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A good idea so poorly released that it baffles me

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 9 / 10
Date: January 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I will start off by saying all those people that gave this game a bad review had the right to do so. This game was released unfinished and with so many bugs that I don't think I have ever seen a more blantant example of a customers being taken advantage of. Shame on you Atari!

If you are only a casual CRPG player then you should pass on this game, your money will be better spent elsewhere. If you are a dedicated hard core CRPG player and/or a huge fan of D&D computer games then read a little further because there might, might, be a reason you will want to purchase this game.

First off, there have been some attempts to fix the game. There are 3 official patches that improved playabiltiy and in addition there are some unoffical patches created by some very dedicated fans that you also may want to look at. I am not saying you should use those 3rd party patches nor am I recommending them, I'm just telling you they are there.

I enjoyed this game for two reasons. The first is the turn based combat system. In a time where point and click real time "strategy" dominates the video game landscape, it is nice to see such a thoughtful and challenging combat system that actually requires and allows for some thought rather than a quick mouse hand. This was a very well done part of the game and very much has the feel of the old paper, pen and dice game.

The second reason I liked this game is nostalgia. I played D&D back in the eighties and the Village of Hommlet module was the first one I ever played. This game very loyally replicates the original pen and paper module. The monk, the barbarian and the thief in the Inn. The castle under construction, the wizard and the warrior who protect the town. They are all here. This game reminds me of a time long ago, sitting with friends I have not seen in twenty years, and looking at the front of that lime green module with the picture of the halfling fighting the zombies on the cover.

Bottom line: If you are a hard core CRPG gamer or are a hard core D&D video gamer you may get something out of this game. If you are neither of these two things, this game will be more hassel than it is worth and you should pass.

Needed a lot of patchin', but was well worth it!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: July 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

First, a few facts:
I hated the Baldur's Gate Series.
I like turn-based RPGs.
I feel that Arcanum was, arguably, the best RPG ever.
This game is totally unplayable without several patches.

That being said, this is best RPG I've played since Arcanum came out in 2002. After a few patches (some of which took some searching for), the game plays very smoothly, and offered my best computer D&D experience in years.

I've finished it several times now, with several different parties. It's really fun for testing out your character concepts for paper-N-pencil D&D. While not perfect, it gives you a good picture of how certain spells and feats work in the game. One of my best experiences was playing an Evil party. I had an army of undead following my cleric around, which I found to be a lot of fun since I loved playing the Necromancer in Diablo II.

Still, I'm not going to deny that the game could have been better, but if you think for a moment about the millions of little rules covered in the 3.5 core books, you have to realize what an impossible task it would have been to make this game perfect. Those who see the brilliance of this game keep playing it, and many have worked hard to make the game even better with their own patches and tweaks, which can be found at Sorcerer's Place (search for it on the web). Definitely use the most recent "Circle of Eight" Mod Pack, which can also be found there.

In short, I feel the game is brilliant in its patched form, but because it was released too early by Atari and not patched for a good long time- developer Troika was dealt a mortal wound. If this game had been released after it was tuned up a bit more... the D&D community would have supported it much like Counter-Strike or something. We possibly would have seen sequels and modules made by fans, and even Troika itself. *Sigh* What could have been...

With no future D&D computer games peaking my interest in the least, the Temple of Elemental Evil will remain on my hard drive for a good long time!

Too buggy to play

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: October 16, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I wanted so badly to like this game. I love D&D and the game at times can be fun, but it is simply unplayable. This is my first ever review on here and I hate that it is a bad one. I would not advise anyone to buy this game. I would say stay away and do not touch when you see it on the shelf. Others have said wait for the patch. I do not even know if that would help. I have had more crashes playing this game for about a week, then I have had in my entire life of using computers. I cannot say it strongly enough, stay away from this game. If there were negative stars I would give them to this game. This game is still in EARLY Beta, unfortunately they released it as such.

Patched Game is fun.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: December 29, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Luckily I purchased this game after the 1.0 patch had come out. I find it interesting that the patch is 1.0, it seems Atari is admiting they released a beta version if the patch brings the product to version 1.0. I also downloaded the Circle of Eight patch that adds things to the game and makes it even more enjoyable. Once you get all of this installed this is a very fun RPG in the classic D&D style. For those of you that loved the Bioware games I highly recommend this game,(once patched) you will not be disappointed. The gameplay is fun and the graphics and environment are decent.

