User Rating: 7.4 | The Temple of Elemental Evil PC
The upside: TOEE looks beautiful, combat is fun, developing your characters w/ 3rd edition feats and differently aligned party combinations gives ton of replay value, and the storyline -- while a bit abbreviated -- is fairly interesting and the varied NPC quests are for the most part, engaging and worthwhile and solvable in multiple ways. And the atmosphere and music is perfect. I wish the Baldur's Gate series could be re-released with this level of graphic polish. I like the radial menus but no shortcuts is pretty ridiculous. The downside: The learning curve was an avoidable mistake. Troika makes playing the game -- which is great fun -- unnecessarily hard. Item descriptions are awful or nonexistent. Maintaining NPC party members' inventories is a royal pain in the arse. Pathfinding is atrocious. There's little guidance or documentation (besides gamefaqs.com) to what any of the feats do. Overall, the game is pretty short. Like 10-15 hours short, if you accidently finish the game without exploring any side-quests. Overall, I'm glad I played through the end and experimented with a few different parties and alignments ... but I doubt I'm gonna play this one again any time soon. (Unlike Baldur's Gate or Morrowind, which I never seem to get enough of.)
