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Pool of Radiance is a familiar title for some of us. Some may remember it as one of the best CRPG’s ever created. Others may distinguish it as the game that brought Dungeons and Dragons into the computer gaming scene. However you remember it, Pool of Radiance 2 does not live up to the original. Sure it has better graphics and sounds, but when it comes down to content, role playing and technology vs time period, the original was a much greater achievement. PoR2 won’t blow you away as the original probably did when you first played it.

The first fact I’d like to point out is that PoR2 is not a 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons game. So does that mean it’s 2nd Edition? No, it doesn’t mean that either. Then what the hell is it, you ask? Well, it’s a hybrid. It is advertised as a 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons game, however it uses a severely destroyed 3rd Edition Rule set. If you must reference it to 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons, I’d have to call it “Quasi, severely nerfed 3rd Edition Rules”. In Stormfront’s (the developers) defense, here’s why this happened: The game was originally designed as a 2nd Edition Dungeons and Dragons game. During development, 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons was announced (and released). Stormfront and SSI thought it would be cool to have the first 3rd Edition CRPG. They redesigned the game to try and match the 3rd Edition rules. This was their mistake, in my opinion. I think they should have released the game as it was (which would have delivered it to us over a year ago), then got right to work on a PoR3 that used a true 3rd Edition rule set.

Character development is very linear. In fact, you really don’t have many choices at all. The only class that actually gets to pick anything as they level up is Sorcerers who get to pick their spells. Skills are automatically assigned per character class. Feats are also automatically assigned per character class. For those of you unfamiliar with Skills and Feats from Dungeons and Dragons, think of Fallout with its Skills and Perks; same idea. In true 3rd Edition D&D, you get to choose what skills you want, and you get to pick the feats your characters get. This is a major selling point of 3rd Edition since it allows for total character diversity amongst classes. PoR2 does not have this. My 12th level Fighter have the exact same abilities as your 12 level Fighter, minus a few minor point differences based on stats. Yes, you actually get to assign your stats upon character creation! That’s about the only thing you get to pick yourself (other than spells). They did a decent job with the skill progression. Classes have most of the skills they should have and at proper skill levels according to their character level. Feats on the other hand, are done very poorly. My Monk gained the Iron Will feat at level 3 (Improves Will Saves by 2 points). Well, the Monk’s main stat is Wisdom, which affects his Will Save. This means Monks typically already have a high Will saving throw! It’s a nice waste of a feat, especially when I would rather have something like Improved Initiative. My Sorcerer started out with the Toughness Feat (+3 Hit Points). This feat is extremely meaningless at higher levels for any character class, unless you decide to stack them and take it a bunch to add a significant amount of hit points (which is just a waste of more feats). A 1st level Paladin gets Improved Critical. In 3rd Edition D&D, you don’t get improved initiative until level 8 at the very earliest! There is also no Tumble skill. For those that play pen and paper 3rd Edition, if you play a Rogue or Monk you realize Tumble is a core skill for those two classes. Tumble allows you to avoid attacks of opportunity, which happen when your character moves away from an enemy. I guess it’s above the level of programming knowledge to have the AI automatically roll a die to see if you successfully tumbled when you walk away from a threatened square. If you made your check, the enemy doesn’t attack. Maybe the code was so messed up from the “conversion” that it was impossible to code this SIMPLE task into the game engine. So you have linear character development, that’s been made clear. You are also not permitted to create Wizards, Druids or Bards. Gnomes are also out. PoR2 is set in the Forgotten Realms world. If you are a fan of the realm, you know that Wizards are everywhere. Elminster was a Wizard. Does Elminster not exist in this bazaar-o Forgotten Realms world of PoR2? No, he must be a Sorcerer! Or maybe there really ARE Wizards, and you just can’t play one? My final point here is not to be fooled by the markings on the box. Don’t expect this game to follow the 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons rule set, because it doesn’t. Consider PoR2 to have it’s OWN special little rule set, that borrows from other game system rule sets.

