Doctor Who: Adventure Games

Perfect for younger fans of the show

I know, I know; this isn’t exactly the sort of thing that people will be dying to read as it’s mostly aimed at children but there are also Doctor Who fans out there who may have considered downloading the Adventure Games from the BBC website, and since they’re available for free and I had an entire evening to spare I decided to try them out.

Doctor Who: The Adventure Games are a series of short, newly written computer animated episodes that you are able to interact with like, well, a typical video game. You play as the Doctor and, occasionally, Amy Pond in whichever situation you find yourself in. Currently, there is only one episode available entitled City of the Daleks.

In this installment, the Doctor and Amy travel to 1963 in the hope of visiting The Beatles, only to find London in ruins and humanity nearly extinct. It appears the culprits are the Daleks who have somehow altered time. It’s up to the Doctor to reverse the effects before Amy fades out of existence Back-to-the-Future-style.

Now I suppose I should point out that this is a free game aimed at younger viewers of the show. It’s hardly difficult gameplay and if you’re used to PC gaming, you can probably finish it in under half an hour. If, however, your computer is laggy as hell then it’ll probably take you more than an hour…more on that later…

Gameplay is a mixture of stealth and puzzle solving. Whenever you’re not sneaking around avoiding the gaze of Daleks (who will kill you with one shot, so there is a slight challenge if you get detected), you’re using the sonic screwdriver to hack into computer terminals which usually involves completing a fun little mini-game, similar to mini-games of the Ratchet and Clank series.

Overall the gameplay is easy to get to grips with and the story is solid. It’s not a Moffat masterpiece but it’s also far from The Unicorn and the Wasp from season four. Graphics are passable for a game that doesn’t cost you anything and if you want that extra element, there are collectable cards to find that have information on characters from the Whoniverse.

I suppose one complaint Ihave is with the voice acting. It is the original cast but aside from one human survivor and the Daleks, it’s Matt Smith and Karen Gillan doing most the work. Their vocal work isn’t terrible by any means but I couldn’t help but feel that it was slightly tired, as if they’d just done a day’s filming and then recorded their lines for this. I could be completely wrong and it might just be me being picky after a long night of trying to get the damn thing to work.

This is one of the main reasons that I personally dislike PC gaming. Maybe I’m wrongly assuming all games are like this but all the games I’ve bought for the PC usually won’t work properly because you need the right computer. There always seems to be a strict set of rules my computer has to follow which it inevitably doesn’t, one of the reasons why I couldn’t enjoy Borderlands on the PC.

At least video game consoles are fairly black and white. A PS3 is a PS3, they’re pretty much all the same and each game works on it, albeit after a lengthy and irritating update most the time. But after spending ages installing the game onto my computer, it’ll usually lag like a bitch and go wrong 70 per cent of the time. This is largely the case with this game.

I’m not blaming the BBC for the technical difficulties I’ve just explained, just my crappy computer, but I will say this: it’s a reasonably fun game that I did enjoy playing, ignoring faults out of the developer’s hands. If you’ve got an hour or so to spare and you like Doctor Who then it’s worth getting, just for a bit of fun although it’s unlikely that you’ll play the same episode more than twice.

I would warn you not to get the game if your computer or laptop or whatever you plan to download the game on is in bad condition and is pretty iffy. Sure, it’s still playable and you can still get some joy out of it but since one of the biggest causes of stress are video games (anybody else agree?), a low spec computer that makes the gameplay suffer will likely lead you to bust a nut and suffer a heart attack before you can even reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.