The Temple of Elemental Evil

I liked a lot of things about this game, not the least of which was the fact that this was a CRPG re-creation of the old PnP Village of Hommlet module. Mind you it added a lot of content to the module, but that's a good thing. Besides that, I did have one major problem with the game. Maybe its because of the excellent DM I had back in the day, but as others have noted, the story is relatively light weight. Like IWD, this all about combat and dungeon crawls. As such, I felt that there wasn't much to separate ToEE from IWD. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but my expectations were definitely much higher.

I still enjoy this game many years later

I have been hoping for more actual turn-based D&D games for a long time; much as I love the BG and IWD series, and Torment. And while this does have that, the game is terribly glitchy. Not just out of combat either. More than once I would take the full-attack action, click just a split second too quickly after the last attack, and it would completely skip the next one (even though the voice would achnowledge the command): wasted attack. ***early encounter-spoilers*** Even more so however, as a long-time DM, this game upsets me. It is not balanced, at all, in its encounters. I was figuring that if they were using proper 3.5 rules, that the encounters would work similarly. But no. For instance, 2 zombies (CR 1/2 each) would be a good standard encounter for a party of 4. Given you can get a party of 5 in this, upwards of 3 would make a solid encounter, a couple more if it's supposed to be a noticeable challenge. But, going down one flight of stairs can leave you facing something like a dozen (12) zombies... AND two green slimes. At probably about level 2... maybe. Further, the in-town quests are horrible. Rarely is much context or direction given, so I spent hours wandering around trying to figure out what to do, before just finally looking up a walkthrough. Terrible story flow there, any good DM would at least give you some clue (or an NPC to talk to to get one) of what to do. Likewise, several of the NPCs (especially the clerics) are stupidly overpowered (tried fighting one as a level 7 chaotic evil fighter... could never pull it off, even getting the drop on them), the old "why aren't THEY taking care of it?" problem of overpowered NPCs in an area. If this were a tabletop game, it would have a terribly DM. Anyway... I'm rambling. Crappy game that is crappily coded.

I have been playing this game since it was released. Even though it is dated, it is still a ton of fun to play.

Loved this game from the original release. Wish GOG would put the update in where characters can go to higher levels.