A complete and utter disappointment

User Rating: 2.6 | Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor (Collector's Edition) PC
This is one of those few games where you hear so many things during its preview and hype stage that you can't help but wait with baited breath. I honestly thought that it would be a great game, being that it would be the first game to be based on the new 3rd Edition rule set. So, I was looking forward to a refreshing restart to Dungeons and Dragons based games. I even went and bought a new video card for my rig so that I could play this game.

Ug...instead, I feel ashamed to admit that this is actually in my "Collection" list. What an utter and complete disappointment. At its best, it is ponderous, time-wasting, and a noteworthy of nothing. At its worst, it is a virus that will wipe your hard-drive if you try to uninstall it (thankfully, the patches and later releases fixed that issue).

Regardless, everything about this game pretty much reeks of "Software developer rips off consumer". To this day, I don't think I have bought one other UbiSoft game - at least not intentionally - because they allowed this product out without any serious testing. Personally, I was not only disappointed, but insulted.

There is nothing else that I can say about this game. It is tedious and a complete waste of time, with very few redeeming qualities, if any. The mechanics were questionable, and behaved erratically for me, and the sound always appeared to be one or two notes behind the action. The interface became difficult to use. And one of its worst qualities was the movement betwen area and town.

I never did bother to finish the game, although I so desperately wanted to give it the old "college try". However, it instead languishes in my pile of "never complted games" - and it seems awfully lonely there (although it does have a few friends).