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My opinion sinks ever the lower into the Pool of Radiance

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: October 10, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Those of you unfortunate enough to have bought this game will realize just how bad it is from the start. That is to say, you'll be just a bit perplexed when the autorun greets you with an unrecoverable crash. If you manage to get past that, then the installer will crash, causing you to repeat the 30-minute process (for a 'typical' install) over again. And then, when you load the game, it will crash once more, or if you're lucky it'll just dump you back out on the desktop. By this time you will be feeling ripped-off and disgusted. If that wasn't bad enough, the game has a nasty tendency of being uncannily stable during actual play, and then crashing once and for all- sort of like what SSI's stock must be doing now. Only a complete reinstallation will fix it once the thing goes.

All right, so this is all fixable with patches, and I'm very optimistic about SSI and UBI-Soft getting those out (sheah, right). If you are a very, very patient player, then you will perhaps not break the discs over your knee and stomp on the remains in wanton rage. The game box proudly advertises 'over 100 hours of gameplay.' It delivers, and you'll be bored stone dead for the first fifty. I have seen exactly 4 kinds of monsters in the first 10 hours of game time. That would be orcs, skeletons, ghouls, and shadows (with various HP differences among them). Battling undead hordes was never this boring. I do believe I have lost a point of my IQ clicking on brainless skeletons.

This is one of those titles where you will repeatedly shake your head and mutter 'what were those ... thinking?' The game seems to have a lot of features, but as to what you can actually use, there's just about nothing. You can't choose your feats, your racial enemy, change formations, dual wield, etc. The Dungeon Master is based on a real-life DM that nobody plays D&D with, and is often the target of rotten tomatoes when he ventures outdoors. It gives out experience so sparingly you'll beat the monitor and rip out your hair in fury. It won't let your party members get more than half a screen away from the leader (forget about scouting, thief boy) and it keeps saying you can't do things you should be able to do.

So, if you haven't played a D&D CRPG yet, then you really should. Just make sure it isn't THIS one. Go get Baldur's Gate, or wait until Neverwinter Nights comes out. This is shaping up to be one of the biggest, most unexpected flops in CRPG history and you should avoid it like the plague.

Baldur's Gate on Valium

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 26 / 27
Date: February 15, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I wanted to like this game. I really did. I was so excited when I got it. It was one of the first games to use 3rd Edition Rules Ad&D, complete with an old-school turn based combat system. My excitement would quickly turn to disgust, though.

It becomes apparent that this game was rushed right when you first create your party. The characters look utterly bland and generic, and customizability is extremely limited (ooo, my mage can have either a blue robe or black robe). Conspicuously missing are the Druid, Bard, and Wizard classes. Why these were not included is beyond me, and takes away from the authenticity and depth of the game. Also, you are not able to choose your own feats. For those who are unfamiliar with 3rd edition rules, feats are special abilities that you gain upon leveling up that enhance your character. Normally, you can choose which feats to take, but in this game they're all chosen for you as you level up. Ridiculous.

Things don't get any better after that. You're immediately thrust into a battle upon starting the game. Battles are full-turn based, with one character taking an action, then the next, etc, etc. Combat is excruciatingly long. Character animations are slow...prepare to be bored to tears while waiting for fifteen zombies to slowly lurch across the playfield before you can take any action (and wait again the next time around). The most frustrating aspect of combat, though, is the miss rate of your physical combatants. It's not uncommon to go a few rounds with all of your party memebers hitting absolutely NOTHING. In a real-time game like Baldur's Gate, this isn't so bad, since everything is happening at once, but in a game like this, it can make what should be simple and quick battles take FOREVER. After about ten minutes of both sides swinging at each other like they were playing pinata, I finally kill the three or four orcs at the beginning of the game and am rewarded with about 20xp for each of my party members. It takes 1000 to reach level 2. Needless to say, leveling is painfully slow. Expect to play for hours and hours without advancing a single level, even early on when leveling should be relatively quick. In addition, to make things quite lopsided, you'll find troves of uber equipment, often in the first dungeon. My level 3 Barbarian was wielding a +3 Axe at one point, which is analogous to giving an Uzi to a kindergartener, and a practice any self-respecting DM would stay far away from.

