Longtime fans of Dungeons & Dragons recall that The Temple of Elemental Evil, before it was a computer role-playing game, was a popular module for pen-and-paper D&D. In fact, the original version of The Temple of Elemental Evil is the quintessential D&D campaign. It puts a small party of adventurers, skilled in armed and magical combat, deep in a dangerous fortress filled with hundreds of sinister monsters and untold secrets and riches. The adventurers start off relatively weak, but through their trials and tribulations, they can become powerful enough to thwart the evil lurking in the temple's heart. To capture the spirit both of the original campaign and of modern-day pen-and-paper D&D, the developers implemented a turn-based combat system featuring the new 3.5 Edition D&D rules, which gives you a fine level of control over your party--as well as plenty of leisure time to admire the game's great-looking creatures. However, an occasionally cumbersome and obtuse interface and occasionally buggy gameplay do limit this game's appeal mostly to those who don't need an invitation or introduction to the world of Dungeons & Dragons. But these players should be readily willing to overlook the game's problems for the sake of its challenging, strategic battles.

The Temple of Elemental Evil is based on a classic hack-and-slash Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

The Temple of Elemental Evil is a single-player-only adventure with a straightforward premise that's mostly an excuse to put you through a lengthy, diverse dungeon crawl. This isn't an epic-scale adventure--most of the game takes place in the titular temple (though, at the beginning, you explore the countryside until you find it), though the temple is a sufficiently huge, multistory affair. Initially, you create a party of up to five characters (or you may choose from pregenerated characters), who begin as neophyte first-level adventurers and can eventually grow to 10th level, which isn't as high up there as some other recent D&D games have allowed you to get. Make no mistake, this is no flaw--Dungeons & Dragons is probably most well balanced, tense, and exciting at the earlier levels, so this game's focus on relatively low-level adventuring leads to many nail-biting battles in which you must take great care to keep your party out of harm's way as best you can. Indeed, starting out, your party is vulnerable even to common thugs, though later on, you'll start to feel quite powerful as your fighters gain multiple attacks per round, your healers become much more useful, and your mages learn to cast damaging area-of-effect spells.

One interesting aspect of The Temple of Elemental Evil is that the characters you can place in your party must be of similar moral alignment. In fact, you must choose a moral alignment for your party, which governs who can and can't be a part of it. For instance, a chaotic evil character wouldn't have any business being in a lawful good party, though a neutral good or lawful neutral character would be welcome. This choice affects the brief introductory sequence for your party (there are nine different variants, in total) as well as the conclusion of the game. Other than that, alignment doesn't play a huge role over the course of the game, as there isn't much in the way of dialogue with non-player characters--not compared to other D&D RPGs from over the past few years, anyway. Good, neutral, and evil characters alike will still find themselves fighting for their lives against the countless vicious foes defending the temple from any interlopers.

Dozens of great-looking, tough monsters await in the depths of the temple, which is where the majority of the action takes place.

3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons rules have been featured in computer games such as Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor, last year's Neverwinter Nights, and some others, but The Temple of Elemental Evil is the first game to use the 3.5 Edition rules. As the name implies, this update mostly adjusts the balance and some of the naming conventions of 3rd Edition D&D, and while some of the changes will seem very significant to hardcore fans, they aren't readily obvious, in general.

At any rate, the game clearly tries to stick as close to the book as possible, and purists will certainly appreciate this. The turn-based combat system faithfully incorporates most all the facets of pen-and-paper D&D. Not only that, but this is an interesting and complex game system in its own right, seemingly conceived with computer role-playing in mind. For example, each character moves in order of his or her initiative rating, and faster characters like monks and barbarians can move further in a round than others. Characters whose hit points are depleted in battle do not necessarily die outright (depending on how hard they were hit) but may find themselves at death's door--only if their wounds are tended to by an ally or if the battle is swiftly resolved will they be saved. Also, larger characters such as ogres, or characters with longer weapons such as spears, gain an attack of opportunity against incoming foes with smaller arms, discouraging their enemies from charging headlong into them. Characters may also use some unique tactical options, such as attempting to trip their foes, or trading their ability to move in one round for an additional attack. In all, these are just a few of the many complexities of the turn-based combat system of this game, which has plenty of strategic depth, making the relatively slow-paced combat anything but boring.