The first and most glaring (and frustrating) problem with POR is the fact that the encounter levels are way (as in light years) out of whack. I got out my DM's Guide at one point and tried to figure out the challenge for an early encounter. My party was four characters of fourth level which in game terms was worthy of encounters up to level six if you're a sadistic game master. The enemy Orcs I was trying to defeat worked out to be an encounter level 12. In a table-top game, the players would have strung up the DM who did this to them. I save-loaded for more than two hours trying to defeat this encounter, which is one of the most discouraging things that can happen in any game.
If you don't know much about the table-top rules, suffice it to say that the encounter I described above was so unbalanced as to be laughable. Problem was, it didn't make me laugh - it made me stomp around the apartment and rant at Hannibal about how absurd the game was and that "if I didn't have to review this, I'd melt the game into bullets and shoot it into the ass of the guy who made it!" And further, I was encountering Orcs and skeletons with an armor class well above 20! Uh, no.
The next set of problems I encounter was the failed save-game bugs. Twice I saved the game only to come back and reload to find these files corrupted (that adds up to what was probably three hours of my time). After I updated to version 1.2, I still encountered the problem once more. The game dumped me straight to the desktop more than once and the sound cut out on a couple of occasions, too. Another one of the more curious bugs was that combat would sometimes end before all the monsters were killed, then, the few that remained would simply vanish. This happens in many of the battles toward the end of the game. Is this a bug, or am I just that good?
The most vile and treacherous bug to come along in a long time is the uninstall bug that wipes out system files. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT, uninstall this game before you run the update from the POR homepage.
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