Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor Review

There are few tactical challenges we had a chance to see in similar games; everything comes down to hacking and slashing. If you want to kill a mage just put your fighter next to him; he won't be able to run, nor cast! The only tactics that make sense in this game are to push your "John Rambo" characters in the front lines and make them eliminate any spell-casters, or what few stronger enemies appear in the game, and have the rest of the party support them. The next frustrating gameplay issue is the Windows-like interface with pop-up menus containing commands. Fortunately, all remotely useful commands can also be issued with hot-keys, which makes playing this game a lot easier.

Dungeon design is monotonous and plain - boring. The greatest enigma in the game was a pile of non-interactive barrels and boxes. As far as I can remember, the announcements said something about absolute object interactivity; that the monsters will have to break through boxes to get to you, but alas, thy just limp around them. Most objects are smashable, but if you are a real optimist, you can just as well go around right-clicking everything to see if any objects offer actions other than smash.

Another thing that is completely useless in the game is money. Nottle, the merchant, will be useful at the very beginning of the game, but as soon as you pass the Main Hall, your characters will have better equipment than Nottle could dream of. Well, maybe your characters will make use of the money after you finish the game, or what?

There are, on the other hand, several upsides to the game, which might make you want to finish it. First, there's the character advancement, which presents a sufficient motive to pass the next boring dungeon because of the XPs that will earn you. Second, the spell visual effects look really awesome, all from the simple magic missile or Melf's acid arrow to the advanced mage and cleric spells. It is a real pleasure watching the spells on screen. Pool of Radiance allows much more spell-casting than similar titles like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale, and you and your wizards will have no trouble in casting multiple spells, both from their own repertoire and from the enchanted items they carry in a single turn.

Feats (gained characteristics) are an interesting new feature in AD&D third edition rules. For instance, my dwarf Fighter hacked down numerous opponents thanks to his Cleave feat, and my human Paladin resisted countless hold person casts, thanks to his Iron Will feat. There is about twenty feats altogether. Apart from that, the game also features class-dependent in-game acquired skills like: heal, open locks, hide, concentration, etc.

The armors and clothes are uninventive and monotonous. The armors are all silverish, and all magic boots and gloves are red. So, like, what happened to the rest of the colors? Only the wizards look colorful, but then again the developers should have let the players at least pick two or three color patterns in order to personalize the appearance of the character.

The main problems that flawed Pool of Radiance are its countless bugs. I only had the chance to experience several of them; apart from the setup program which refuses to install the game to any drive other than c:, I had a lot of trouble with virtual memory under Windows 2000/XP. It seems that the game devours immense quantities of virtual memory, which can eventually make the game or even the whole machine freeze. There are many other bugs (especially in the gameplay), and as Ubi Soft obviously realized what this can do to their finances, they started publishing patches on a daily bases...

Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor could simply be defined as disk full of bugs, striving to be a slow Diablo based on AD&D third edition rules.