![]() ![]() It’s like some level designer heard the phrase “bigger is better” and went out to prove it wrong - and succeeded marvelously. The game’s world is basically made up of nine areas - the surface of Myth Drannor and eight dungeon levels - but the dungeon levels are way too big. Plus, there are only about 10 types of creatures in the game (with variations on each), so not only do you have to fight long, boring battles, you have to fight long, boring battles against the same things over and over! Oh, fun, fun, fun.Along with the combat, the pacing of the game is terribly slow. Then long fights just drag the game down into a morass of slowness, where you’re thrilled to explore an area and find empty rooms rather than creatures waiting for you. One time my party got stuck fighting 17 orogs (orc-like things), and the battle lasted 45 minutes, and I spent most of that time twiddling my thumbs, waiting for my characters to be able to take their turns.But long fights aren’t necessarily bad - unless the game focuses on combat and dishes out hundreds upon hundreds of random or meaningless encounters, like Pool of Radiance does. Those two problems don’t sound like much, but when your characters miss 75% of the time (as they will early in the game) that leads to lots of rounds of combat with lots of associated shuffling and pausing, and each fight takes 10 minutes or more. There isn’t a quick-move option, so you have to watch enemies slowly shuffle into position (or wander around aimlessly when they can’t find a target), and enemies always take five seconds to decide what to do. (Or you could select E, “All of the above.”) Now, Pool of Radiance employs a true turn-based system, so its combat is never going to be quick or action-packed, but Stormfront Studios barely made it playable. Or maybe “terrible” isn’t quite the right word and other choices such as “slow” or “repetitive” or “boring” are. Unfortunately, combat in Pool of Radiance is terrible. It’s trying to be a hack-and-slash RPG, much like the aforementioned Diablo 2. I think Diablo 2 has more of a story than Pool of Radiance, and that’s saying something.However, Pool of Radiance isn’t trying to tell a story. If you’re looking for a game with, oh, motivation or character development, then this isn’t the one for you. (Think of Pinky and the Brain, but with a sorceress and dracolich instead of mice.) Then the story, such as it is, involves you fighting your way to them and killing / destroying them. Pretty much there’s an evil pool, an evil dracolich, and an evil sorceress, and they’re planning evil things simply because they’re evil. But those party members don’t add anything to the story after you talk to them for the first time (even in situations that just scream for them to comment), and Pool of Radiance wouldn’t have played any differently even if Stormfront Studios had allowed you to create all six characters at the beginning.But the anonymous party works out well enough because Pool of Radiance also doesn’t have much of a story for them to play a part in. You get to create up to four characters when you start out, and then you can find other potential party members as you make your way through the game. Stormfront Studios, either in a nod to older RPG’s or because they were lazy, set up the game so you control an anonymous band of six adventurers. ![]() well, you don’t play anybody in particular. There’s a reason why people were uninstalling the game: it’s bad, and its myriad problems are obvious right from the word go.In Pool of Radiance, you play. But now that the game has been out for a while, it’s much more likely that Pool of Radiance will be remembered for two things: that it shipped with an uninstall bug that could delete system registry files, and that people discovered the bug (and thus were already uninstalling the game) well within a week of its release. When Stormfront Studios created Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor, they probably had high hopes that it would bring back fond memories of the gold-box role-playing games (RPG’s) of the late 80’s and early 90’s (including the original Pool of Radiance), if not challenge BioWare for supremacy of today’s RPG’s. Sometimes a game becomes known for all the wrong reasons. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |