The Chosen: Well of Souls Review
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The Chosen: Well of Souls (also known as Frater in Europe) is the latest budget action role-playing game from Polish developer Rebelmind, who also created Space Hack (released in 2005) and Grom: Terror in Tibet (released in 2003). I never played Grom, but Space Hack and The Chosen have a lot in common -- perhaps too much in common, given Space Hack's lukewarm reviews -- with both games focusing on combat over everything else, and with both forgetting that things like story and dialogue can help a game along. This sort of thing always makes me wonder: did Rebelmind not receive any feedback with Space Hack, or did they simply decide to ignore it, and create a game with almost exactly the same pros and cons and probably the same mixed reviews?
One place where The Chosen differs from Space Hack is the setting. Instead of using a spaceship, The Chosen takes place in 19th century Europe -- or at least a version of 19th century Europe where magic, zombies, and machine guns all exist. As the game opens up, an evil magician named Marcus Dominus Ingens has captured the Chosen One and the Emerald Tablet, and he has opened up several Wells of Souls to unleash demons and skeletons and a variety of other nasties on an unsuspecting world. You play as a (hunter) working for the Alchemists (the good guys), and your job, naturally, is to kill all of the creatures produced by the Wells, then to close down the Wells, and finally to track down the evil magician himself and set everything to rights.
Character Development
The Chosen includes three different characters for you to play -- Frater (a spellcaster), Elena (an archer), and Tong Wong (a fighter) -- but the character development system is basically classless, and so there is little difference between the three. Each class gets a couple of unique skills (like spellcasters getting the (mana pool) skill, which improves their mana regeneration rate) but otherwise the classes share a bunch of common skills, and so you can develop any of the characters any way you want.
Oddly, all of the skills in the game are passive, and so instead of jumping around and performing special fighting moves, you only get to do things like increase how much damage you do or how fast you run. The skills are divided into three categories (with about nine skills per category), but you can only have one skill per category active at once, meaning that you have to choose a few skills to focus on. You also get four attributes -- strength, dexterity, knowledge, and vitality -- that do about what you'd expect.
You can reach level 40 in the game, and each time you gain a level you also receive points to spend on your attributes and skills. Skills can only be advanced five times, but most skills also have prerequisites, and so the character development system, while basic, also works fairly well. It will take you until the end of the game to maximize a trio of high level skills, and at no point will you find yourself to be way more powerful than your enemies. If nothing else, Rebelmind did a good job in keeping The Chosen balanced, which is nice.
Game Mechanics
The Chosen sits squarely on the Diablo side of the fence as far as look and feel go. The camera typically gives you an overhead view of your surroundings, and you can perform most actions with a single mouse click. You left click to move and you left click to attack, and holding down the left mouse button will cause you to continue to attack (well, at least it should, but sometimes it doesn't). You can also use the right mouse button to cast spells and summon demons, and the mouse wheel to zoom or rotate the camera.
The control scheme is actually a little strange since you can't use the mouse to completely control the camera, which games of this sort usually allow you to do (in Neverwinter Nights 2, for example, you can control all aspects of the camera with the middle mouse button). I didn't like using the mouse wheel to rotate the camera, and that meant I had to rely on the keyboard for camera movement. Since The Chosen doesn't have any sort of (smart) camera system to help you out, that means the game puts a higher emphasis on your non-mouse hand than usual, since you also have to use that hand to do things like quaff potions, summon familiars, teleport to the Alchemist base, and pause the game. I didn't really like this balance between the hands, and I wish Rebelmind had put a little more effort into the interface to provide more options.
As for the actual gameplay, what you do mostly in the game is kill thousands of enemies. There are a handful of side quests and a few story moments, but these are few and far between. The background summary I listed in the introduction is roughly just as detailed as what you see in the game. You never learn who Marcus Dominus Ingens is or why he's trying to take over the world or where the Alchemists came from or how the Chosen One is selected or why there are Wells of Souls or anything like that. Rebelmind just provided the barest of bare-bones histories to support the game, and then stopped there. Anybody who plays role-playing games for the character interactions or for the stories involved will be thoroughly bored by The Chosen.
Luckily, the combat system works pretty well. Rebelmind did a nice job in varying the locations you explore and the enemies you face to keep the combat interesting. Some enemies can turn invisible, some are rooted in the ground, some can resurrect fallen comrades, some lie in wait and try to ambush you, and others are weak but cast nasty spells. That means you have to pay attention to what you're fighting, and you have to adjust your tactics to the situation. You can't just run forward and kill everything that gets in your way (like in, say, Dungeon Siege II). You have to target some creatures right away, or attack and retreat, or simply run away, and it's nice when an action role-playing game makes you think a little.
Followers and Economy
There are two parts of The Chosen that I thought worked very well: the characters who follow you and help you in your adventures, and the economy. Let me start with the followers. In The Chosen, you can gain assistance from three types of characters: people you meet on a map, and who stay with you until they die or until you move on to the next map; (helpers) who you can summon at will, but who are expensive to heal or resurrect; and demons, who you capture each time you close a Well of Souls, and who only stick around for a short period of time.
The three kinds of followers each have their strengths and weaknesses, and have different situations where they're useful. For example, the regular followers can be healed using the (tend) skill / aura, but if they die then they're gone for good. Helpers, meanwhile, can be summoned at any time, but they only heal when they gain a level, and they only earn experience when they do damage, and so you have to get them involved in combat but keep them protected as well. Finally, demons are very powerful, but they require (faith) to be summoned, and they only last for about 10 seconds, and so you have to save them for tough fights. I liked having different options for my followers, including having two types of helpers (a flying ranged attacker and a big bulky melee fighter), and I liked that they changed how I approached battles.
As for the economy, in most role-playing games developers don't even make an attempt to keep money in check. Usually the problem is pretty basic -- you find money but then there isn't really anything you need to spend it on -- but in some games (like Fable and Dungeon Lords), so little work went into the economy that you can actually make money by repeatedly buying and selling an item at a shopkeeper.
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.
