The Temple of Elemental Evil

Out of the box this thing is a step into my DnD days, single player adventure that runs like the best of strategies. Start simple, start smart and move forward to the meat of the game, the game play.

Graphics are nice and inviting but unfortunately the overall experience is time consuming and frustrating. UI is not very helpful when doing choices; Wizard spells can be only used N times a day; can't define who is the main party socialiser and many small issues here and there are killing the fun. There is a lot of missing taking place in combat, making fights longer and hard It takes time, if you want to give it a go anyways. Default characters have dull voices so you main want to install the main mod and create your party from scratch. The mod on OSX requires to install JRE 1.7 inside Wine, then the mod, then setup Wine to run the mod "front-end" UI instead of the main app. Know that he mod made the game less stable for me though.

ToEE is by no means a bad game, but with very little story or character interaction. It is, in short, to Baldurs Gate what Fallout Tactics is to Fallout 1&2. A lot of (tactical) killing, but that's about it. I'd recommend skipping it and going for BG, BG2, Planescape:Torment & Arcanum first. Or Fallout 1&2, which are despite their postapocalyptic wasteland setting more like BG then ToEE. If you prefer story, the occasional alternative solution without killing, and interesting henchmen, that is.

I want to love this game, but it seems like RNG is heavily skewed against you (This is comming from someone whos beaten Darkest Dungeons). Because of this you end up getting massivly frustrated as an enemy will hit you every attack; while all of your guys are wildly swinging at it missing every attack. An example to show how bad it is I once missed a SLEEPING dire rate 5 times in a row. One decent counter to this is that you're allowed to save scum as much as you want! Which is incredibly boring and tedious. Also theres no manual that comes with the game and very few posts are made about this leaving you in the dark about most things. Which is fun sometimes, but in a game where you decide so many important things right at the start (if you make a character) it hinders your ablity to maximize your characters ablities which is something you need. Besides that this game is great and I would give it 5 stars if it wasnt for these 2 massive issues.

Almost all my CRPG experience comes from playing the NWN, BG and IWD games. I think this game fails in a couple ways. I am maybe half way through and I still don't give a hoot about a single NPC, I don't care about my own characters and I can't even think of the names of my hired help off the top of my head as I write this. We'll call him "Oaf with a hammer". The best part of these games is getting to know NPCs and your own characters and being emotionally invested in them and what they are trying to do. TOEE does not offer this. As many have mentioned, the beginning of the game forces you to spend a few hours wanting to claw your eyes out by asking you to play town go-fer in Hommlet. It's excruciating, a bit confusing and not the least bit rewarding in any way. Even with all that being said, the dungeon crawl and combat aspects of it are pretty satisfying. I hated only giving this two stars because sentimentally, I am a total sucker for almost anything with the DnD name slapped on it, but I frankly don't particularly love playing this game.