The Temple of Elemental Evil

I have finished nearly 90 RPG and in my opinion it is an average game. A combat is great due to D&D rules, RPG elements are also great, but everything else is miserable - quests, NPCs, plot, lore, pathfinding, trading, cities. I have applied Circle of Eight mod which should be improving game greatly, but honestly without this mod it would be probably unplayable. There are so many better RPGs, so unless you are big fan of D&D and combat based RPGs, my recommendation would be to avoid this game.

Great story line when the games is playable, however the game is constantly crashing at launch, rending the gam unplayable for the time being.

The other reviews overhype this game, here's why: This is not a brilliant tactics game. It's D&D 3.5. That's it. It's a system from 2 decades ago. It's servicable. It's customization comes at the cost of many newb-trap options (eg, if your ranger doesn't take Point Blank Shot > Precise Shot, you are in trouble). This isn't even a good implementation of the system, IMO. ToEE < NWN It tries to do away with the grid, but ends up with something so much worse. I regularily would rage in frusteration as my charcters wandered off in the LITERALLY opposite direction from where I clicked. It thinks fights against dozens of enemies are fun. Your party of ~7 dudes will be in fights with 20+ enemies. It was fun the first time when I'm hitting 9 enemies with a fireball, but gets old. Enemy diversity sucks too. Having to manually "Read magic" on every single picked up potion and scroll, gets boring. I started to have a lot more fun when I started leaning on the console to cheat in items. Never ones that would give me an advantage, just save time, eg. Potions of Heal so I didn't need to keep resting to regain HP. Wands of Identify so I didn't need to keep resting to use magic items. Scrolls of Restoration so I didn't need to keep resting for debuffs to go away. etc. I did cheat in magic items at game end. But that's cause there's a bug where you can't craft after your wizard reaches max level, so I spawned in only what I would have been able to craft. Even with the community patches this is a buggy mess. I was also a little upset to realize that the no new content verison actually does make some changes that affect game progression, much for the worse, IMO. Ok, here's the thing though. The feeling when my Paladin crit his Smite Evil on a Balor and does 95 damage in 1 attack? That was sick. Cleaving through 4 goblins in one swing? Sick. Figuring out how to win that tough fight vs a temple priest? Sick! 3/7 - Only for the desparate, thank goodness for cheats...

I'm a huge fan of D&D games and I tried this one game after loving all Infinity games and disliking both Neverwinter Nights. Isometric tactical goodness rules over 3D shiny stuff. But TOEE is a very different monster. Everything is so slow and boring that just the stronger ones could achieve the supposed fun at the end of the tunnel. And, unlikely a previous reviewer, I tried the game for several hours and days. Half of it just trying to fix the bugfest with the unnoficial patches. The combat is a perfect implementation of D&D rules, but fidelity should not overcome dynamics like here. The radial menu is cumbersome and applying keyboards shortcuts is not a definitive solution. In the dungeons, it's hard to know also where your characters could walk, or how many could attack an enemy at once, thus part of the tactical planning is gone. Besides combat you have the non-combat, that, as noted by many, is the weakest part of the game. Characters are boring, voices are boring, and walking around in Hommlet is incredible boring. It takes a lot of time to go from one house to another, and there is many of them. If you want iron stuff, go to one. Leather stuff, another. Very realistic, sure, but you will waste your life looking the little sprites slowly crossing the village. Graphics are good, but if you play in the high resolutions supported by the patches, everything will be very tiny. That is a problem because TAB key highlights doors and fallen equipment, but not containers (even if this is stated in the manual). Know that classic villain journal that sets the plot in motion? Yes, it is in that pair pixels hidden among many unusable furniture with the same looking. That was 2003, five years after BG1 showed that pixel hunt for little secrets is not so cool as it seems. The music, on the other side, could be desscribed with only one word. That one I used several times in this review, and, in fact, could substitute all the rambling before: boring!

I think this game was much better back in the day, though I remember some scathing reviews when it came out for what I can only believe is that I experienced in my time with it now. Clunky, weird graphical hangups, really difficult, and overall not very much fun. Might have been better to leave this one in the past or give it the Enhanced Edition treatment.