It irks me how half the time everything's all dingy and depressing, but oh well.
Just got to venice after ~8-10 hours of gameplay (done a whole bunch of tombs and side quests and codex pages and shit), absolutely _LOVING_ it so far.
It's perfect, although a bit buggy. When storming San Gim with Mario's people early on, I scaled the wall, raised the gate, but the guys didn't come in and nothing triggered and it just asked me to raise the gate, so had to restart. And then just now, deciphering a glyph Forli, I entered the right code, it said I was wrong, I backed out and went in again, entered the same code and it let me through.
Still, it's amazing.
I've kept a list of all the feathers I've got so far, hopefully I'll get them all. I fully intend to try, at least.