The Temple of Elemental Evil

The Temple of Elemental Evil is a wonderful RPG by the same studio that brought you Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, and Neverwinter Nights. The game uses the 3.5e rules, which work seamlessly in the game. This is one of the most fun adventures, as it adjusts fire based on what kinds of characters you create, and how you run them. In other games, it was obvious by the end that you should have been playing a NG Ranger, or CG Fighter, and so on. In ToEE, your decisions truly effect the game, and how you interact with it. Quests are different if you begin with an evil party than if you begin with a good party. Overall, this game is hours of good play, and well worth the money.

TOEE has very nice 2d graphics, among the best 2d rpg graphics that i have ever seen and the combat mechanics and easy to use and very fun. i like the way spells are handled and the effects on the screen are very nice. the only thing lacking is an interesting storyline that is more involved than just fight this level up acquire items of power etc. But for a fun romp in a D&D setting, this game is for you.

To reall get the most you need to insall the "Circle of Eight" patch. Not GOG's fault...the patch wasn't even done by Atari, but by 3rd party people. Its hard, but a good D&D CRPG. Hack and slash your way to glory. Excellent tactician's game. The story is simplistic, but this is a hack/slash dungeon crawl. People into this often don't look for a story but a reason to slash at something. This game gives them in spades. Note: Some wounds graphics a little gory. ;-)

This is a great game and is best appreciated with the Circle of Eight Mod packs made by the community, which fix a lot of bugs and add a TON of content!

The manual for this game is almost identical to the core section on the 3.5 edition of the D&D player's handbook that was available in bookstores. I was thinking of purchasing the other one's that are available for purchase but I went with ToEE simply because I prefer turn based games. The closeness to "real D&D" mechanics are almost a perfect conversion, aside from the bugs (crashing, rare graphic errors, not being able to see your party in the dungeons at certain corners and walls) the only major difference is that you have to use codes and back-doors to manually import your characters from other campaigns. There is also no way to change skin-tone, so although there are Drow NPCs, they don't look traditional. One other major difference that comes to mind is that you can only go up to level 20, which is ok for how the campaign is set up if you start from level 1. Personally I imported some characters I used in other campaigns by "hand" to avoid all the side quests and low level monster mashing. I'd recommend this game to fans of the older SSI games and tactical gamers. Although "power-gaming" is slightly possible in this game, players want to just hack and slash should seek elsewhere.