buggy and too brief: Had the potential to be amazing but it falls really short.

User Rating: 6.8 | The Temple of Elemental Evil PC
If you like tactical combat, the turn-based combat here is pretty great. The GS review already explains why the combat is fun. But there are some other issues that bring the game down. Even after patching, it is fantastically slow. The game will crawl at times for no apparent reason. This issue is well documented in the game's forums. Apparently it has to do with the "fog" that covers areas you haven't seen yet. The story and quests are paper-thin. It feels pointless to do the simple quests in the 2 towns when the fighting offers more experience and more fun. The NPC characters are not fleshed out much, even after you add them to your party. There are level-limits which make some the low-level characters tricky to play because they don't have much to offer in a fight until they reach higher levels, like the Mage and Druid. Fighters have an easier time of it over all. It doesn't help at all that the game is actually quite short: it ends at the temple. Just when you have your characters built, the game ends. Blah. The shame of it is that the combat mechanics and game engine are solid. Fix the bugs and you can make many more games with the engine. Now that some time has passed since the game's release, it looks like there won't be another game using that engine.