User Rating: 7.2 | The Temple of Elemental Evil PC
Trying to find out about all the intricate little details that are needed to truly make use of the full capacity of ToEE's 3.5 ed. D&D rules is a bit duanting. Many are buried in a small novel of a manual with an inadequate indexing system. That's one of my large gripes. The manner in which the mouse is set up (via DirectX's DirectInput) is tedious and poorly designed. I have to play in windowed mode to get around that inexcusable flaw. Cain blames it upon DirectX, technically correct. Yet they knew that going in, so why set the mouse up in a way they knew was flawed?! Crashes, Blue screens, and lock ups (especially lock ups) are terribly commonplace. And this playing on MS's more stable OS of XP. The game was tossed to the public roughly six months too soon. That I blame squarely upon Atari. The game play is mostly a dungeon crawl with combat very commonplace. This bothers me only a little. I like true role-playing in RPG's, and there is minimal here. Yeah, there are different pathes for different team allignments, but ultimately, it is still combat, just with supposedly different motives. I like the game, but regret buying it so soon because of the nasty bugs (numerous things do not work as they should) and because the game, frankly, ain't worth $50. Maybe $30, but definitely not $50. I strongly suggest waiting until it is patched and the price is significantly lowered before considering purchasing it. Lastly, I like the turn-based combat a lot. There have been complaints that maybe there should be a real-time option for nonchallenging fights. Well for those, I simply hit the A key to prepare for action if that character is approached during combat for any team members not really needed for the fight, and use only my fighters (and/or cleric for undead). Combat is thus over fairly quickly and cleanly, for me anyway. There just ain't enough story for my tastes. Elf
