Rise of Venice: Beyond the Sea Review

First off, let’s address the elephant in the virtual room. I didn’t like Rise of Venice. I still don’t; playing this first expansion to the game only clarified this. It would appear though, that there are some out there who actually enjoy the repetitive gameplay, dull presentation and complicated aims. Enough, at least, to justify painfully overpriced DLC. Rise of Venice: Beyond the Sea brings a wave of new content to the entry level trade sim, although that wave is more ‘South English coast’ than ‘Tsunami’.

The key attraction for Beyond the Sea is the new expanded map on which to conduct your trading ventures. The western side of the Mediterranean has now been opened up, which means cities like Barcelona, Gibraltar and Marseille are available to trade with. While playing the base game, I often had a feeling that I should be able to pan further to the left edge of the screen, a feeling cultivated by years of playing European mapped strategy games. The somewhat limited original map was never quite enough. Thankfully the new addition rectifies this issue and provides a little more scope to the game world.

Unfortunately though, the map expansion is largely superficial. Having access to these new cities changes very little in terms of gameplay. Having an extra area to trade within provides a novel experience for a little while, but once that’s worn off, it feels like a section of the map that should have been in the base game anyway. It’s not even all that significant; Kalypso claim that it increases the map size by 50%, but what they really mean is that they’ve crammed the same number of cities from the base map into the smaller western Mediterranean addition. It makes this area easier to trade within, but that doesn’t make it any more ‘enjoyable’ than the standard areas.

There are other additions brought to the game with Beyond the Sea. Honestly though, they’re not much to tout about. The new Residence missions see family members task you with slightly different challenges although, as with the base game, these all rely on the boring base mechanics. The Doge challenges are the only decent addition to the game, presenting the player with challenging but rewarding tasks that closely involve the war between Venice and Genoa. They feature a little more atmosphere than the standard missions due to their militaristic themes and they’re also more developed than standard ‘trade this from here to here’ tasks.

The other major addition is, and I'm serious here about this being a ‘major’ addition, a brand new ship type. The NAO, or Spanish Carrack, was the ship type Christopher Columbus stumbled across America with. The more prudent amongst you may be wondering what this has to do with a trading sim in which America is far out of reach, and you’d be right in thinking this. The new ship type adds very, very little to the game. After all, the various ship types weren’t exactly a crowning feature of Rise of Venice in the first place.

Through all this empty content, there’s one thing that sticks in my side while playing Beyond the Sea; the simple fact that at no point does the game attempt to take you any further from the sea than it did in the base game. I mean, why is the expansion called Beyond the Sea when all it does is show you more of the same sea that you were exploring in the first place. “

What’s beyond the sea, captain?”

“Ah, well, it appears to be more sea.”

I’m going to put this one down to bad marketing efforts, but it does seem a tad ingenuous to me. With a title like that I was half expecting a new land-based trading system on top of the naval mechanics.

The whole situation becomes a bit more insulting when you consider the price point Kalypso is offering Beyond the Sea at. With an RRP on Steam of £14.99, half the price of the base game, this has got to be one of the worst deals I’ve seen on the digital marketplace for quite some time. I accused the latest Crusader Kings 2 expansion of being a little light on content, but for half the price and loaded with about the same amount of new stuff (for a vastly superior game, mind you), that now seems like a complete bargain in comparison. Sure, the price is likely to fall, but I’m genuinely shocked that Kalypso can get away with selling such a small amount of content for such a high price.

If you really loved Rise of Venice, then this expansion is likely to provide an extra few hours of trading goodness. Although I would recommend picking up a copy of Kalypso’s own superior Patrician III beforehand. Simple fact is, this expansion presents terrible value for money and barely improves the game at all. The map addition is largely cosmetic and fails to make any lasting changes to the game. The rest is just filler content that provides less than an hour of extra gameplay by itself. I wouldn’t touch this one with a barge pole, or even a Gondolier’s oar.