The Temple of Elemental Evil review: Overlooked or Overrated? It this RPG worth playing in 2021? 

For anyone considering playing this I highly recommend the Temple+ mod, along with Circle of Eight mod (Co8). They both work fantastic together and I would consider both mandatory for a stable game. After Co8 was completed the original developer toolset was found which fixed most of the issues that Co8 wasn't able to address, including pathfinding and stability. I'm playing right now on Windows 11 at 1440p with no issues.Temple+ also added feats, races, prestige classes and much more which can be seen in the Temple + changelog. One of my all time favorite games, thank you for shedding some light on this gem.

To be fair this game was a pretty faithful adaption of the old tabletop There wasnt too much storytelling involved from the start, the one bad thing is that you dont have your friends with you to make the story yourself

It's a pity that a lot of people talk about Arcanum and Bloodlines and praise them, but only few even know about Temple of elemental evil, it's the only Troika game with good combat, but also the best implementation of Dnd 3.5 in video games.

DnD 3.5 is my favorite edition, and toee has nailed it so perfect. The combat is perfect. I love how all the skills were implemented. i always wished BG3 would use this engine and combat system.

"Arcanum 2 with the combat of TOEE" was more or less my dream RPG for years.

Man, your videos are so good. You're eloquent, amusing and the pacing in your videos is perfect. Never played this game, and didn't know it was Troika. That explains why my friends told me it was hit or miss. Poor Troika. Lol You're really helping revive my love for nerdy RPGs. Cheers.

Been going down a rabbit hole of your videos after seeing Solasta. You deserve a lot more subs brother. Good analysis!

Thank you again for a thorough and honest review. I have never played this game (I couldn't honestly tell you why either...), and not going to lie, you had me at "Reminds me of the Kuldahar Theme from Icewind Dale". The Kuldahar theme gives me goosebumps 21 years later. Every. Single. Time. Icewind Dale has, single handedly, the best soundtrack of any game. I will physically fight anyone who has anything disparaging to say about it. Everything Jeremy Soule has made for the video game industry has been a GD masterpiece (Morrowind, Skyrim too?!?!) that deserves exceptional praise. Getting ANYWHERE close to it earns a play in my book. The soundtrack always plays a deceptive role in setting the tone and atmosphere and I will add this to the list. Now I just need to work up the courage, and the time, to finish Wrath of the Righteous...

I enjoy your content and you are getting better with the pacing. The beginning with the happy ending massage took a bit to touch the tip of your long argument but it grasped the concept and handled it well. A happy ending indeed.

Another obnoxious bug: sometimes an enemy will be out of your party's vision in a combat encounter and will just stand there, not knowing what to do. The problem of course being that the combat is turn based so they will just refuse to spend their turn while they "brainstorm". Still think the game is amazing though, some of the best wizard gameplay I've seen in an RPG with some of the cheesiest spells. Charm humanoid/dominate work on literally every humanoid which, spoiler alert, is 90% of enemies and yes, it even works on bosses (as long as your character is powerful enough) letting you manually control them. Glitterdust and Tasha's hideous laughter make trolls and giants useless (on top of being lvl 2 spells IIRC) and who can forget Mordenkainen's faithful hound, a summoned companion that is invisible, immortal and PERMANENT (still not sure whether this is a bug or a feature). I guess Arcanum's identity of clearly carefully balanced spellcasting is ingrained somewhere in TOEE as well. XD Really enjoyed the review and yeah, the Circle of Eight mod is a must, IIRC the game won't even run on a lot of machines without it.

Happy to see that you have been able to make time for it. Will certainly watch it at some point and try to give feedback. I played through it some years ago for the first time and it definitely was fun. Harder than Icewind Dale 2 since it's so open, but still manageable. Not particularly interesting narratively, but I enjoyed how much of a basic fantasy adventure feel I was getting from it. Will definitely give this another try with an evil party at some point.

