I really hope I'll like Venomous more. Phreak has a great eye for level design and Towers of Twilight and Cardinals' Sins feel really ambitious. I just got a feeling he isn't that good at doing city missions. It felt lacking in design complexity and yet felt too complicated in terms of progression due to navigation and objective difficulties.
Yeah, this mission was clearly on the hard side (I played original version and not Director's Cut though). It has strong and extremely thick dark atmosphere (and I actually liked Bank iirc) but quite loaded with backtracking and with lots of things that are very vague and not obvious esp. when you are playing it first time. Lots of stuff is hidden behind small levers and buttons (I even recall that some main objective stuff also). I played it on Hard and can only imagine how Expert will look...
Felt the same way. Dropped it halfway through. Absolutely adored Cardinals' Sins and Towers of Twilight from the same author, but this felt pretty bland and, at points, tedious. It didn't have much on offer whereas these other two missions really bring you to unique places, with less frustrating navigation to boot.
A visually stunning mission for sure (though somewhat thin on content) but it could be argued that it (along with the unfulfilled Hammerite Imperium* cycle) puts Hammers too much in the Orthodox(-like) world whereas in the OG Hammers clearly are the Catholics of Thief, ie equivalent to RL western rite.
Try The Seven Shades of Mercury (the only completed mission of said intended cycle*) or some of DarthsLair's missions for some other interesting Hammer-themed FMs