The Temple of Elemental Evil

The manual for this game is almost identical to the core section on the 3.5 edition of the D&D player's handbook that was available in bookstores. I was thinking of purchasing the other one's that are available for purchase but I went with ToEE simply because I prefer turn based games. The closeness to "real D&D" mechanics are almost a perfect conversion, aside from the bugs (crashing, rare graphic errors, not being able to see your party in the dungeons at certain corners and walls) the only major difference is that you have to use codes and back-doors to manually import your characters from other campaigns. There is also no way to change skin-tone, so although there are Drow NPCs, they don't look traditional. One other major difference that comes to mind is that you can only go up to level 20, which is ok for how the campaign is set up if you start from level 1. Personally I imported some characters I used in other campaigns by "hand" to avoid all the side quests and low level monster mashing. I'd recommend this game to fans of the older SSI games and tactical gamers. Although "power-gaming" is slightly possible in this game, players want to just hack and slash should seek elsewhere.

This is an unparalleled conversion of the D&D 3.5 ruleset. If you like turn based combat, then this is for you. You have lots of character options and most rules/feats/abilities are represented in this game. However, there is no real storyline. You have a handful of step-and-fetch quests which have nothing to do with your characters of the storyline, then you're dropped into a dungeon which has different monsters in every room. Despite my appreciation of how well the combat and game systems worked, I didn't bother to finish the game, it just got too redundant.

Bought this game. Instead of trying to write a review here is some straight up info. The game looks great, in some ways. I remember the Balrog demon looking incredibly awesome, smoke and ashes with the glowing embers underneath the skin, very awesome looking. However character's seem a bit too small, move oddly. The gameplay mechanics are also very nice, the turn-based combat is fun. However the game is a bit loose. Especially once you get to the temple, it is difficult to know what you are supposed to be doing or where you are going. The temple is huge, but it needs some direction. NPC interaction is fairly minimal but interesting enough. This isn't the forgotten realms D&D setting, so the lore may be a little confusing. Not too sure on the voice acting either, the accent seems odd but I guess that is part of the setting too. Would rate this 3.5 stars. If you like hardcore RPG games then you might like this. If you like an excellent narrative and simpler gameplay (like Baldur's Gate 2) well it might be technically fun, but a little hard to get in to.

This game has a great deal of potential, but for me it has always been unplayable because of the huge number of game-breaking bugs. There is a popular and extensive mod pack (the Circle of 8 Mod pack) that (I gather) fixes a lot of the bugs. However, to give an idea of quite how bad it is, even with that installed, when playing through the tutorial, upon moving from one area to another, the game instead loads one of the later areas from the main game. This is the third time I've tried the game. On the first, I got a few hours in before giving up -- not because the game isn't fun (see other people's reviews), but instead because it's just not worth putting up with corrupted save files, inexplicable teleportation, inventory items popping out of existence depending on which order they're clicked on... I suspect that if one is able to somehow avoid these problems -- and maybe it works better on some operating systems than others -- then it would be quite fun. The music is great, and the game looks good.

I could go on for hours about many little details about this game, but I think the best way to describe it is as it follows: The best thing about this game is that it's a 1:1 adaptation of its source material. The worst thing about this game is that it's a 1:1 adaptation of its source material. It is without a doubt the best implementation of DND mechanics in video game form, but that also means that the town sections are completely void of any kind of interesting content at all. But the problem is that all DND adaptations suffer from this, since you can't have the same kind of human made content and flavor in a computer generated videogame. It's worth playing for the combat alone though.