IIRC The Temple of Elemental Evil is true to the book adaptation of eponymous classic adventure released in 1985. The only significant change mede was reworking it for using 3.5 edition rule set. This possibly explains all the problems with lack of lore, unexciting fetch quests and all the other things. As far as I know most of 80's adventures were combat oriented. And thanks for another great video. Love its' style, inserts and jokes. And being lifetime fan of Baldur's Gate II, Planescape Torment, Arcanum, Fallout and other gems of that time I never happend to play TToEE more than half an hour. IIRC it was never licensed in my land and or release was late for dozen years and pirated versions were unpatchable and so buggy you were never able to get loot from killed enemies. Well, this video inspired me to finally get 'n beat this game. P.S. Sorry for my english, it's not my native language. I understand everything but I'm a bit (well, a BIT!) inexperienced in talking.

I was waiting for 7 months my goodness,thanks for the review, you are getting better and better! Sorry,it appears I didn't tell you exact version of the game,so I played TOEE +CO8 (standart edition)mod ,with disabled autosaving on changing maps, autosaves is actually Evil. BTW,recently I found out that there is another must-have mod called Temple+ it fixes bugs which CO8 doesn't, so ideal combination is the Temple+ with CO8

It amazes me how this game looks on par with PoE, and much better than pathfinder games. Truly an epic achievement for Troika. I Revisit this game every couple of years whenever I need my dose of gritty dnd combat. Played it back in 2003 and gotta say it aged well.

I played all the Troika games when they came out, and still have the original boxes, manuals, and DVDs. But while I still love it, this is the hardest one to replay, and I have not played it as much as the others. It's a full D&D game which is more in my wheel house, so all things being equal it should be my favorite. I did love the starting vignettes based on your alignment, which gave you a sense of why you were then and sometimes a starting quest, often one that could not be completed until you dive into the temple. But it was hard with a non-power gamed player created party, as often I like to go with a more RP feel, than the most optimal make up, and there was not a lot of balance. Like if you made a full party and went off to battle it would be rough to level, but get the right over powered NPCs and you just hide behind them. It's rough because this game will always have a huge place in my heart, but of the 3 troika games I played it the least, and the longest ago. Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Never Winter Nights I love less but have played more recently than this. If it had a better quest system, and a smoother leveling curve, with a player made party and/or level adjusted and balanced followers, it might be more worth playing again. It can be a bit of a grind, even in the first real dungeon, if you don't just talk your way out of things, and yet that feels like cheesing it when you know how much harder fighting would be. The game just needed more time and balance. It was rushed and it only had half the team working on it, as the other half was rushing to get Bloodlines out in time to launch along side Half-life 2, and neither game did well enough out of the gate to save the studio. I remember being shocked they closed just a few weeks after Bloodlines released, and yet still today people are playing all 3 of their games.

is there a way to make the ui bigger for this game, looks really small and hard to read?

My game crashed at the start last year. I was under the impression that this game is like diablo 1, 1 small town and a big temple of evil dungeon. So I quit after the crash. But seeing your review, the fact that its a baldur gate style adventure, makes me wanna try again.

Okay, to show that I'm not negative all the time, I agree with almost everything, and as usual I love the vid! (Yes, it's old, I've seen in many times already, but I have playlists with your vids, and it just got me to this one again, and now thanks to you I have a tingling to stop playing Underrail again and start a nostalgic TOEE adventure, but I jump from game to game too much)

I love your little whimsical real-life analogy intros. They're precisely the sort of irreverent humour that I miss in modern games.

I always loved this game. My only complaint was the 10th level cap( and considering the cr of some encounters, it needed to just go to 20). That said the circle of 8 mods made it so much better. It is definitely a game that deserved a remaster.

I'm a fan of this game but you are correct in many of the shortcomings. However the turn based combat system is great and also D&D authentic. The companions are limited in their interactive actions, as is all roleplaying in the game, but while Elmo is a tank and a bit overpowered at start you seemed not to have played two of the best NPCs - Meleny and Fruella. Both have more than one funny line including at their death but they both can work well in the game and have good abilities. Meleny is a druid and Fruella a fighter with a weapon focus.

I remember picking this up long ago because I liked Troika and putting it down again within an hour. Where's the story? Where's the interesting characters? I didn't even remember that terribly plain UI.

