Pool of Radiance Review at IGN

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(Originally posted by Darien)

IGN offers up this review of The Ruins of Myth Drannor, giving the game an overall score of 6 out of 10. PoR once again receives its highest marks for graphics, with all other aspects awarded less than stellar ratings.

Rather than rolling your character stats, you're given a pool of point to distribute. This makes all the characters seem sort of average as a result. Naturally if you let people roll their own characters, some folks will take advantage of it and keep rolling till they get characters with at least 15 points in all the stats. This point distribution system is apparently a real feature of the 3rd Edition Rules but it still seems cheap to me. Also cheap is the fact that you can't customize the wardrobe colors for your characters.

Feats and skills are automatically assigned and sometimes make no sense whatsoever. Why a caster should need Toughness before Combat Casting is beyond me. And why a caster can only get up to level 16 seems even more strange. That automatically exclude him from using ninth level spells...

While there are some bright spots here and there Pool of Radiance seems uninspired and even a little unsure of itself. I'd be willing to give Stormfront and Ubi Soft the benefit of a doubt since the 3rd Edition Rules were released while the game was in production. Still, the rules had been out for over a year by the time the game was done and I would have expected either a better implementation of the rules or at least a more thoughtful departure from them.