The Temple of Elemental Evil

I remember when this game was about to come out. I was SO badly looking forward to the release. It got here, I loaded it up on my Pentium 3 750mhz beast, spent two hours patching video cards and system drivers, and craaaawwwwled through the first 10 hours of this friggin nightmare of a game. I must admit, I never finished it. In fact, I didn't play ever again. Something threw me off about this one. I don't know if it was the pace of the turn based combat, the tedium of moving so very little through such a massive game, or just the fact that I had very little patience in my collegiate, weed-soaked, delirium. For 3 bucks though...this one may just get tried out again. I'll let you know if this time is different. If you have the patience, I'd say go for it for sure. Can't go wrong with that summer price.

First software I've seen that's capable of crashing my virtual XP session. I actually have to issue a hard reboot to bring the system back up. LOL. After reading, this is clearly not due to my playing on a hosted session - this game has serious issues that you as the buyer are left to deal with. Not pleased....I have no time to fiddle with a game to make it work, so it feels like a rip-off. I remember that happening a lot back in the 90's...boxed software that just straight wouldn't run due to bugs. This is Bad Old Games.

Let's just go ahead and get this out of the way: Yes. The combat system truly is amazing. But is the game worth playing? Short Answer: No, it's too buggy even with the massive fan patches/bugfixes. Do not buy. Long Answer: This is one INCREDIBLY buggy game. Let me just give one major example of this: About 2 hour into the game, I am ready for my first major battle. And what do I find? My Mage CANNOT CAST SPELLS. After double checking my methods numerous times, I found that it was a bug. Long story short, I restarted the game from the beginning 3 times and the first thing I did was check and see if my Mage could cast spells. Only 1 out of the 3 times was he actually capable of spellcasting. Furthermore, I read of a couple instances online where people reported that, due to this glitch, their Mage simply lost the ability to cast spells over the course of the game. That significant bug is only scratching the surface. We have missing dialogue options, missing quest NPCs, corrupted saves and on and on the list goes. The fact that such game breaking bugs exist after YEARS of a dedicated community providing patches and bugfixes is truly a testament to just how much of an unsalvagable mess this game is. Disregarding bugs for a moment, the game is simply clunky. The map system is very odd and poorly labelled. The UI is ugly and unwieldy. There's a lot of stuttering when scrolling across the screen. FINAL VERDICT: DO NOT BUY.

I have finished nearly 90 RPG and in my opinion it is an average game. A combat is great due to D&D rules, RPG elements are also great, but everything else is miserable - quests, NPCs, plot, lore, pathfinding, trading, cities. I have applied Circle of Eight mod which should be improving game greatly, but honestly without this mod it would be probably unplayable. There are so many better RPGs, so unless you are big fan of D&D and combat based RPGs, my recommendation would be to avoid this game.

Great story line when the games is playable, however the game is constantly crashing at launch, rending the gam unplayable for the time being.