Below are user reviews of Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor and on the right are links to professionally written reviews.
The summary of review scores shows the distribution of scores given by the professional reviewers for Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor.
Column height indicates the number of reviews with a score within the range shown at the bottom of the column.
Higher scores (columns further towards the right) are better.
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User Reviews (31 - 41 of 147)
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Sloooow and boooring
1
Rating: 1,
Useful: 5 / 5
Date: October 15, 2001
Author: Amazon User
I have really been looking forward to a new SSI D&D game. A good old fashioned dungeon crawl with awesome graphics sounded like a lot of fun. It should be. It really should be.
It isn't. The problems?
The customization of characters is very limited. You get to create four cookie cutter characters. You might as well start with the pre-made characters for all the thought that goes into it. The game action is terribly slow. It takes forever to get anywhere. By the time you get through a few rooms you are so bored you can't stand it. I bought this game the day it came out and I have been trying to like it every since. I have just given up. That's $40 I will never see again. Oh well lesson learned.
By the way the music is pretty good and the movement (slow as it is) is fluid and life-like. I also have had no problems with crashes but then I have a fairly high end system.
I wouldn't buy this game unless you are a very patient person. I reccomend instead Baldur's Gate II.
If your expecting a good AD&D game think agian
1
Rating: 1,
Useful: 5 / 5
Date: April 22, 2002
Author: Amazon User
Game play is too slow way too slow. Very frustrating game. You go nowhere fast. Now i hear you can't uninstall it with out [messing] up your PC. I was exicted to see a game that takes place in Myth Drannor, but there's nothing to do except kill skeletons or orcs. Save your money and buy any of the Baldur's Gate games.
Shame, Shame , Shame . . .
1
Rating: 1,
Useful: 5 / 5
Date: September 18, 2002
Author: Amazon User
I really hate writing negative reviews, but this game needed it. When I first heard of PoR, I thought "Cool, a game using the 3rd edition rules that looks pretty decent." It was $50. The next time I seen it, I hade no money, but gave it a look anyway.It was $30. At the time I bought it the price was $20. Yes, through explaining the rate at which the price of this game dropped, I can support my opinions. Before I played the game, I gave the instruction manual a glance through, and I was horrified. There was NOTHING on quite a few things that make D&D.
No two weapon fighting, only four people to a party, VERY limited character generation, and there's more, oh so much more. I'm really glad I bought this game for only $20, otherwise I would not be a happy gamer. This is NOT a solid game and I scoff every time someone asks me about it. Don't waste the time and money we all have so precious little of.
Please listen to me..DO NOT BUY THIS GAME!!!!!
1
Rating: 1,
Useful: 7 / 9
Date: November 29, 2001
Author: Amazon User
Listen to me please!!! Do not buy this game!!! There are so many problems with this thing that I could go on for days. The most disturbing thing is I cannot believe that any game manufactor would ever put out such an totaly incomplete game. Some of things that I have experienced:
1. sometimes you will just be playing and the game will suddendly freeze up with no way to get out except to pull out the power cord on your PC, not even control/alt./delete will work, you have to pull the plug or hit the power switch.
2. if you get into a room with mulitple monsters there is a 90% chance that the game will become so sluggish that you can no longer control your characters or their actions. This has nothing to do with your PC's specs either so you cannot blame a slow computer. Mine for instance is a 1.5mhz processor with 512MB ram..and that is more than enough power to run any game on the market.
3. the action is so incredibly slow I swear you will almost fall alseep waiting just to finsh a minor battle.
4. the dungeons are so large and confusing that you will spend at least 3 days just trying to get to the end of the first one.
5. there is a bug in the software that will not permit you to uninstall the game!!! (how messed up it that!!!!)
If that is not enough reasons to not buy this game I think something must be wrong with you. I have to stop with 5 or I will lose my mind. Trust me there are MANY more problems/bugs that I do not have the patience to write about. Believe me, it takes a lot to get me so mad that I will spend the time to write a negative post about a game that is so bad it should not have even made it out of testing. PLEASE TAKE IT FROM ME AND THE OTHER POSTERS HERE....DO NOT BUY, PLAY, OR EVEN THINK ABOUT THIS GAME!!!!!
You have been forewarned.....(I wish I was before I wasted time and money on this worthless game.)
Ummm... No.
1
Rating: 1,
Useful: 7 / 9
Date: December 08, 2001
Author: Amazon User
First of all, I wonder why the "positive" reviewers are wasting their time adding insults like "whiners" toward those who are having problems? Just review the game, you just hurt your own credibility with insults ("see, only jerks like this game").
Secondly, the game was released unfinished. Any game that wipes out people's OS's deserves a refund. It is slow - and not just in combat. Given it's feature level, there's no justification for how slow it runs on fast, modern hardware. This is not a thinking player's game so much as a game for people who live in slow motion, or just like to spend a LOT of time playing a game in one sitting - like a whole day. The story is basic, the NPCs are lifeless, and even the installer is badly designed! (Not even counting the uninstall bug.)
