A great game for experienced DnD players. If you can get past the onslaught of bugs and glitches.

User Rating: 7.3 | The Temple of Elemental Evil PC
By tsmone | Review Date:
Temple of Elemental Evil is a game for the true DnD pen and paper player. Out of the Box the game is hardly playable. Its buggy, crashes and has several game breaking misinterpretations of the core rule books. To play this game at its full potential you will need to visit www.co8.com/forum and read about their community fixes and mods available. Atari doesn't seem to want to support this game and it really needs too. The gameplay bascially is a 2d painted map with 3d characters on it. Similar to Icewind Dale or Baldur's Gate's series. The radial menu to get characters to do actions can be cumbersome. This is easily handled by hotkeying some of your most used commands. Even then you are forced to remember which key you hotkeyed to a radial command. This makes battles take longer then they need to. The combat is on a turn basis. As I said this game is for players already familiar with DnD rules. Someone who has never played a game similar to it would be extremely confused. To speed up combat some enemies will take their turn at the same time. This can get confusing when 3 or more enemies all go and you miss exactly what they did. If you enjoy pen and paper DnD you will find TOEE a great transition from 3.5 rules. The gameplay can be slow at times. The story plot is very weak if non-exsistant. Its very unclear what your suppose to be doing from the beginning. It kind of makes sense though. The developers are not holding your hand and forcing you to do anything. There are plenty of small quests to do for experience. The missions are simple and mostly redundant. I used a guide to assist me with the missions since its very hard to even find one. The game is very hard till you get your party above level 2 and can fend for themselves. You will spend at least your first 2 hours running around the first area trying to wrap all the missions up. Time changes from day to night. Different NPC's can be found roaming around depending on what time it is. Days pass by but there really seems to be no reason to care what day it is. The graphics are very high quality. Characters perform animations and it seems to give them life. One thing it lacks is the ability to zoom in and out and see close up details. Its nice to find a item, equip the item and actually see the character holding/using it. Magic has effects like you would imagine. Very flashy and cool. This can also be a pain. If you have many magic effects on you they all will be glowing on your character. Having 5-8 avatars on the screen with several effects can cause performance issues on slower systems. Sound. The music is either on the mark or annoying. Some of the music fits the climate perfectly. Sound effects seem to land well and mixes well visually. Some of the back ground combat music is too bassy and can get annoying quickly. Some of the spell effects are bugged and come across too loud on the speakers. Characters seem speak to often. The inital voice selection is rather limited and most pre-made voices are annoying. I personally found some custom voices and its make the game so much better. Allot of sounds you will never hear without some form of mod installed. Right now TOEE will be found cheap if not practially given away. With the proper patches and mods its a great game in its own right. The information can be found on Atari's forums. Circle of Eight www.co8.org are a great source of people who love TOEE and see its full potential. If you love Pen and Paper DnD, have allot of patience, can sort through mods and patches, you will enjoy in this game. With the lack of turn based RPG games on the market, this game will supress some of your desire to go insane.

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