Too bad they didn't release the game once they had everything working properly or you might be hearing about this being awarded some Game of the Year talk.

An Awesome Way to Discover the World of Greyhawk

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: March 11, 2006
Author: Amazon User

First I'd like to say I never had any problems running this game. I popped it in, downloaded it, and played it with no weirdness. Smooth as could be. Also I strangely did not have a level cap, but just kept getting new spells and feats, etc. (I honestly think something went wrong here--but my characters just kept leveling up beyond where I think the game was programmed to prevent me. Hey give me more bugs like that anytime!)

The gameplay feels a lot like Baldur's Gate (which is the computer game that made me fall in love with both the Forgotten Realms and computer RPG's--the best computer RPG of all time) with much of the same freedom to explore and do things in any order you want, and to approach problems from a variety of angles. Most of all, it is a great way to fall in love with D&D's Greyhawk setting if you're like me and pretty much have only gotten to know it in snippets from the 3rd edition core rulebooks. It is wonderful to immerse yourself in, an engaging story that will suck you in for hours and hours.

A couple of warnings. First the game is HARD. You will be challenged to think tactically about every fight you get into, even the random encounters along the roads, and even then you will die horribly a lot. They throw some mean badguys at you without flinching. I loved the challenge of it, but I can see how all the merciless slaughter could turn away someone who's used to games that pamper them a bit more.

Also as mentioned in another review, you'll find that any adventuring companions you run into will get first cut of the loot when looting enemies. I can see why they did it, to reflect the fact that characters who join your party don't automatically become your slaves, but still it can be a bit frustrating, especially when an ally pilfers the best stuff off a body literally on the other side of the map from him and you cannot get him to return it. Also if the comment made is true, and the NPC's will overload themselves, then that's another big headache. What I found as a solution was this: Give the NPCs all the worthless big items you're carrying around (quarterstaves, rocks, arrows, etc) until you fill all their inventory spaces. They won't be able to pick up anything but coins and won't get encumbered. The other easy fix is to kill your NPC companions as soon as they've outlived their usefullness and get your stuff back (gee, any guess what the alignment of my party was?)

On the whole I was impressed by the game. I found the graphics very pretty (a refined version of what you get in Baldur's Gate--a bit of a dated presentation compared to Neverwinter Nights, but very nicely drawn and animated). The dialogue options were great--with four or five responses available at each branch of conversation I was usually able to say some flavor of whatever I would have wanted my character to say. The NPCs were colorful and fun, always worth talking to, and the main plot when you enter the Temple is really absorbing. My one regret is that apparently there is some demon queen ultimately responsible for the ills in the game, but for the life of me I could never find her--though I did run into two gods and fought gobs of uberpowerful devils and demons across the elemental planes before finally submitting to the will of my dark lord. Heh-heh, how often does a game let you do THAT?

Fun, but frustrating...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 12 / 17
Date: December 01, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I'm a big fan of all the medieval fantasy RPGs out there, so I get them all as soon as they come out and play! Once I got the guidebook to go along with it, I had a blast playing this game. I LOVE doing all the little quests in each town, but sometimes it's tedious so I use the book for hints. The game was fun overall, but once I got to the point where I had no more raise dead items, no clerics to raise my party and 2/3 of my party members dead - I quit.

The pros about ToEE:
-Nice Graphics
-Fun Storylines
-Lots of Fun Combat
-Complex character generation

The cons:
-Not enough raise dead items/opportunities!
-Too dark!
-Combat can be tedious at times

I rate this game about a 3.5/5 stars - mostly because I did get many hours of enjoyment out of it, but I was disappointed I couldn't finish the game. I might load it back up one of these days and play some more - but for now I'm too busy playing the Dungeon Siege expansion which I find to be much more enjoyable. This is not a bad game though, D&D players will probably like it!