Tweaks help, but should not be required. How far would you get selling gas if the car owner had to do a different tune-up at every station? It's not "advanced graphics," it's Poor Design and Testing.
In short, I wish I hadn't bought it. I don't have months to spend giving myself headaches building a few basic characters (no feats and skills! what?!?) a few levels only to find that the game's over and I don't know what happened of any importance.
The key to a "real" roleplaying game is interaction, richness of detail, and a complex and coherent world, and this game doesn't have those. It has all the worst parts of PenNPaper and none of the good parts.
Graphics: Good
Sound: Dull
Gameplay: Stinks
Reliabilty: Worse Than Stinks
Audience: Masochists Only
Pool of Radiance - Don't waste your money.
1
Rating: 1,
Useful: 6 / 7
Date: November 28, 2001
Author: Amazon User
I had great hopes for Pool of Radiance 2. I had played all the original gold box D&D games by SSI.
However, I installed the game and could not even get past the intro movie. The game froze every time. My computer system met the requirements listed on the game.
Eventually, I decided to remove it from my hard drive and wait until UbiSoft made a patch to let me play. -- I had read about the UNINSTALL bug, so I waited until I downloaded patch 1.1.
Even with the patch installed, uninstalling POR2 crashed my system. It erased or modified some system files. I tried to do a low level restore of my system, but that did not help. The only way I could use my computer was to completely wipe the hard drive and re-install all of my software.
If you don't want to waste your money or risk your computer, don't buy this game. [...]
Very few people will like this game
1
Rating: 1,
Useful: 6 / 7
Date: December 27, 2001
Author: Amazon User
This is a very slow game with a poorly designed interface. The only people who will like this game are those who want complete control over their combat so badly they will put up with all of the short comings of the game to have it.
This is a dungeon crawl in the truest sense. Your characters walk verrrrry slooowly from one sloooow combat to the next. You dread taking a wrong turn because it takes you soooo long to get back to another spot.
The characters can't be customized that much, and the rules (they claim to be 3rd Edition D&D - I wouldn't know) stink. Charisma, the most important attribute of... a Wizard??? Excuse me, did I read that wrong?
What is good about it? Well the graphics are beautiful. You will have lots of time to look at them as your characters plod slowly along their way.
Take my advice and save your money. This game stinks.
After years of patches...
3
Rating: 3,
Useful: 6 / 7
Date: May 12, 2006
Author: Amazon User
When this came out I wholeheartedly agree with the previous reviewers here--- and then some! It was awful, buggy, and slow. Now with computers much faster than the specifications required and with 4 count 'em, 4 official patches later, one having been released fairly recently by the distributer-- it's a little better. It is at least playable. You may get better play by turning off anti-aliasing features in your video card.
If you have the discs collecting dust or see it in a 99 cent bargain bin, it might be worth satisfying any residual curiosity. There are still a lot of aggravating aspects, but one thing that was good was the background artwork for the time. People disappointed with it when it came out should be aware of patches up to version 1.4
There are also some good mods out there for changing your character icons.
Unfortunately, it still does not hold a candle to the classic 8-bit gold box game.
ZERO Stars!
1
Rating: 1,
Useful: 6 / 7
Date: January 23, 2002
Author: Amazon User
This game is the biggest disappointment I've ever seen, and being an avid fan of the Gold Box series, it doubly hurts.
Beware at your own risk if you buy this one. And don't even try if you are running 2000/XP. According to Ubi Soft, these are "Business" operating systems, and we should not expect to run their games on a business operating system.
But I was asking them about XP Home? Last I checked, that wasn't considered by Micro$oft to be a business operating system.
It's this arrogance and negligence by Ubi Soft that will convince me never to buy another game from them again.
Anybody want an opened, unused version of POR?
Worse as I go along...
3
Rating: 3,
Useful: 7 / 10
Date: September 30, 2001
Author: Amazon User
I have to admit first that this is my most anticipated crpg I've been waiting on for over a year. As it came close to being released though I saw a few let downs in the reviews; little things such as no crossbows and not being able to choose your own skills, and of course no weapon focus. This I could live with. Finally it was released though and I started playing it hard and trying out my different options. My second big disappointment came when I found out that you can't choose your own feats either. Ahh...oh well, this I can live with.
Me and my buddies had preplayed a storyline out for our characters months before this game was released, getting our guys to around level 3 or 4 multi-class before we started the game. How we were going to incorporate this into the PoR story was have us each just play the single player first by ourselves as practice to get our guys to that level we achieved on pen and paper. Then we would export those single player individuals into the multiplayer version to beat the game all together for the first time around.
Well my third(and hopefully last) huge let down came when we loaded up the multiplayer and saw that it looks nothing like the single player. No storyline as I can see, no Nottle waiting for you to save him and sell items, no elves in the tree. Where the hell is the tree? This is I could not live with. I ordered 3 of these games just so we'd all have a disk, and now the multiplayer has turned out to be some "Diablo" type game with only random monsters, dungeons, and too many special items. We're still going along...hoping we'll find some form of story and not just meaningless hack and slash in the multiplayer. If I do or don't depends on how I'll come back and change my rating.
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