There is very little NPC interaction and not a lot of quests. If you compare it to Baldur’s Gate, there is practically NONE. While I was playing the game I kept “waiting for something to happen”. Know that feeling? Nothing ever did really happen. I couldn’t stand to play this game for more than about 10 hours tops before I quit in frustration and disgust. It was boring. It was the next Diablo 2 Expansion pack. The majority of the game is a dungeon crawl. Think of this game as Icewide Dale meets Diablo 2, except without the witty dialogue and smooth quest and game mechanics of Icewind Dale. The graphics are pretty decent though. The sounds and atmosphere are actually pretty good too. They’re definitely the best to date for a game of this type. Spell effects are dazzling and well done. You can tell when one of your guys is “buffed” with a spell effect because some sort of aura will usually emanate around him.

There were a few bugs I found, but nothing game stopping. On occasion the game would practically crash out and slow down so much where I couldn’t do anything. Hitting escape a couple times seemed to fix this for me. There are several patches for the game which you can download at the PoR2 website (http://www.poolofradiance.com). The minimum system requirements do seem a bit low. My suggestions for this game would be a P3 600 or faster with a 32 Meg video 3D card and a fast hard disk. The interface felt cludgy and was a pain to navigate. If you wanted to use an item in your inventory, you’d have to navigate through a Windows 98-esq menu system to find it and click it.. usually TWICE (once to equip it, then again to use it! D’oh). The interface is just sort of cut and pasted on the screen and doesn’t really fit with the game. Use the hotkeys! They make life 10 times easier!

Several aspects of the game got quite annoying. The fact that none of your characters could travel off the screen from each other. So much for having your Rogue go up ahead and scout, eh? Some skills were activated automatically instead of manually. Search was one of these. All you need to do to find a secret door is walk along the walls of the dungeons. If you have rolls turned on, you will see all your characters instantly make roll checks when you pass by a secret door, informing you that there is in fact a secret door there even if no one made their checks! You could turn rolls off, but then you wouldn’t see what I am about the rant about. The random number generator algorithm is F’d UP!! My Paladin had a +15 to hit, yet he always seems to roll just under what he needs to hit his opponent, like a 3 or 4. I found most of my other characters like to roll 6’s quite a lot. This is NOT my imagination either. Every single friggen’ combat was like this. 4… 1… 12… 6.. 5.. .6.. 15.. . 16… 6…5 etc.. The monsters somehow always rolled high. My Sorcerer/Monk with an Armor Class of 25 at get hit roughly 1 in every 6 swings. I check the type of monsters I am fighting to see what kind of attack bonus they have and it was usually +1 to +4.. (according to my official 3rd Edition Monster Manual, which I guess means D*CK in this game). That means they need to roll a natural 20 to hit me. How does that come out to me getting hit about every 6 attacks? Seems like.. oh.. roughly every 20th attack should hit me (a 1 in 20 chance after all)? At this point, I turned off rolls and played the rest of the game ignoring the grossly misprogrammed number generator. Initiative was also a joke. You hardly ever win initiative. My roommate and I actually ran some official tests on this one. We created hacked 1st level characters with 100’s in all stats, which comes out to like +50 Initiative or something nuts like that. We would approach a monster and stand there. It would get into range and combat would begin. The monsters would win initiative more often then we did! Maybe PoR2 doesn’t take your Dex modifier into account for initiative rolls like it should? No matter what, if you had rolls turned on, you could see your roll of 2 and the monsters roll of 18+ just about every combat encounter. One good thing about combat is that it’s turned based, just like the original PoR. Personally, I think turn based combat is more strategic than real time micromanagement combat. Plus it gives it more of a “role playing” feel when it’s turned based.

All in all, I am severely disappointed in Pool of Radiance 2. If you are not a 3rd Edition D&D fan, nor a Forgotten Realms fan, but you like Diablo 2 and maybe Icewind Dale… then hey, you might want to give PoR2 a chance. It’s a pretty good hack n’ slash turned based adventure combat game set in medieval times.