My biggest gripe with this game is magic and magic-based classes. As I stated before, the Wizard class is completely absent from the game. While the Sorcerer is a great class in its own right, the Wizard adds an old school and authentic feel, and it's sorely missed in this game. Aside from that, what IS there isn't much to write home about, either. Upon looking at my game's manual, I was appalled at the paltry collection of spells available to spellcasters. NO level 9 spells, and few higher level spells, with no creative or innovative spells whatsoever. Spellcasters themselves also leave a lot to be desired. In short, don't pick a Sorcerer for your party unless you want to be lugging around a dead weight xp hog with the durability of tissue paper for a very good portion of the game. Early on, your caster will start with at the very most 6 hit points, and cannot wear any sort of armor. This means that if an orc decides to turn his axe on our robed buddy, he won't last much longer than a round or two. The said orc while also laugh mockingly with when the sorcerer tries to defend himself by shooting a pretty little red bolt at him which scratches the orc for 2 damage. The sorcerer can cast this same little red bolt 4 times before exhausting his spell reserves, making him even more helpless. He could always try attacking with his equipped weapon, but he may as well be firing a musket at a penny 100 yards away, while blindfolded. I know mages are supposed to be weak when starting out and come into their own at higher levels, but as I mentioned before, levels comes extremely slowly, so it will be a long an arduous path before your mage can actually do anything other than die. This was one of the main reasons I stopped playing in disgust, since I'm a big fan of magic users and they're practically useless for a good portion of this game.

In conclusion, an overhyped game that deserves to be forgotten. [Money] wasted that I'll never get back.

Worst gameplay ever?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 24 / 25
Date: October 23, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Pool of Radiance shows every sign of being rushed to market despite obvious problems in the user interface and serious bugs. It's only redeeming feature is a turn-based combat system that is deeply flawed and the ability to save at any time which is very important.

Let's start with the boring and repetitive dungeons which look like they were expressly designed to antagonize the players. Long detours are required to travel between nearby locations. The automap is almost useless as it consistently shows openings where none exist.

... Frequently characters fail to take anything close to the obvious, direct route to their targets and consequently arrive there too late to take any further action. Often a character would walk through a cloud of death rather than take a shorter, clear route. However, the bad guys were just as stupid so I guess it evens up.

The targeting algorithm is equally bad. All the characters are animated (wings flapping, etc) and even when the cursor is stationary they will move in and out of the target zone of an arrow or spell depending on which frame of the animation is being shown. Not only does this cause a problem when trying to target the character, but it causes problems when trying to target nearby characters, too. The angle of view also prevents you from targeting characters when there is a larger character in front (from the viewer's point of view, not the character's point of view)...

The non-combat part of the targeting algorithm is also flawed. Quite frequently it was impossible to persuade the group to move to the desired location because of the angle of view (which cannot be changed). There are also artificial restrictions on how far characters can look and travel both in and out of combat.

You can arrange your party to travel in a particular formation. This feature doesn't work. I had my fighters up front, thieves and clerics next, and my magic-user at the back. So why is it my magic user always seemed to walk into a room first? I couldn't get my fighters into combat until the bad guys had killed the magic-user because the silly sod was blocking the door. I wish there was a way for my fighters to kill the magic-user first.

I lost several turns in each fight because the computer has a habit of ending your turns prematurely.

It's also unstable. During about 100 hours of play the system crashed or hung about a dozen times. It also pauses for up to five seconds at a time with annoying regularity. I would expect this from a FPS game, but not an isometric view. Diablo never hung once.

All in all, this loses to Diablo in every way except the turn based combat (in theory, anyway) and the ability to save at any time (which I really like).

Two thumbs down.

Long awaited, huge disappointment

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 18 / 18
Date: September 29, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Having seen the advance screen shots of the game 2 years ago at E3 in L.A., I have long awaited the release of Pool of Radiance. I am an avid fan of the original game and series that took us to the Forgotten Realms. To say the graphics aren't stunning would be an understatement for they truly are. That is about the only thing I can say good about the game itself.

To describe it best would be Diablo on SLOW MOTION! Everything moves at a snails pace, including combat which is more tedious than it is worth - to boot, the game is mostly combat, little story told within and what is told is rarely spoken and hard to read. To bring up a menu for ANYTHING requires right clicking, then clicking on a subheading, then on the final choice and FINALLY on the monster, character or object you want to do the ability on. Ease of controls is something this game is not. Reading your characters health requires another sub command within a command, etc. Anyone who has played these games before knows that ease of controls is key to enjoying any game.

