The Temple of Elemental Evil

3.5 was a crunchier time, this module is atmospheric and perfect for some tactical gaming. I just wish I was good at this lol

This is a brilliant game considering it was released in 2003 and amazingly, still works under Windows 11! Great if you like character building. It has nice animations, especially for missile weapons. Walking around exploring is a bit tedious but overall, I really enjoyed playing it.

If you love D&D 3.5, this is one of the most faithful recreations of it. The game looks great even at this age and the music / tone is wonderful.

Honestly there is the base for a great game here, but it just isn't there yet, everything it does feels half-baked and the huge number of trash mobs and slow beginning in which both your characters and the monsters miss the attacks again and again as you patiently wait for the animations to play ironically makes me wish it was RTwP instead. The late game also suffers from being really buggy and unfinished, even if it has some cool battles. I won't blame this 2003 game for being crash heavy in a modern system, but bugs like skills clearly not working as intended or some summons being so buggy its impossible to dismiss then and they are somehow immortal or even buggy quest progression are things impossible to excuse. Story-wise there is nothing that interesting either, but at least the village and environments are quite nice, would have liked to see then expanding then a bit adding more depth to then(for example you barely interact with the environment itself in this game) and adding more vendors too, there is a lot of money in the game, but very few places to use it. Maybe the fan mods fix some of these problems, but as far as the unmodded game goes I can't say it really impressed me.

I liked a lot of things about this game, not the least of which was the fact that this was a CRPG re-creation of the old PnP Village of Hommlet module. Mind you it added a lot of content to the module, but that's a good thing. Besides that, I did have one major problem with the game. Maybe its because of the excellent DM I had back in the day, but as others have noted, the story is relatively light weight. Like IWD, this all about combat and dungeon crawls. As such, I felt that there wasn't much to separate ToEE from IWD. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but my expectations were definitely much higher.