I just grabbed a pc to play this along with Icewind Dale 2 as well as some of the other classics. I appreciate your take and honesty in your reviews of these older games! I watched a couple of other channels and all they talked about “Temple+” mod to fix all the bugs and you mentioned and a couple others above mentioned in the comments the “co8” mod… my question to you or anyone else in the know, is there one that is better then the other also are they able to be used together? I haven’t started a play through TOEE or IWD2 yet because PWoTR is taking forever to get through… your review on it is spot on btw!! I’m not going to get into a ramble about it, lol! Sidebar: are you aware that there’s a beta test for IWD2 EE mod?

I suffered little bugs ....since i got the gog version +co8. Back in the day of physical media it was painful. I gave up after the Moathouse. Now it's fine tho.

Circle of 8 with Temple+ solves most problems with the game. Its still not great but it brings it much closer to what it could have been.

You can do a video talk to Ultima VII ? and Divine Divinity 1 (2002) ?

I have played through this game twice and I still barely remember anything about it. By comparison I remember almost everything about Baldurs Gate 1 & 2. Thus it felt like you were reviewing a new game that I had never played! Zugmoy was the main badguy of the story? I had no idea! And I even know who she, the demon lord of fungi, is from D&D lore! I still forgot she was in this game somehow!

This game would benefit a lot if they release a bugfree version adapted to new computers. Would be for sure interesting for a lot of people, specially with all the baldur's gate craze running rampant.

Hahaha! OMG! The happy ending analogy was great! So disappointing the questing and lore was so poor... I mean, that's precisely what I'm looking for if I am getting into a game like this... I guess they focus all their resources on making the "happy ending" memorable... Great review my friend, very thorough as usual... "FedEx delivery simulator" XDXDXD

So there was a way to circumvent the final battle and end the game early? Well, then that's what I did in my first and only play through, and I remember being somewhat confused and disappointed since I thought this was the normal ending. It felt like I was a quarter through the game and nothing memorable happened so far. I put the game away and never touched it again, thinking it was kind of unfinished. Maybe in the future I will give it another try.

sweet hidden gem. thanks for bringing this into the light! unfortunately another one not on steam so no purchases will be made. it's like they don't want money. fine with me getting to fetch it for free. would easily fork out 20-30$ for this one. and that says a lot about a 20yo game. or maybe it just says a lot about newer games.

I knew upfront this was primarily a dungeon crawler, had alot of fun with it.

It has been a very long time since I played this but I recall feeling like it was much too narrow of an adventure...more like a DLC add-on to a larger game. It was enjoyable as a small, short campaign, but for me the overall scope of the game was too "macro".

Mah boi Elmo be wildin

What costs a massage in your land? Here it costs 40 Euros and the other kind of massage costs 100 Euros I heard, but now it could be more expensive , because of inflation. If you think about it. Some game costs also two digits over 50 and the fun one can have is not just 1 hour. So, I think investing in games ain`t that bad.

I haven't watched a second of this video yet but this game is awesome.

I enjoyed it and would happily buy an update.

This is also the only dnd game I ever played that the intro is different based on alignment, played all and all are good, even chaotic evil lol

Story elements fall squarely on source material. Its faithful, for better or worse.

This game was frustratingly brutal for me as a kid going in blind with no experience with 3.5 or d&d, Not knowing the rules and making a random party getting obliterated on the first encounter at the temple.

Needs the Temple+ mod in addition to Circle of 8. Doing so fixes most bad things.

0:52 is that Ricardo Diaz voice actor?

couldnt get it to work, back in the day, would crash while loading...

Good but it was buggy as crap. It did teach me how to play DND.

The point that a game of counter strategy and counter counters doesn't work is invalid, smt literally breaths this. On the other hand in smt you don't have to start over from scratch if you realise that your team sucks and merely have to fuse or level up some new demons. I personally think how much you can do this depends on how much of a warning or information you give your players in advance. If you only learn what a troll, beholder or mindflayer can do when encountering them thats bad, if give your players a chance to learn what they are up against in advance and give them some hint on how to prepare go for it.

This review is so damn weird man.

ugh, turn-based, pass