40 three Degrees of Thievery in the Slow Lane.

I can’t quite remember why I downloaded this demo, but it’s been sitting in my laptop for a few months now. In fact, I must have downloaded it thinking to take advantage of the hundred+ GBs suddenly available in the aftermath of the harddrive crash. Usually what demos I deign to download are ones that I think are – or will prove to be – pretty interesting, since I cannot really afford to eat up precious sectors in my ever-decreasing harddisk space.

I must have downloaded it thinking it would play like Diablo, or action RPGs of similar kinds. Indeed, The Chosen turned out to be a point-and-click (hack’n’slash if you played the Warrior class, which I didn’t) RPG adventure, not with a fighting system that I had expected, but not with something new either. And up to whatever the demo offered, the game is not half bad. But nor is it exceptional. In fact, the first thing that I thought of as the in-game screen first loaded was, “Hey, this looks like Dungeon Runners!” It could have been the art – graphics, backgrounds and the such are good – but as you played through the game, you’d start to think that perhaps free MMORPGs may offer even more than this does.

But hey, this is only the demo, which brings the player from the start of the game to when he/she finds the secret laboratory. In fact, there is one shortcut button that says “Enter/Leave Laboratory” (which hardly serves a purpose in the demo since you have yet to find the lab then), so I gathered that much of the real gameplay only starts after you have found and entered this place. Extra hints to that are: two summonable creatures/helpers (Golem and Ne-somethingIforgot) will only be awarded to you inside the laboratory. Thus powerful as they may seem, you don’t get to use them in the demo at all.

Another thing. Voice acting? …Not too good. Bad fake accents? Or just plain bad acting? I wasn’t too impressed.

Classes are: Warrior, Hunter, Monk. Naturally, I chose Hunter in my first round, which played okay for this simple first stage. For my second round I used Monk, whose magic did nearly as much damage as if the Hunter was fighting melee (which is way more powerful than her arrows), so this character has both the distance and damage advantage at this stage of the game. Mana recovery is not a problem since mana portions are abound – if you cared to take the time to bash every crate and box lying around, that is. Which brings me to: I hardly think this game will have much replay value. Storyline is the same for both classes I played, and from the looks of it, will remain surprise-less for the rest of the game.

I deleted the demo without much hesitation after playing, which might just mean that it didn’t leave much impression on me. I could really try continuing my Dungeon Runners, now; I’ve left it untouched for too long.