The Temple of Elemental Evil

It's a reasonable D&D sim, but not as good as memory'd have it. It may mean more to you if you remember the old rules; probably a lot less, if you don't. Trip attacks. You'll see tough foes dash past your front line fighters, execute flawless trip attacks on the mage, then beat the spellcaster senseless. It's a strategy, sure, but it's one you'll get very tired of. Nulb. Why does it exist? Hommlet has all kinds of things going on and a huge romance quest. Nulb has almost nothing going for it. Why didn't they just ditch Nulb and skip straight on to the Temple? Yes, Nulb's in the original tabletop RPG, but that was written on paper, not in stone. The combat's interesting and occasionally challenging. The fishing quest will drive you nuts until you get the secret. Once you hit about 6th or 7th level, the challenge goes out of it; 8th or 9th, and you'll be Cleaving your way through most of the encounters. Difficulty does not adjust, which also means that, at low level, you'll get murdered time and again. I guess this is why you shouldn't go into these things with great expectations. It was fun for what it was, and if I'd seen this ten years ago I'd have loved it. Time has passed since then and games have improved. Accept it for what it is: a nostalgia trip, but not a world-shattering experience.

I was hesitant to try this game due to people saying that it's too buggy. Having just finished both Baldur's 1 and 2, I prefer TTOE over those 2. This game has much more combat with lethal foes and the 3d characters look a lot better than the sprites found in Baldur's Gate. Yet the things I like the best is less fetch'em tasks and the combat that is much harder and requires you to think. Also can build your custom party of six and it's cool that your quest varies based on the alignment chosen. If you do decide to get this great game then get the co8 mod and careful when you saved.

Circle of Eight ( CO8 ) mod makes this a great experience. If you want to up the game even from that, then Temple+ mod will give you many options that make quality of life ( QOL ) better and experience deeper. As far as the game, its Temple of Elemental Evil ( TOEE ) on computer. (or Keep on the Borderlands if you download that too). What stands out, by a country mile, is the combat. This is the best adaptation of a rules set on any game I've seen. Talk about having options in combat. Out of spells, your quiver is empty, what can you do? Quite a lot actually. This is the cream of the cream when it comes to rules implementation and combat. A dungeon crawler at its peak in my opinion.

Circle of 8 mod, install, enjoy. As close to perfect as is possible because the lack of source code, though not perfect(still little bugs but nothing too bad).

Great game mostly about the battles, and reasonably faithful to early days of the D&D 3.0/3.5 rule-set, even to the point of keeping the combat turn based. Sure it's short on story, but then the Temple of Elemental Evil module didn't have huge amounts of story either and was more a huge dungeon romp. Given that Troika (R.I.P) did it all in about an 18 month development cycle, they did a great job with the time they had. For me a gem in the rough, is an apt term. Keep in mind it has it's fair share of bugs, so if that is a deal breaker for you you may want to avoid it, but with a bit of patience you may find you see the gem too.