The Temple of Elemental Evil

Hackneyed story with minimal exposition of what's going on and why you should care. NPC cohorts are dull in every sense - ineffective in combat, they make poor equipment choices (you can't control them) and they have no interesting background or dialogue. Everything is spread annoyingly far apart, even the initial town, so doing local quests is an agonizing and tedious chore. I found the combat to be slow, sticky and inorganic, and far too many bugs even after patching. Skip this one.

This is the most accurate to D&D 3.5 combat I've seen in any game. The character creation and combat is a blast. But most of the non-combat interactions are tedious and boring, you have to slow walk all over an almost empty town, and micromanage all of your party if they have different speeds. There's a lot of QOL issues that you'll miss from Bethesda RPGs or even Interplay RPGs. Also, I installed the Circle of 8 modpack and still ran into a bug that required me to reload from before my last boss fight, so there's that. The fight was won through almost luck and had another tough fight right after it, so I just stopped playing.

I enjoyed this game a little. Hey, its D&D right? I bought the original module when it came out in 85 so it was cool to see the areas and levels, sometimes lovingly, recreated. Thumbs down to trioka for trying to improve on baldurs gate. Clunky interface.Few character portraits.SUPER LAME teeny tiny 3D characters and monsters. GOOD music and voice acting.Oh yeah, as I played longer more and more crashes and bugs so...enjoyment apex reached...game 50% over and Im 100% done.

The game combines many elements into players experience, like the circular character menu and the unique combat styling. However the game has it's own set of challenges, for instance, the game has a few bugs that may delete a save-game or maybe some thing worse. This is not a damning condition, most mod websites like moddb can give you the mod-bugfix Circle of Eight, this mod fixes nearly every bug, not to mention the fact that it adds a whole new city and story therein.

Temple of Elemental Evil is one of those amazing sandbox games that only comes by once in a century. It is HARD - unforgiving even and gives you lots of nerdy options and styles ot play in. It lets you play evil in a realistic sense - in essence it drops you into a convincing world and lets you do whatever you want and suffer the consequences/rewards. Its amazing, but not for people that hate challenges. Also def get the patches and mods, it makes the game much better, fixes all the bugs.