The Temple of Elemental Evil

Its a very very good game

A buggy mess when it was released, the current version available on GoG fixes many of the problems and if you apply a fan-made (sort of) patch from Co8, you can not only fix the rest but get added content as well. It's a beautiful tactical RPG and well worth a play.

The Temple of Elemental Evil was the second game from Troika Games, an outfit formed by Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson, who all worked on Fallout 2 at Interplay. It's an isometric RPG that uses the D&D 3.5 rules with turn-based combat. The story is not so gripping, and I preferred the Baldur's Gate games over this, but it stands as a faithful implementation of the tabletop D&D system (BG used real-time with pause), and is well worth a playthrough.

I'm a huge fan of turn-based tactical games and D&D, and as such, I absolutely LOVED this game. For me, carefully creating and fine tuning a party of adventurers to command in tactical battles is the very definition of gaming goodness, and ToEE does not disappoint! It really is a shame that I just can't bring myself to give it 5 stars... First and foremost, this game is hindered by bugs. There's no way around it. In fact, I was barely able to even get the game running at all. And, if looking through the forums is any indicator, I'm not the only one who experienced these issues. Second, there is very little storyline here, and figuring out what to do next can be confusing, especially at the beginning of the game. However, if (like me) all you care about is the battles and leveling up your party, this isn't THAT big of a deal. Finally, you NEED to have the Co8 modpack to get the full experience. It fixes bugs, adds additional content (very important for the crafting feats), bumps the level cap to 20 (instead of 10), and lets you create all 8 party members (instead of 5 + 3 NPCs). You could play without it... but DON'T! TL;DR- ToEE is turn-based tactical role-playing at its finest... almost.

ToEE follows the classic D&D 3rd Edition rules much more closely than any other game I've played. The combat is turn based and tactical, and feels a lot more like the pen and paper version than mostly real-time offerings like Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights (which I wish played more like ToEE). Unfortunately, if you don't know these mechanics coming in, the game doesn't always do a very good job explaining them. For people who've played the pen and paper version, though, figuring things out should be easy. The plot of the game basically takes a pen and paper adventure and converts it directly to computer game form. Unfortunately, this provides a dungeon crawl somewhat lacking in plot direction. I sort of stumbled my way through the game, enjoying the battles and challenges, but without a very clear idea of where I was going or why. If you're craving something more plot driven ToEE isn't for you.