Characters walk slowly everywhere except in combat. You cannot move one character ahead of the party to scout around since you cannot be 10' from the rest it seems. Scrolling on a map only goes as far as the size of your monitor, no farther, despite having uncovered the area from the 'fog' previously. All in all, the controls are horrible.

Character generation is extremely limiting despite what the reviews say. There are no bards, no true wizards (only sorcerer), no subclasses within the class like the Third Ed. rules offer (not to mention Baldur's Gate II), no gnomes, no female characters unless an elf-human-or half-elf, lack of a good spell list (only the basics are covered), the average weapons, no ammo to buy for ranged weapons (unlimited supply? Realism counts to some degree now), etc.

It is a poor adaptation of the Dungeons & Dragons universe. Do not be fooled by the graphics alone. The third edition rules are touched on here and there but it is clearly not what any gamers would like or expect. For the first attempt by SSI, UbiSoft and Prima games to enter the D&D universe, it is a poor one at best. Stick with Baldur's Gate II and wait for the expansions in that series. Otherwise, there is Neverwinter Nights next year to look for. What an extreme disappointment this was. After just one day, I am already returning the software. Sad and a true disappointment..

Nothing radiant about this

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 17
Date: October 10, 2001
Author: Amazon User

PoR has to be the most disappointing CRPG release ever. I played the original gold box games when they were released, and this does not live up to the legacy. There are numerous crash bugs, a tendency for the save files to become corrupted and unusuable (wave goodbye to hours of play), a horrible user interface and the most unbelievably awful gameplay system I've ever had to slog through. I imagine that SSI, before starting development on PoR, had two folders available: one for the best features of the gold box games, one for the worst.

The devs picked up the wrong folder before starting.

The combat is terrible. It amounts to waiting (slowly, even with gamespeed set to max) for monsters to make their way towards your party and then, just as slowly, attacking them. And SSI brought in the 2-part turn method which was definitely NOT one of the endearing features of the gold box games. It makes for redundant effort and a great deal of wasted time. On the other hand, I *am* getting a good deal of reading done while waiting.

People have complained that comparing PoR to the Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale/Planescape:Torment run is unfair. I agree. It's horrendously unfair to take a beta-code "game" which shows little to no knowledge of, to say nothing of love for, the D&D license and compare it to the magnificent efforts of Black Isle Studios' products. It's like setting a flea against Godzilla.

PoR is the favoured acronym for this disastrous undertaking. Advance the last letter forward one letter in the alphabet and you'll have a better idea of what this game truly is.

STAY AWAY!!! Save your money for IWD 2 or anything else

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: March 25, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Worst of the worst!!! This game has glitches, glitches and more glitches!! Spells and magic items that are so cumbersome to use you dont bother. You have items that will kick you out of the game back to your PC desktop over and over again when you try to pick them or anything else up. Fights that you cant leave the area or fight because the enemies are in a locked rooms that you dont yet have the key for but the fight was engaged because you went near the room. A store keep that wont trade with you and nothing to do but dump all your items. No place to stash or store anything. I wish i had given up weeks ago and didnt finish this nightmare! I wish I could get my money back. Horrible to navigate maps. Orginially we purchased this game to play multiplayer but gave up after weeks and weeks of trying to "resolve" all the problems getting everyone on and playing at the same time. Single player game started out relatively fun....but after getting kicked out time and time again, i gave up frustrating the daylights out of myself. I would rate it a minus five stars if possible. Save yourself weeks of headaches but anything else!!!

This gane really sucks

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: June 17, 2002
Author: Amazon User

What a letdown!
I love all of the old SSI D&D games, but this is terrible
I thought I might look up this game's review since my party is stuck!
I should have read all of the bad reviews before I bought this

Special Note, Ubisoft produced or created(or whatever) this game, and another piece of dung called Battle Realms(just as buggy, no patches)
I think Ubisoft just churms out games before they are ready

A real waste of money

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: December 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I love the Infinity Engine RPGs like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale, and yes, I used to play AD&D on paper. This game was VERY disappointing. Graphics are OK, but playability is awful. Control functions are not intuitive at all... combat is slow and dreadfully frustrating. I have not experienced the bugs people complain of, but that's probably because I only played it an hour or two before quitting.

A nice paperweight!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: January 10, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Actually it's not that heavy, so it's not a good paperweight.

0 stars! I think everyone else summed up most the flaws pretty well.

bad

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: November 05, 2001
Author: Amazon User

too bad 1 star was as low as I could go

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