The Chosen: Well of Souls Review
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Well, to Rebelmind's credit, they're pretty good about giving you places to spend money. In Space Hack, it cost a lot of money to keep your equipment repaired. In The Chosen, the method is a little more fun. You get to combine pieces of equipment to improve them. There are many rules for how these combinations work -- for example, weapons improve the damage or armor rating of an item, at the cost of durability -- but the end result is that for a certain amount of money, you can grow your equipment with you, and it's sometimes more fun to develop your equipment than it is to develop your character. More importantly, you have to keep making decisions about what to do with the items you find. Do you sell them and make money, or do you try and combine them and spend money? Early in the game this decision is easy, as it doesn't cost a lot of money to improve basic equipment, but the better you develop your items, the more it costs to continue to add to them, and then what do you do? There isn't a lot of money available in the game (demons, it turns out, are fairly chintzy), and so the answer isn't obvious. But, just like with the followers, it's nice when a game forces you to pay attention and to make some decisions.
Conclusion
The Chosen: Well of Souls is what it is. It's a bargain-priced action role-playing game, and it delivers about what you should expect. I mean, if you go to a zombie movie and it features a small band of survivors who get picked off one by one, should you be disappointed? No, because while you can always hope for something more original, that's what you paid to see.
The Chosen delivers all the combat you could want during its 30-hour campaign, but it doesn't even try to do anything more. There is very little dialogue, there is almost no story, and there is nothing in the way of bells and whistles (the voice acting in particular is brutal, which is surprising since it was supposedly re-recorded for the North American release). But the combat works well enough to hold the game together, and it might be enough to entertain people who enjoy grinding through combat without all that bothersome talking getting in the way. For everyone else, as long as you enter with tempered expectations, you might find The Chosen to be a nice enough diversion, but nothing more.
