Once cast into the game itself, you are provided with a wide variety of tactical manoeuvres: you can play with your initiative to tailor your party's attack sequence, so you can milk that extra Attack of Opportunity. Efficiently position characters to obtain flanking bonuses (or negate the AI's). Ready an action vs. Approach as you anticipate and interrupt an oncoming attack from a particular vector (before they get to your squishy Wizard). Various levers and pulleys that help you shift focus to something at the expense of another – do I use Charge Attack to swiftly engage in melee, at the expense of an Armour Class penalty in that round? Or do I hold the line and Fight Defensively, boosting my AC at the expense of my to-hit chance?

On top of that, you have the game's vast library of spells to complement your strategies: Enlarge Person on that fighter so the chances of tripping opponents become more favourable, not to mention that increased reach which affords you those sweet extra attacks from that Cleave feat. And the havok you can wreak with those overpowered charm spells! YES!

Unfortunately, ToEE is also a very flawed game. For one, it was very buggy on release – it took two official patches and years' worth of fan-made patches to fix up and polish the game. The biggest disappointment, however, is in the role-playing department.

Troika had, up until that point, a reputation for brilliant RPG worlds: vast, open, fleshed out, rife with plots and subplots and well-thought-out interaction with the inhabitants, history and lore. These were the guys who brought us Arcanum and Fallout, after all!

As it turned out, ToEE had very little of that, and the threadbare story it did have pretty much dissolved at the mid-game stage, when you were left with not much to go on beyond “there's this Temple here, uh, kill it or something”.