The Temple of Elemental Evil

I played TToEE when it came out in paperback for AD&D back in the 90'ies and have been looking for a CRPG version. I bought it instantly when it came out and played for several hours, but I just couldn't find the vibe I was looking for. The controls and UI were both clunky and unforgiving. And the bugs were game breaking so I finally stopped playing. Seeing the game drop on Steam, I decided to give it another whirl. It is the same game as when I bought it before, and when I hit a game ending bug, I see that nothing much has really changed. This is really unfortunate as the campaign is really amazing but still cluttered with game breaking bugs. I guess I was really hoping for a solid update in this version which would have solved the bugs. Alas!

10/10 recreation of a D&D session where the DM forgot to prepare anything interesting. Played for 10 hours, but the only fun I had was during the hour I spent creating my characters.

Temple of Elemental Evil is arguably one of the weirder D&D CRPGs ever made, between its slavish adherence to both D&D 3.5 as written and the original T1-4 module from the 80s. It's also one of my favorites. There's not really much else like it out there, which excuses how dry and also punishingly difficult it can be from time to time. I hope you're ready to spend at least 30 minutes in the opening town doing a bunch of fed-ex quests so your characters can get to level 2. On the plus side, that spiked chain trip build you've always theory crafted for tabletop works just fine here and is a lot of fun. In true Troika fashion, this game also was notoriously buggy at launch and required fan fixes to reach its potential. As far as I'm to understand, this new steam release is essentially using a lite version of the Circle of Eight and Temple Plus fix packs, so if you want the basic experience without much fuss you don't need to do anything. If you want anything more it's going to take some research and work, but thankfully not all that much.

This is an great remaster of a very hard D&D 3.5 game. The first few levels might require a guide to get through, but once you hit level 5 the game starts to become less save scummy. It is an excellent adaptation of the original D&D adventure by Gary Gygax and Frank Mentzer to D&D 3.5. It's turned based, which I prefer, and it seems all the bugs that infested the original game have been fixed in this release. There is also a thriving modding community that adds a ton of extra content to the game including increasing the level cap to 20 and adding new quests and locations. It also runs perfectly on linux via proton, no crashing or any bugs encountered.

*Excellent* version overall, really nice work SNEG!! That said, it's a little tricky to get the FULL Circle of 8 mod + Temple+ to work, but once you know how it functions it's not too bad (just follow the guide here in the Guides section, it's a great guide for doing that.) But yeah, bug-free 30 hours in and just having a blast playing, it works great, the WASD camera is beautiful, everything works as expected and it's truly a joy to play this very unique and OOZING with character, atmosphere and DEPTH as well, my goodness, this is a true GEM of gemz bros. And for your 2nd playthrough or Keep On The Borderlands module (which is a free FULL campaign, a usermade module for the engine), you can use Temple+ and the full Co8, which means extended character creation (SO cool, seriously!) more rules to play with, and just some really really great stuff overall. Classic stuff here in a super playable format, well done! A+ Peace & God Bless yall! <3

To those who bash this game, ToEE... You obviously have not tried it with mods. Co8 has several mods available for it including another complete adventure. While I admit I have not played much on Steam release of this game, I have about 80 hours on another platform who has been carrying this game for YEARS. The game is hard, I will admit that. But it is so satisfying when you complete various parts of ToEE because you know that you have accomplished something. While I own it on another platform, I also bought it here and have bought at least 3 copies of the CD-ROM version as well. When I really like a product I will buy it multiple times to show my support. Especially when it is this inexpensive. The first copy I bough was many years ago when it was released by Atari and I paid about $40 for that one. Plus another $15 for the Clue Book. While this review covers Windows I plan to try the Steam version in CachyOS soon.

One of the best implementation of D&D combat I have ever seen. Unfortunately, everything else about this game is mid at best. Lack of HUD and font scaling is criminal, and some bugs are really annoying. Play this if you believe that combat can carry the whole game for you, otherwise skip.

I enjoy this game only because Temple of Elemental Evil was the first D&D adventure I ever ran back when I was 11 years old and there is tons of nostalgia. For anyone just stepping into this game, there is a lot of issues in it that I wouldn't recomend, it's pretty much just a two dungeon dungeon crawl with very little story and very little dialog to it, pretty much a Hack N Slash, which can be fun, but without the Nostalgic Warm Fuzzies of seeing characters and locations that were only in the Module before kind of come to life, I think there are many games that are better than this. I do like that it's 3.5 rules (The best D&D ruleset there is) and it is turn based which I also prefer.

As a D&D and CRPG veteran of 30 years: this is the worst opening to any game I have ever played. Build a super optimized party that covers all the bases and fills every role, just to get stomped into oblivion by some frogs in what should be one of your very first fights in the game. Wander around the opening town trying to complete minor quests to gain exp, only to encounter dumb interactions that dont count as quests and have no real impact or resolution. "Git gud" guys can push up their glasses at me and tell me "Clearly you didnt go get THAT ONE GUY from the inn at the beginning who makes this easy" **** off, no good RPG is going to REQUIRE you to pick up a specific NPC in your party just to have a chance at winning some early fights. That is bad game design. I made a fully custom party so that I could PLAY a fully custom party. I love Arcanum and baldurs gate 1 and 2 and all sorts of other games that could be considered "challenging" or "difficult" to get into, but the difference is that those games were actually designed well. ToEE is just bad. Save your money

Unfortunately they broke this version of the game. Modifiers are completely off. you'll find in the game you always miss even with a +9 to attack level 2 mobs and they hit you so easily no matter what your AC is. spells hardly work at all either. I had to go back to playing my disc version and its a lot better. I have no idea what they did with this.