I really wanted to like this game. Created by the same people responsible for such gems as Fallout and Arcanum, this new title was supposed to become my favorite game of the year. While I kept my expectations relatively low, largely because the pre-release interviews didn’t sound too encouraging, I was still excited about finally having a good role-playing game with turn-based combat and fully concentrating on the single player experience. Even after discounting for the fact that it was published by the same outlet responsible for such atrocities as Master of Orion III I expected this game to be a solid hit. I was wrong. Temple of Elemental Evil, while having more potential than any other game in recent years, is incomplete, plagued by gameplay bugs and experiencing more technical difficulties than any other game since the infamous Pool of Radiance 2.
Game mechanics
Temple of Elemental Evil is a third-person role-playing game, remotely comparable to titles like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. Unlike these games, however, there are some major differences. First of all, this is the first game to fully implement the 3.5 AD&D rules. These rules are vastly different from the second edition rules, and greatly affect the character development and combat in the game. Second, the title features a whole new kind of interface, which is supposed to streamline all the different options the 3.5 rules allow. Finally, the combat in this game is turn-based, offering a tactical depth that is unprecedented in other role-playing games.
You start out by creating a party. You’ll have the option to select a few generic characters or create new ones. The character creation process is very complex, and you’re likely to spend an hour or more fine-tuning your heroes, with the aid of a thick manual. One of the most important aspects of this step is to select the alignment for your party: it can be evil, neutral or good, and there are several degrees to each. Each alignment will trigger a different beginning for the game, and there are several possible endings, the probability of which depends on your party alignment as well.
Once you complete your party, you can set off to your adventure. The whole story revolves around the mysterious Temple of Elemental Evil, which has recently increased its activity, and which threatens the surrounding country. A few additional storylines were added, mainly to allow for various side quests. The most notable side story deals with the fight between two towns, one good and the other evil. As you progress in the game, you’ll be able to choose sides, which will eventually lead you to one of the several different endings the game offers.
As I said before, the game is portrayed in a third-person perspective. You see your characters, and you move them by clicking on a location. Your party will be able to assume several formations, which are especially useful for surprise attacks, and depending on how much space is available at the spot you move your characters to they will hold the formation. You’ll be also able to move only certain characters if the tactical situation calls for it.
Combat is fought in a turn-based mode. Most of the special options come into play here. Your characters will be able not only to fight or cast spells, but also try to confuse opponents, charge them or stand on defense, trip them and use plenty of more tricks in order to survive and make the enemies’ day more miserable. The combat rules are very complex, and include such details as determining the order in which each participant moves, the damage dealt and received and various other modifiers, such as bonuses for outflanking opponents. Despite all this, the combat engine is very intuitive, making the basic concepts easy to grasp.
However, the most important aspect of the game is character development. 3.5 rules have moved far from the adventurous second edition and instead attempted to create the most lifelike character development possible. While each of your characters will be very limited in the amount of levels they can achieve (ten levels maximum), the possibilities are endless. You’ll be able to combine character professions, and you’ll spend a lot of time deciding which attributes to improve. In addition to the already well-known spell system, which didn’t change significantly, the game now offers skills and feats. Skills are numbers-based. Their strength is determined by the character class, the basic statistics and the number of points you allocate for them, and they range from diplomacy and thievery to intimidation and spellcasting. Feats are bonus attributes, aimed at improving a certain action. They can add a more powerful attack to a character, make an archer shoot with more precision or increase the power of spells. Many of them require other feats as prerequisites, and as a result character development requires some strategic thinking.
Interface
A game as complex as this requires a special kind of interface. I was a little disappointed by the lack of documented keyboard shortcuts, but I soon found out that the radial menu interface was very powerful and easy to use. While most basic actions, such as walking or talking are handled by simply clicking the mouse, for any more complex action you’ll need to open the so-called radial menu. This is a circle that appears around the character when you click on him. The menu is divided into several categories, each of which opens a sub-menu, which can divide into several menus as well. All in all, it works just like your basic toolbar in your average Windows program, but the radial design and very intuitive menu structure make it much more user-friendly.
Technical issues
The game is so buggy that simply getting it to run requires a great deal of luck. Having had almost a dozen computers, each with different configurations at my disposal, I found only one where I had no problems playing. Even there, however, the game was clunky and experiencing a memory leak, despite the fact that the hardware was several times as powerful as the required minimum.
The main technical problem with the game is the copy protection. Atari didn’t learn from its Neverwinter Nights embarrassment and included the same kind of copy protection, which prevents many computers from even recognizing the CD. While some of the computers I tried the game with didn’t have this problem, the spinning CD was as noisy as other Atari releases dating back to Civilizaion III, and I had to increase the volume just to hear the in-game music and speech.
Those lucky ones who have CD drives that accept the CD will likely face other problems. On two computers, the installation always crashed on the same spot, and on those where I managed to install and start the game, I experienced numerous crashes to desktop, total computer lock-ups and corrupted saved game files. Judging from the posts on the official forum, I was very unlucky to be able to run the game on only one of a dozen machines, but there is still a large number of people complaining about these problems.
The last technical problem is just a blatant oversight by the developers. In its original setting, the main screen is very dark, but there is no in-game mechanism that would allow you to adjust its brightness. I spent a lot of time shutting the game down and adjusting the gamma setting from the control panel (switching between those two crashed the game) to get it just right.
