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8.8 ultra recommended
If you're living in Venice, stop drilling that well! (Venice is a city in northern Italy with canals for streets, in case you're not sure if you live there or not.) All those wells sucking water from the aquifer deep beneath the waterways caused the city to sink into the Adriatic Sea. Did you know that most of the older houses are flooded on the first floor? Venice was once the richest trade port in all of Europe. Now look at it. It's like a bowl of Cap'n Crunch's Peanut Butter Crunch forgotten on the kitchen counter.
What can you do to help? Well, Popcap Games are doing their part, and so can you. Their Venice allows you to travel through the soggy city, moving from building to building in your gondola. Your goal is to rescue the city's ancient magical treasures, stolen in the seizure of Constantinople way back when, and use their power to lower the tide. The treasures may have cursed the floating city but they also gave it the power to repel the Adriatic flood tides. Venice plays like a mixture of Breakout and a game where you shoot mice into holes that I just made up.
There are seventy-two buildings to be saved. In every building you'll find lots of wooden shapes with curious holes, or slots, cut into them. These slots are each in the shape of one type of treasure. There are hearts, Murano vases, skeleton keys, stars, Constantinople moon coins, and in later neighborhoods ruby rings and lyres. Your gondola fires treasures one at a time upwards. If they meet a matching slot, they stick. Fill every hole in a wooden shape and it will disappear. Clear all of the wooden shapes onscreen and the tide will rush in and raise your gondola higher. Don't worry, because when you successfully complete the highest level of the building the torrent will subside.
But it's not as easy as it sounds! If a treasure you've lauched skywards fails to meet a matching wooden slot, it will come down again. Even worse, it may hit an obstacle and bounce away at an odd angle. You'd better catch it! It's Game Over if you lose too many treasures into the flood waters.
There are a variety of wooden constructions. Spinning circles, swinging panels, rotating crosses, and more. Usually knocking a treasure into a slot will affect the wooden shape, sending it spinning another way or knocking it upwards on its hinge. You can get bonus points and powerups by creating chain reactions. For example, if you shoot a skeleton key into a slot at the top of the screen and there is an empty skeleton key slot below it, your treasure will spawn a second key which will tumble into the lower slot. The more tumble bonuses you get, the higher your chance of receiving a powerup.
Like Breakout, powerups must be catched to activate them. The most useful powerup is the wings powerup. Swan wings attach to your gondola and you're able to fly wherever you like onscreen. This makes it easy to shoot treasures into slots blocked by obstacles. A rainbow swirl powerup lets you shoot into any slot. There are also score multipliers and power shots and extra lives. And finally a powerup that summons Cupid to your aid. If you fire a treaure into his chubby hands, he'll take it to a slot near the top of the screen. Powerups are not only generated by multiple tumble bonuses, but sometimes you can find them sitting on wooden shapes, just waiting to be knocked free.
Watch out for obstacles! There are bumpers that bounce the treasures around. Sometimes you need to use these to bank a shot to a certain area that you otherwise couldn't target. There are moldy blocks that you have to destroy by hitting them with treasures. (Don't try this at home.) There are sliding blocks that move back and forth when hit. There are baskets that hold the treasure, then drop it. And more!
Every third building, you get a chance to try a trick shot. Make it, and you get 10,000 bonus points.
The single hardest thing about Venice is learning which structures will reflect a treasure and which you can safely shoot through. I started to figure it out after a while, but it would have been nice for Cupid to explain this when he was taking me through the tutorial. Occasionally a shot that I thought was okay was reflected. Also, many, many times I clicked to fire a treasure and nothing happened. I had to click again. I figure either Cupid was a bit slow loading gunpowder into the treasure cannon or it's a bug.
Popcap Games has created a fun and unique casual game, one of the most original bigger budget casual games in a while. If you're sick of hunting for spiders and apples in cluttered rooms and watching castaways stand around and hammer, give this slick arcade gem a try! There are multiple modes of play (flood mode is fun) and excellent, well-crafted music. My brother worked on a goat farm in Italy for six months, catching goats, milking goats, and repairing holes that the goats made in the fence during their escapades. Take it from him: Venice is worth visiting!