The Temple of Elemental Evil

I can't really match the reviews up already describing the game. I was looking for a D&D 3.5 engine to play around with and that is what I got. I was able to get this game working in ubuntu 10.04 using wine with little effort. The one caveat is that the game must be run windowed (add '-window' after the command line) and all is well.

The Temple of Elemental Evil is a classic D&D module for a reason. It's an absolute masterclass in adventure design, with all kinds of interesting hooks and details and backstory. This is a pretty faithful adaptation, and the best CRPG implementation of D&D 3.5 that exists to my knowledge. Unfortunately, it's pretty buggy (even with the patches), and the interface is incredibly awkward and frustrating. No ability to zoom or rotate the main map view makes some rooms nearly impossible to find, some enemies nearly impossible to see, and some positions completely impossible to stand in, which can make certain fights far more difficult than they need to be. I've reloaded so many times because of characters getting killed by a mis-click, or because the game doesn't clearly indicate when an action will trigger attacks of opportunity, or what parts of a room are or are not impassible/LoS blocking. There are also a ton of things that use a really awkward drag and drop interface, like inventory management (including looting and buying/selling) and things like spell selection, which where handled far better in games more than a decade older with simple select option:select action button or hotkey controls. I also highly recommend looking up a walkthrough or something. There is a ton of stuff that I have no idea how anyone found, short of just brute force working through every option in every NPC's dialogue tree and/or pixel hunting until they found stuff that changed the cursor. If you can fight your way through all that, tho, there really is a truly great adventure underneath it all. I'd love to see a remastered edition or something that redid the interface and updated the graphics while leaving the mechanics all exactly the same.

The artwork in this game is beautiful. Planning out your party and strategy is challenging. The combinations of classes and alignments are endless and you can have years of fun. I love planning new parties. It's important to mix and match till you get the perfect combiation of classes for your play style. Anyway great and engaging game.

Great fun retro game CRPG but you do need CO8 mods to get it run correctly and launch from their shortcut. Shout out to CO8 - Thank you!

This game is excellent, sadly I missed out playing when it was new and fresh. I really wish they had updated the minor issues, but those are easily overlooked. I also wish they would make more games like this instead of the modern focus on action style.