Our first encounter took over 3 1/2 hours. We were lucky that only one person died. Every time we turned around, multiple terrible things that are hard to avoid and expensive/hard to cure were happening to us.
The constant feeling of "how am I effed this round?" really sucked the fun out of the first encounter. By the end of it, I wanted to go home (the guy who died, even though we rezzed him, DID go home). After debate on whether to continue, we resolved to do the next two encounters (which the GM said would be lighter and quicker) but decided to run at the outset of the boss fight (since the first encounter made finishing on time, before the game store closed, impossible).
Also, I don't know if the GM simply missed it, or Kyle forgot to write it in, but while there were specific locations for the first and third portal stones (can't remember exactly what they were called), there was no mention where to find the second portal stone. GM had to make it up. Really bad to not have all the mission mcguffins in the scenario.
As a final note, objectively, I'm not sure if this is a good scenario or not. Subjectively, it wasn't fun at all. Definitely not Kyle's best work.