Gameplay – 4
Temple of Elemental Evil is by far the best conversion of a pen-and-paper RPG system to the PC. I was a little worried how the merger of a 1st edition module with 3.5 edition rules would look like, and I’m pleased to say that the game is very addictive, very playable and still true to the original module. The turn-based combat and intuitive interface further add to the near perfection this title could potentially achieve.
It is regrettable that the final release remains in the potential phase, and that the execution is very poor. In addition to numerous technical problems, which will render the game unplayable for many people, the current list of gameplay bugs found by the fans is eight pages long, or nearly twice the size of this review. Many spells don’t work right. There are character classes that won’t let you gain even those ten levels that are allowable in the game. Many non-player characters will make your experience very frustrating. For example, non-player characters who join your party tend to overload themselves with loot, up to a point where they are absolutely useless, while preventing you from accessing some high-powered items they looted. Other characters, which you meet and are supposed to kill, will either disappear or do something really stupid when you let them live, which breaks the main quest. Other annoyances include monsters materializing in walls, leaving you stuck with being unable to kill them and unable to end combat, having to reload an older save. To make matters worse, even those enemies that display right come with a heavily scripted behavior, which is easy to take advantage of.
In addition to obvious bugs, there is a whole category of problems caused by one of the most controversial publishing decisions I’ve heard of. Shortly before the game’s release, Hasbro, the owner of the Wizards of the Coast who holds the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons license demanded that the game’s rating is changed from Mature to Teen. The developers were thus forced to remove all children, foul language and several objectionable objects, such as a brothel. However, they didn’t have the time to remove conversation paths and quests linked to the removed features. This caused several quests to be broken, and a lot of conversations that make no sense are still in the game.
The game balance also leaves much to be desired. In my first game, for example, I needed to rest for seven days to heal up. Trying to rest, I was constantly being attacked, with each battle gaining experience points, and by the time I finally healed, my characters were three levels stronger than what the designers intended for me to be this early in the game. It turned out that I was resting on a monster spawning point, a feature that is not only neglected by the documentation, but which also doesn’t check whether the player is present. The end result of all this was that I was able to go through the rest of the game with relative ease. I am aware that non-linear games like this one will offer opportunities to gain cheap experience points, but being limited to only ten levels, the player’s characters should be kept under tighter control by the developers.
Even if all these problems are fixed, the game will remain inaccessible to a wide audience of players. The designers tried to follow the 3.5 rules as closely as possible, which resulted into one of the steepest learning curves in the history of computer role-playing games. The manual, while giving you an enormous amount of information, is still not sufficient to cover all aspects of the game, and those who are not familiar with the 3.5 rules will struggle with such things as telling what some special items do, how various feats work when combined, and how important certain statistics are to various character classes. Being familiar with the second edition rules, which I use up to this day when playing pen-and-paper RPGs, I still needed to visit the official forums to learn how to use the various character attributes to my advantage. A person who grew up without playing the pen-and-paper version may find it very hard and frustrating to beat the game, even in its patched form.
Graphics - 8
The graphics are the brightest spot in this game. The 2D environments are beautifully rendered, and even at lower resolutions they look better than the backgrounds in any other third-person RPG up to date. The characters look great as well, and their graphics are getting updated in real time when they equip items. I often found myself switching to the lowest resolution, only to get a good look at my characters, especially in larger battles where I could enjoy the monsters as well. However, the graphics still experience some clipping problems, and seeing my party members walking through each other was a little disturbing.
Sound – 6
Sound is a very mixed bag. The ambience was very fitting, and being encoded in mp3, I enjoyed listening to it even without playing the game. The voiceovers, however, range from relatively good to inducing temporary insanity. While I value the fact that the development team member responsible for the voiceovers came forward on the official forums and accepted the blame, I can’t forgive several of the voice actors. Some of the acting was acceptable, but there were characters that simply read their notes without any emotion. And then there is The Bard. His awful singing will be legendary for years to come as the worst example of voice acting ever. If you mistakenly pick up this game, heed my advice: avoid the traveling bard at all costs.
Replay value – 7
The game allows you to try out several different alignments, each with a different story. In addition, the character creation and development is so complex that you can play even the same storylines over and over again, and never play the same game twice. However, the high replay frequency is partially offset by a very short gameplay. You can reach one of the endings 10 hours into the game, without any previous warning that it’s about to be over. The longest you can spend on a single game is between 20 and 25 hours, which is very short, compared to other Troika games.
Overall – 6.3
I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen a game with so much potential. The developers went beyond what seems to be humanly possible by taking a first edition Dungeons and Dragons module, applying the 3.5 edition rules and converting this mix into a computer game. It worked surprisingly well, and The Temple of Elemental Evil was on its way to become one of the most memorable PC titles in history. Unfortunately, the release was rushed and not tested properly. It suffers from many technical problems and an enormous amount of gameplay bugs, some of which break the main quest. Considering the game’s steep learning curve and all the bugs, what was a promising title is instead one of the most frustrating games on the market, and not even additional perks, such as great graphics and intuitive interface will save it from mediocrity. While a series of patches may fix the game, its reputation as a first-class title may be tarnished beyond repair.
