I seem to have an affinity for a certain type of game - made in Europe (often Eastern Europe), small company, low budget, one of their first games and so on. I am constantly stumbling across them and playing them - despite the fact that they are seldom very good. I attribute this to my love of first person shooters and role-playing games on the PC, and also my voracity of plowing through games combined with the relative paucity of new releases in those genres. There is good and bad news to this seeming addiction of mine - the bad news is that I am often paying too much for short and mediocre games with almost no replay value. The good news is that many of these games have an interesting nugget at their core - some gameplay element or twist that makes them compelling and ultimately worth playing, even if they still aren't very good when viewed critically.

That is - for good or bad - pretty much my synopsis for The Chosen: Well of Souls.

The game tells the story of how Marcus Dominus Ingens discovered the secret to immortality at the turn of the Nineteenth Century and began eliminating other high level alchemists in order to keep this power his own - and to feed into the development of even stronger powers. He can harness the power of the souls of these alchemists by trapping them in soul wells, which also allows him to unleash massive armies of demons, werewolves, zombies, vampires and more - all for the purpose of gathering more power to himself, because with each new soul he gathers, he becomes more powerful, while the Chosen One becomes weaker. There is a prophecy of a Chosen One who can stop this - and in a surprising move you are not that chosen one! Instead you play as an elite warrior who must free the alchemists' souls by destroying the soul wells, complete other tasks to help thwart Ingens' plans and save the Chosen One to restore the stolen tablet and the balance of power before Ingens takes over the world.

The setting is an interesting variation on the typical fantasy themes - while you will go to towers, cast spells, visit dungeons and explore castles, there is much more to the game than just that. As the story suggests, the setting is the Nineteenth Century, but beyond that it is a vision of the Nineteenth Century in Eastern Europe and North Africa and other areas that is desolate and eerie. There is technology present - pistols and shotguns are used alongside the bow and staff - but this is an age of torches, candles and hulking mechanical devices. The graphics are very nicely detailed 3D environments that feature moving trees that react as you walk through them, as well as many destructible environments. Night, day and shadow effects are very nicely implemented too and the matching sound and visuals as you or an enemy come through the trees are a wonderful surprise. The spell effects are spectacular too - when I first cast a fireball and it exploded with a force that shook the game both sonically and visually, I knew I had found my favorite spell. Other spells are equally impressive - freezing enemies, causing waves of destruction to propel out from you and so on; it all looks great and sounds every bit as good.

You chose between three character types - Frater the Monk, Elena the Demon Huntress (equally adept with bow or gun) or Khan the Warrior. These are pretty much the same as the typical fighter / mage / archer archetypes, with the exception that ranged weaponry includes guns as well as bows. Characters gain experience by completing quests and (mainly) by killing loads of beasties. At each new level you gain five development points and a skill point. The development points allow you to increase character attributes and the skill points are spent developing your character's skill tree. Character development paths are surprisingly limited - there are only four primary governing statistics: strength, dexterity, intelligence and vitality. These impact damage, health, mana, accuracy and the other usual things you need to make it through the game. They also impact your ability to wield certain weapons and use certain skills and spells. The skill trees are nearly identical for all three characters, but since you only get a point per level (plus occasional bonus points) you will never have enough to develop a true generalist or change the path you take initially. The result is that the skill tree doesn't feel satisfying for any of the classes - and I found this especially true for the mage. Rather than increasing your magical skills in certain areas through the skill tree, you buy (or find) spell books and use the skill tree to reduce enemy resistance to certain classes of spells.

The gameplay is viewed from an isometric perspective as is typical in a Diablo-clone action RPG. You look down on your hero as he moves through the world, clicking to move him to new locations and using the WASD keys to control camera. Camera control in these games can be a major problem, so it is a big positive that things work so smoothly here. You can rotate and zoom the view quickly so you can always see your hero and the graphical performance means that making these changes never slows things down. The controls in general are very well laid out and completely flexible - you never feel that you're battling the controls. One thing that will irritate some is that looking at your inventory or character screen doesn't pause the game. This really isn't a problem since the spacebar pauses the game and then you can use the inventory or other screens at your leisure, but it would make more sense if brining up the inventory paused the game as well.

The interface works well throughout but there are some elements that fall a bit short of current offerings. The health and mana are indicated in each corner, as is typical with these games, and the number of your health and mana potions is superimposed on the appropriate gauge. I wish that the inventory had sorting options, especially since it is very possible to be 'full' and simply rearrange a few things and make plenty of room. You are also not shown the impact of changing equipment - you have to know what your current weapon is doing for you and make a decision based on that. So far I have had almost exclusively good things to say - admit it, you're just waiting for the other shoe to drop. I knew you were - and here it comes.

The Chosen is lots of fun - so it's too bad the game is laden with problems that get in the way of that fun. The story is very clichéd, but honestly this wouldn't be so bothersome if the writers hadn't gone out of their way to shove it in your face every time you talk to someone. The dialogs that accompany every NPC chat is stilted and boring to read - if you choose to read them at all. I found myself skimming for details by the time I had closed my first soul well. But they are better than the voiced dialogue, for which there is no description I can summon other than just plain awful. The first time I heard the hero I thought someone was doing a bad impersonation of Peter Lorre. Here you have already destroyed hundreds of monsters and proven to the people of the countryside that you are a one person wrecking-crew - but you might have been asking for more gruel, the way your character sounds. It is true that they the cut scenes come that often, but I dreaded them anyway.

I normally complain about RPGs that have insufficient 'gold sinks', making you too rich for your own good early on in the game, but the opposite is true here - I played as Frater and found myself selling junk constantly and bashing every crate for the measly gold provided so I could get the next level spell book. The game provides an 'item creation cauldron' that you would think should take care of that - allowing you to invest in a skill as opposed to spending cash to buy items all the time. Unfortunately, creating items also costs tons of cash. To put this in perspective, buying a first level spell book costs 1500 and the average gold drop from a monster or chest yields about 20. Worse yet, there is about a 20% chance that an enemy will drop anything and perhaps 10% chance that a crate or barrel will contain anything. It never gets better, so you will enter an area, kill some enemies and grab items until your inventory is full and then teleport back to sell stuff off and then return and repeat. Oh, and since your weapons and armor deteriorate and you can never learn a repair or identify skill, you constantly have to pay to repair and identify items - and too often the investment doesn't pay off at resale.

There is plenty to criticize about The Chosen: Well of Souls, but I want to reinforce that it's important to look at it as a budget release. Taking that perspective as a basis for your assumptions will put you into the correct mindset - limited game, fun gameplay, nothing revolutionary. And I find that this game succeeds along those lines in pretty much the same way as last year's Space Hack (not surprising since it is based on the same engine). The core gameplay is a blast - loads of monsters to kill, fun and effective spells and weapons, and you can see your effectiveness increasing as you increase in level. Because the core game is fun, I could handle the problems and frustrations, and if you look at The Chosen as a very linear game filled with some nice, mindless hack 'n' slash fun then this will almost certainly be the case for you too.

Reviewed by Michael Anderson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).