Too many challenges to enjoy an epic adventure...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: October 31, 2003
Author: Amazon User

In a world where the D&D CRPG venue has been established by games such as Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale, taking a classic epic adventure such as TOEE to the CRPG world should have been a sure thing. Unfortunately, TOEE doesn't rise to level of BG and IWD. Several challenges await anyone who buys TOEE. The need for a patch has been well documented so I leave that to the other reviews. First there are a whole new set of D&D rules. Granted, TOEE is a CRPG that follows the new 3.5 D&D rules very religiously while the other previous games have "simplified" previous version of rules much to the chagrine of hardcore D&D fans. However, these simplifications followed the 80:20 rule in which the simplifications reduced the complexity to the point that 80% of the target audience could have an enjoyable experience without adding significant product complexity to satisfy a minority. The next challenge is the UI which is completely mouse centric and requires a greater degree of hand/eye coordination to deal with. Where as in other games a keystroke could cast a spell, now its a sequence of selecting the right character, a mouse dance of mouse button clicks while manuevering over a very small piece of screen real estate to do the same action. There are very few "short cut" key strokes in many secondary "admin" type screens. Can't select spells or skills by hand, have to drag and drop. Can't sell multiple items at once to sell, have to drag and drop each one (huge pain). And if you mess up the drop, start over. May not seem like a big deal but my eyes aren't what they used to be and lack of hand coordination skills is why I don't buy action/first person games. Its not that the UI isn't intuitive, its just not consistent with other D&D games which compounds the frustration. Last challenge is the game performance. Partially as a result of staying "true" to the rules, subsuquent design decisions have a considerable drag on performance. For example, calculating "fog of war" (what is visible to the party) is determine per person in party. Not bad when you have 5 PC but when you have 10 or 15? BG/IWD approach was to have smaller maps (areas for the company to explore) that didn't require as much "remasking" when one moved the party. TOEE uses many large maps (some the size of BG city) and does FOW rendering against that. Combat doing turn-based is even worse as the now the enemy position (from the POV) are calculated and rendered/not rendered on the big map. Go up against 20 skeletons and you feel like you could have hand rolled the entire battle quicker.
As a result, this game fails to meet experience expectations set by other games in this genre. They should have tried this approach on a lesser game setting (i.e. IWD3), rather than a classic epic where the challenge was finishing the game not playing it. Thus the expectations exceeded the resulting product here, unfortunately...

Great Game, if a little buggy

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: June 04, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Check it out. A PC D&D game that isn't set in the Forgotten Realms. And its good. And it uses the current 3.5 edition rules. And its good.

Seriously, this is a good game, which fun character development and an interesting setting. The most interesting thing the desingers implemented was the Party Alignment idea--- you choose your party's alignment and it determines which opening vignette (quest/assignment) you receieve. Basically, every alignment has its own interesting story that sets up the game. The only problem with this is that it is a symptom of the game's main problem: there isn't really much of a plot. Oh there's the your traditional RPG story, with a Big Bad Coming Back to Try and Conquer the World Again, and it works, but still...

The gameplay is turn based, so if you prefer a fast-paced hack and slash, this might not be for you. It makes for a cool action RPG, in a very true to D and D turnbased style.

The other cool thing is that you can design your whole party (up to five people), allowing you to come up with good combinations to support your team members. (There's also an interesting glitch that lets you have all your abilities start out at 18... but I digress.) You can only reach 10th level in this game. This is the ultimate weakenss in Temple. It really prevents you from experimenting with multiclassing (sigh... no Monk/Fighter for me....).

This leads me to the issue of game length. Once you complete the quests in the two towns you visit, that's it. All you can do is mosey on down to the Temple, and fight your way to the end. And though it is fun, and there are quests in the Temple (depending on your alignment), I would have liked to explore more of Greyhawk.

The sounds in ToEE are good enough, but as stated in other reviews, nothing genre breaking. The screams of torture victims in the Temple get really annoying (and disturbing at times) really quickly, since the music and sound is the same throughout the four dungeon levels. Overall, when not overly used, as in the Temple, the music is appropriate, and kind of creepy the whole time.

There are bugs, some very annoying. Some are gamestoppers. There are also issues that I'm not sure if they are bugs or simply mistakes on Troika's part. For example, the looting system leads much to be desired. NPCs will not trade with party members. This can be really annoying whne they snatch up a super powerful weapon... that they can't use and your Fighter, etc. can.

Still, for all its faults, this is a good game. And frankly, its the game that made me appreciate D & D. What we need next from Troika Games is a big epic CRPG set in Greyhawk, which a level cap of 20. That way we can all get a break from the Forgotten Realms.

