Old but gold. A strong start to the Pools series. The story is simple but straight forward and works. You are hired adventurers that explore around, fight monsters, and complete contracts for the guild. You start off clearing the slums and some other city streets nearby, then eventually the game opens up and allows you to explore a large wilderness area with many interesting locations to discover. The game really feels like a good ol' D&D adventure. It doesn't do anything crazy unique by current day standards, but what it does, it does very well. Which is being a fun adventure with a great combat system, good implementation of AD&D 1st edition rules, and with good exploration that has a variety of locations. You can really see the inspiration this game had on future RPGs such as Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and many others.

Poor kobolds.

I did not rate the game a 5/5 however, becuase of a few reasons. 1st edition AD&D rules are pretty rough to deal with at first. They are very similar to 2nd edition which I am familiar with, but with a lot of little annoyances that were fixed in 2nd edition. For example: to identify magic items you have to first cast detect magic to even know if the items are magical at all, then you have to pay a vendor to ID them for you. Another thing is there are barely any classes to pick from. You have fighter, mage, cleric, and thief. Thats it. Also Depending on the race of your character and the class, there are different level caps. The only race that can level to the highest of their particular class is humans. So essentially if you don't play as a human than your going to be much more limited which is rather counter-intuitive since that discourages the player from picking other classes. Also one last thing that really annoyed me is that thieves can't use bows. Seriously? At least they can in the next game. There may be more things but those are the main ones I can remember.

One of the toughest fights in the game. This is thrown at you early and really teaches you how to deal with different enemy types.

The other reason the game is not a 5/5 is the enemy encounter scaling that is based on the stats you set at character creation. If you set your attributes to all 18s which I did and most people do, then you are going to fight significantly more enemies per encounter than those with lower stats. There were encounters where I had to fight 50 hobgoblins. They aren't very tough but my THAC0 wasn't very good at that point so it was a lot of missing over and over untill I finally mowed through them all, which took far too long. And it wasn't just one encounter like that, there were a lot, back to back. You also don't have the fireball spell until near the end of the game, so you cant just cast fireball and end the fight quickly. This ain't no Bard's Tale.

In conclusion, I had a good trip down Pools of Radiance lane. The game shows it's age and unless you played the game back in the day or are willing to play a classic like this just the way it was, then I probably wouldn't recommend it over say Baldur's Gate.