The last in the first Gold Box series, Pools of Darkness tied up the story from the first three games, and in a sense, brought it full circle. Though the combat was challenging, and the ability to use high-level spells and abilities was interesting and impressive, it was pretty much just a standard hack-and-slash game, with little direction, even for a Gold Box offering. At certain points in the game, it became very difficult to know what to do, or if you should bother doing anything, since a lot of the areas in the game didn't need to be visited at all and provided little more than an opportunity to build your skills, however necessary that might be. If you played the previous three games in the series (Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, and Secret of the Silver Blades), this probably is a good game to play, but otherwise, it's not really worth it.

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