The Chosen: Well of Souls Reviews

The Chosen: Well of Souls has received a drubbing with two more reviews clearly marking it mediocre. Escapist, with no rating given, didn’t even finish it.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must make an admission: I didn’t finish the game. The now-defunct Computer Gaming World magazine had a rule dictating that reviewers were required to play a game to completion before they wrote their review; Old Man Murray, on the other hand, said once that if a game wasn’t fun within the first 10 minutes there was no good reason to think it wasn’t going to suck all the way through. Caught between these two extremes, I settled on what I felt was a more-than-fair compromise: I put my head down and bulled through hour after tedious hour until not even guilt was enough to propel me further. It takes a lot to keep me from the end of a game, and in that sense, The Chosen: Well of Souls is in rare and elite company.

The Chosen: Well of Souls never descends into the realm of the truly bad, but neither does it manage to be good. Ultimately, it fails not on a catastrophic and memorable scale, but on a mundane and forgettable one, the victim of odd design choices, minor bugs and unrelenting monotony. The game does nothing that hasn’t been done before and done better. There’s just nothing here to recommend; gamers who are tired of Dungeon Siege but can’t get enough Dungeon Siege-style action might find something to like in it, but anyone not fitting that particular demographic would be better taking a pass.

GameZone is also not impressed with a 5.5.

Ok, all that said, The Chosen is not a bad game. It is not up to current standards but it is a pleasant little diversion, and one that will consume several hours of game time. Unfortunately, the game itself, if you drive through it, can be a little on the short side. The game does suffer from too many stereotypes, and there is an overall lack of immersion that makes this game feel less than urgent. You know, one of those ‘˜oh, there is a bad guy opening a portal to hell? Well, Ok, I’ll get around to him eventually’ feelings. That is not a good thing, simply because it creates the feeling that once you have the game, you do not need to work into it. It can sit there and you’ll get around to it eventually.