Greyhawk has none of the style or the substance of its source material.
User Rating: 5.8 | The Temple of Elemental Evil PC
***Note: The difficulty has been classed “just right” since, for the most part, the game provides an experience that is close enough to that descriptor.*** The Temple of Elemental was one of the most promising D&D interpretations to date, with a thorough implementation of the 3rd Edition rules and a module that is based on the Greyhawk area of the franchise and was made under the supervision of the creator of the lore, Gary Gygax. It sounds like a winning RPG on paper, but what you get is decidedly different. The Temple of Elemental is full of a large number of glaring bugs right from the outset and, in general, the game just isn’t up to par with other D&D games or developer Trokia’s previous works. The game begins, appropriately enough, with you creating your party. Much like the Infinity engine-based D&D games, your party consists of six characters, and the character creation is very true to the pen-and-paper fare – aside from the requisite in-depth skill and feat selections you must make (updated with the latest feats and spells), you even have to “roll” to decide your statistics, which is a neat touch. After setting some other options, such as the alignment of your party, you’ll be taken to an opening vignette according to which alignment you chose, and although this may seem impressive, these opening scenes are very short and whichever one you end up playing is a pretty minuet point. At any rate, your actual adventure begins in the quaint town of Hommlet. Seemingly, Hommlet has all the makings of a great D&D town – a pub where you can pick up adventurers and chat up the locals, a church where you can see a priest for free healing, and a bunch of NPCs that will, when prompted, give you quests that your party can complete to earn experience points to level up and learn new skills and gold to purchase new weapons, armor, and accessories. Unfortunately, most of these promises are swiftly broken. First of all, the villagers dialogue is poorly written and voice acted with the emotion of a painkiller addict, making the conversations you’ll be having more or less disposable – you won’t want to listen to the characters speak their lines like in Icewind Dale II or Neverwinter Nights – instead, you’ll find yourself turning the speakers down and skimming through the text as quickly as possible so that you can get the dialogue branch that results in a new stage for a quest, triggers a new party member, or something to that effect. If you’re looking for a well-crafted storyline, The Temple of Elemental Evil is not for you. Secondly, quests have a serious lack of variety. The denizens of Hommlet insist on giving you “FedEx” quests instead of something, you know, interesting to do. The lack of locales also seriously hamper things – since the titular temple makes up the vast majority of the adventure and you won’t be heading back anywhere else once you get in (for the most part), the opening quests can really only take you to three different areas. Once you get inside the temple, things thankfully pick up a little. The game is essentially one big dungeon crawl, and if you’re into traditional Dungeons and Dragons combat (traditional in the sense that the game’s combat is completely real-time), you’ll be in a zen-like state of gaming euphoria. However, just like the opening town, things get dragged down pretty quickly. For one, the game seems to be a touch too difficult at the beginning and much to easy at the end, and this reverse difficulty ramp is pretty weird, to put it bluntly. This difficulty at the opening stages is no big deal, right? Any D&D gamer would tell you that you could just rest to recuperate. Unfortunately, this is not an option, for the most part. Aside from the extremely rare “safe” rooms in the game, resting is a complete disaster in The Temple of Elemental Evil. As you rest, you’ll be assaulted by huge groups of monsters every hour or so which, as any D&D gamer would know, will heal only a sliver of your adventurer’s wounds. Even worse, some monsters will spawn inside of walls, making them impossible to hit, and since you cannot escape a combat situation, you’ll be stuck in at an infinite stop and will be forced to load your last save, so unless you’re the type that saves every five minutes, this can be detrimental to your play experience. In the end, The Temple of Elemental Evil is far too flawed to be a good purchase for anyone. It looks pretty good (aside from the ugly black that shrouds the environments) and sounds acceptable, but in the end, D&D RPGs are about the gameplay, and this game has none of the style or the substance of its source material or the other games that use the same inspiration.
