The Temple of Elemental Evil

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.

Bought this on a recommendation, beat it last night. My party wasn't perfect (though I did reroll for stupidly good stats) and I didn't use the crafting mechanics. I used the Circle of Eight and Temple+ mods and it ran fine outside of some crashes that happened when I layered too many buffs on my party, and a weird incident with Charm Monster. I didn't apply the extra content. Pros * I liked the temple itself as a setting as well as the types of enemies there and how they're laid out a lot. * It uses the 3.x ruleset. Not a fan of the ruleset itself, but it allows for some interesting builds due to Feats. Cons * The starting village of Hommlet was so boring, it almost killed my desire to play entirely. I skipped most of the early quests as they provided little rewards and had much more fun that way * It's quite stingy with the gear. There are some really nice weapons but most of the armour and weapons are only rated at +1 and there are very few stat boosters (gloves of strength, etc). It really feels that they want you to use their crafting system. I ended the game at Lv12 (normal level cap is 10), so I'm sure you are expected to spend some of your experience on improving and crafting gear for yourself. I also wish there were a bit more things worth buying from the shops after the initial phase of upgrading out of your leather armour. * The game is not grid based os moving around gets somewhat fiddly. It takes some getting used to and it can be really frustrating at times when you need exact positioning, for example, to block a door to prevent enemies from getting through. * There's SO MUCH damage reduction here, and some of the amounts are really annoying. * A very personal con, money is scarce early on so I hauled a a lot of stuff back to the merchants to sell, which resulted in a lot of boring walks. Overall, best treated as a dungeon crawler and a 3.x character combat sandbox IMO. Would be a 4/5 in my book but I'm docking a point for all the cons.

This one's a REAL CLASSIC ! Some will say that the game is short with complicated combat system and a lot of bugs. Maybe they're right. But this is D&D in it's full glory ! Perfect character generation, exceptional combat mechanism and beautiful monster lore with great adventure characteristics and intriguing quests make this game A REAL RPG ON STEROIDS !! It's a bit tough, but when it ends, you wonder yourself what kind of party will you create the next time. It's character creation and story are so deep and diverse that it sucks you in wandering the villages, ruins and swamps all over again. RPG MASTERPIECE !!!!!

ToEE has a very accurate turn based implementation of the D&D 3.5 rules (probably the best edition of the rules so far). The feats, skills, weapons and spells are quite accurate to the books. The plot is based on one of the best known D&D scenarios (partially written by Gary Gygax himself). This would have been a 5 star game if not for its bugs. A must have for fans of turn based games (if they can put up with a few bugs)!

A good game, but terribly difficult to get working on modern hardware even with fan patches and mods.