This game is a tad difficult to place these days. Although it doesn't hold up the way it did when I was very young and playing it on my suffering little four-color IBM PS2, I sunk a large amount of time into it and it definitely kindled my interest in Dungeons and Dragons on a whole.

Gameplay in this game is interesting. Depending on what sort of party you've put together for yourself, you have several different actions available to you to tackle any particular goal, but the goals are relatively simple and not very hard to tackle no matter what your party. Locked doors, for example, can be cheaply and simply opened by a thief, bashed in by a particularly burly Dwarf, or Knock'd into openness by a mage who doesn't mind wasting one of few precious, precious spells.

The fighting system is a precursor to modern tactical combat and it's a system that held up for quite some while and inspired many other games. Characters have a certain Move rating according to how heavily encumbered they are among other factors, which allows them to navigate a grid. Other actions can always be taken as well, such as attacking in melee or casting a spell. Also, turning tail has a tendency to cause people to stab you in your exposed back, so fleeing from combat is rarely the best thing one can do for oneself. Also, Thieves can backstab, which is about the only way they do real damage aside from firing bows into the fray, which may hit their friends as well. It's well thought-out, but it lacks a few very basic things in my opinion... for example, a person with a halberd doesn't get a range bonus of any kind of a person with a shortsword, and so on. But those are my problems with Dungeons and Dragons in general, and to this day.

Magic is also a bit underusable early on in the game, but mages turn into tiny Gods about as fast as they can level; as soon as the long-famed Fireball and Lightning Bolt are available to a mage, they start being significantly more useful and dying significantly less, if only because they toast great swathes of enemies and allow Fighters to easily sweep their way through a weakened horde.

The graphics in this game were fantastic back in the day, but aren't anything to write home about now. A small 3D view in the top left corner indicates where the characters are and can be swapped with a slightly under-featured overhead map with the press of a button, which is a useful trait in a game as mazey as Pool of Radiance. The combat sprites can be mixed and matched to make them look like the class they are; Rogues with a dagger, Clerics with a great crested shield and a flail, and so on and so forth, but the sprites are set once your character is created and can't be changed easily. Each only has two frames, one for normal moving around and one for when an attack is actually made. It doesn't look great, but it's quite effective in getting across exactly what's desired.

The game also doesn't have a lot in it that bears repeating. The unforgiving combat rolls can spell the death of your party on breaking into the wrong door without looking, which lends to a good amount of loading a recent save and wandering around for some more random battles, gear, and equipment. There are troves of items to be found in many different places, which adds some exploration and interest, and generally when one finds one, one has also found a safe spot to rest and equip the party. Overall, it's fun to move around in, and making a new and different party to play through again can be rewarding, but it's not exactly open-ended, so it's not the best choice for replaying again and again.

All in all, Pool of Radiance is a solid experience and a good amount of fun to work one's way through; it's pretty simple to learn and complex enough to satisfy, although small snags like not knowing the stat differences between a bec-de-corbin and a halberd (go with the halberd) at a glance can be a tad annoying, and trial-and-error is king unless you have an old Second-Edition Player's Handbook to look up weapons in. This game is solid and sticks to the old rules, which is nice in some ways and a pleasant anachronism, but to be perfectly honest, I miss my feats and skills now that I've had them.

Learning Curve: Takes a second

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