Review of Temple of Elemental Evil

"I see a bad moon rising... I see trouble on the way.."

Little did I know when I started to explore the Temple of Elemental Evil, its vortex would spread beyond the confines of the program and begin affecting my life. Health scares, money issues, catastrophic hard drive failure the day before I put the finishing touches on this review... Coincidence? Or the inevitable spread of delicious evil?

The Temple has always held a special sway for me in the world of AD&D. I still own the original module, I have the updated version and I once converted it to an undead filled gore fest just to keep it fresh and interesting so I could run it again....

Atari and Troika really have done an excellent job of keeping this module faithful to the old modules. They even went so far as to consult with Gary Gygax to ensure they understood the wheres and whys of the module.

Character creation is pretty much standard AD&D 3.5 rules. Roll the dice, move your mice.. oops wrong game. Roll the dice until you get the stats you want. If you feel really daring you can used the 'advanced' method and start with all 8's then spend points to raise stats. There is a horrible lack of character image icons to choose from here. It's almost as if they gave up on it after about 10 minutes of work. Perhaps the upcoming patch will address this.

When starting the game you choose a party alignment. All your characters must be within one 'slot' of the overall alignment. This alignment also affects the quests and conversation options you receive in the game. This should add a nice amount of replay opportunity to the game so you can experiment to find your favorite ending and plot points.

You then begin the game by finding a cleric in distress and being sent to the village of Hommlet to return some of her personal effects. This is where the real adventure begins...

"I've fallen and I can't get up"

The temple is a dangerous place.. Especially for those who have chosen a more noble and lawfully good set of pursuits. It's easy for a Paladin to fall by doing quests for the evils that lurk within the temple.. it's more difficult just to snuff it all out.. but you can, in time, do that if you wish. Although sometimes some doors are better left unopened... the number of quests is varied and interesting, although some will really affect your alignment without any warning so be careful.. Eventually you'll find your way through the various levels to the big bad herself...

The graphics are wonderful albeit sometimes clunky on my Athlon 1600+ with my MX420 video card. I'm not sure how I feel about the radial menu system yet. It works well until you have a lot of options at higher levels and you have to constantly move the camera location to make sure the character you are accessing has enough screen real estate to unleash his full menu. Things tend to scroll off the bottom and sides of the screen right when it is most inconvenient.

Combat is the standard round and initiative based system most of the paper and pencil aficionados are familiar with. You can perform a certain number of full and partial actions in your allotted time. Combat can take an amazing amount of time with a vast horde, but in the end the experience is just what you would want from an AD&D adaptation.

There have been many reports of game stopping bugs, but I have not yet experienced any of them. There is a patch due out this month that should fix many of these.

The Temple of Elemental Evil is a dream to those of us who have long worshiped its uniqueness and scope within the AD&D world. The conversion to the digital form has been done very well. Now if you'll excuse me, I think there's some more evil I need to be smiting...