Excellent graphics and adds on to the deep gameplay that already existed with the orginal game. It did take me a while to find out how to advance but, there is a wiki on google. The patching is also strange as it won't let you update to the current version or something. Either way pick it up on sale and play for hours :).

The best praise I can think of while reviewing an add-on is this: once I have played the add-on, I have never returned to the original game. That is true for Dawn of Discovery Venice. Now that I have played it, I have never played the original Dawn of Discovery (and I have played over 150 hours of Venice.)

One of the mose significant alterations is the addition of a third quest giver and trader: the venetian Giacomo Garibaldi. This alone alters the game in a very significant and positive way. There are now two new mission types: privateering and trade races. I particularly enjoy the races, sending my flagship leaving all competitors in its... I was going to say "dust", but I guess "spray" is a better choice of word. Obviously, a third trader offers more variety, which is always good.

One thing I really like about DoD is the choices you can make at the beginning of your game. It is not a simple choice of "easy", "normal" or"hard" difficulty, but a choice of a multitude of ingredients where you can really taylor the game to your liking. Venice does not disapoint in this regard: you can choose to incorporate as many of those several new ingredients as you want.

I highly recommend DoD Venice. It adds many positive ingredients. It also gives you the possibility to ignore certain alterations you might want to do without. It's a win-win situation.

Of course, DoD Venice also adds multiplayer and some might find that important. I have not tried it.

A Nice add-on if you already like the game. Warning though, Ubisoft's terrible support has completely forgotten to make the auto updater get the latest patch, which fixes a major save bug and is also required for the great unofficial patch. You can find a place to manually download the 2.1 patch on the Anno 1404 Wiki.