The entire game feels like a stale and lonely slideshow of blatant unimportance, and it practically begs you to hate it.
User Rating: 5.2 | The Temple of Elemental Evil PC
I was expecting a Baldur's Gate-esque type adventure when I picked up the Temple of Elemental Evil, and I was sorely disappointed. Every so often a nice morsel of goodness will make itself apparent in the game; but more often than not, TToEE is a boring, uninspired game that fails to stand out amongst a sea of solid PC RPGs. Temple makes a poor first impression the moment it is booted up. The character creation process, although very deep, lacks any sort of aid for understanding Dungeons and Dungeons 3.5. Games like Neverwinter Nights held your hand if the complexity of the system put you in over your head--Temple leaves you to drown in the minutiae. It doesn't get much better. You choose your group's moral alignment upon starting, but the choice is almost entirely superficial. You're treated to a different opening cinema depending on which alignment you chose, but that's where the importance of the alignment system ends. After that, you're plopped in the same town, and given the same main quest, regardless of your choice. The presentation is weak. The graphics are honestly at the Baldur's Gate level--which is simply inexcusable, considering that BG is 5 years old. The sound and the music do nothing to help. The entire game feels like a stale and lonely slideshow of blatant unimportance, and it practically begs you to hate it. But I trudged on. One of the first houses you visit is occupied by a lone woman. You speak to her, and she rambles something about how hard it is to take care of her many children. What is she talking about? There are no children in the house, outside the house, or anywhere in the town. Searching for these mythical childspawn was an exercise in vanity. They don't exist. The game improves a little when quests start popping up--albeit mostly uninspired, the quests at least provide something to do. It's a shame they are mostly trekking quests--you'll wander all over town, delivering messages from husbands to wives and employees to bosses, all of it relevant to the grand scheme of things in no conceivable way. You may stick with them, hoping something intriguing pops up. Nothing ever does. The only gem in the entire game is the combat system, which is well thought-out, pretty well animated, and simply addictive. Turn-based and tactical though it may be, I found myself continually interested by everything it threw at me. It's sad that combat here is rather rare, at least in comparison to most RPGs. I would have enjoyed the game better had the battles come more frequently. I've read that Atari rushed TToEE out of the door, thereby ripping it from the hands of the talented folks at Troika. I believe it--something is not right here. The entire game is an unfinished bore. Perhaps with time it could have been something good, but we'll never know. I recommend that any gamer intrested stay far away from this failure. There are dozens of better PC RPGs out there--don't punish yourself with this dreck.
