actually a reasonable starting point precisely because that production delegation system removes some of the micromanagement torture that veterans of Patrician remember well. The Metacritic score of 66 reflects the tutorial problem and the campaign spike difficulty more than it reflects the quality of the underlying economic sim, which, when humming, is genuinely compelling for the niche it serves.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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