Mindnumbing boredom that 3 patches cant fix

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 10
Date: September 02, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Ill get straight to the point: Stay away from this game.

I have played The Icewwind Dale series, Baldurs gate 1 & 2 and the excellent Planescape: Torment several time over. They are all great games.

When it was announced a PC version of Temple of Elemental Evil, I was very excited. I remember the the thrill playing, and then DMing the PnP version of the game some 15 years ago.

And THIS is what they come up with?!? Crap!

1. Bugs. After installing the three official patches the game is still bug-ridden: clicking on a character brings up the inv. of another, spells dont work, desktop crashing, numerous clipping issues (which is very rare in 2D game), an interface that seem to do the exact opposite of what you want it to do. etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc.

2. Tedious. The D & D 3.5 rules does not translate into a computer game. At all. It is that simple. In the Baldurs gate series the game play was fast, intuitive. exciting. In ToEE its a big yawn.
The Homlet quest are, with two exceptions, dumb, boring and errand boyish: Tell X to bring me a turnip, get a hammer for the blacksmith, tell X that Y really likes her, play cards with some bum at the inn. You get the idea.....
Combatwise it is none the better: I spent som 50 minutes chooping up 2 frogs just to get inside the Moathouse.
Had the 50 minutes been exciting I wouldnt mind, but its just a series of going through motions, linear clicking on options on each characters unwieldy radial menu.
Accurate representation of combat? Maybe.
Fun (which, in the end is why we all play computer games)? If your idea of fun is sticking needles in your eyes, this game is a blast.

3. Visuals & audio
The voice acting is in the top 3 worst games ever. A good example is the character Elmo whom you meet at the begining. After the encounter, I was left wondering if this was a joke on the gamers by the makers of this game.
The visuals are an anachronism. Great in 1998. Maybe. Today you get better visuals on high-end mobile phones.

4. The bugs, incredibly crummy gameplay, DD 3,5 rules, bad visuals and audio coupled with a thoroughly uninspired story makes this a game you should steer clear of.

Advice: If you havent played the Baldurs Gate or Icewind Dale serie yet: get those.
If you have: play them again

Anything but ToEE, even if it is in the bargain bin for 2 bucks.

Finished at last, and boy is it great.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 10
Date: November 23, 2003
Author: Amazon User

About a month ago, upon creating my party, doing the 1 minute alignment specific beggining sequence, and seeing how beautiful the game's artwork is, I attempted my first quest. The only problem was; the npc who I had to talk to mysteriously disappeared. I then realized the game wasn't exactly finished. Troika just recently released a patch and I have redelved into the world of GreyHawk. I have found one of the best games of the year.

Being a jaded computer role-player, I am quite hard to please. Diablo II and Baldur's Gate II seem to be the template for just about every RPG nowadays, sticking with recycled mechanics and a fresh coat of paint. Which is a safe, albeit uninspired, route. Apparently the creators of TOEE have enough respect for what they create, and enough interest in what they are doing, to break this slump.

Upon entering the game the player is greeted by instant gratification visually. Every detail of what one might expect in a cookie cutter (not a bad thing) fantasy universe is smoothly implemented. In other words; everything flows and fits. The wisplike fireflies of the night, the town drunkard, the random encounters with "bandits", and the political church all are there. They aren't there because the developers were trying to be different, they're there because they should be. PS: They are also there because this is a faithful adaptation of the module with the same name.

As you do the mildy uninspired quests to get to the first mini dungeon (leading up the the epic temple dungeons of course), the main meat of the game is introduced: combat. This is more of a D&D creation than any game before it, going with nothing less than an ambitious turnbased mechanic. Every tactical endeavor must be preasent for success. And oh boy, is the challenge fun.

But of course, there are several ways to do many of the situations, and many of the confrontations can be avoided. My main strategy though is to charm the biggest monster I can find and then kill everything.

With all this killing, you may be wondering about the story. Well, there isn't really a story. This game is all about Dungeons and Dragons. The nostalgia many of us have about it, the aptmosphere behind it, and the feeling you get whith two criticals in a row. Nothing could stop the developers from achieving their clarity.

Now go buy this game.

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