I wanted to enjoy this. I really did. This was the combination of two of my very favourite things: Doctor Who and videogames. It should have been like a cheese and bacon toastie. Alas, the cheese turned out to be a bit mouldy, and the bacon a bit rancid. And the bread’s a bit dry as well. Still, we should go in bearing in mind the fact that this is a free game from the BBC (provided you live in the UK, that is – stinkin’ forrins not welcome), so adjust expectations accordingly. Now that I’ve thrown my cards onto the table hard enough to dent it, hit the jump to read my full review of the overtitled Doctor Who: The Adventure Games: City of the Daleks.


We begin in the TARDIS, as the Doctor and Amy are heading for 1963 (because that’s when the first series of Doctor Who… oh you knew that? Bit too obvious, was it? Never mind…) to meet the Beatles, but instead they end up in Trafalgar Square post-Dalek invasion. Clearly the Daleks have changed time, and it’s up to you to put things right! You see a woman running for a manhole cover and a Dalek shouts something about exterminating ‘the last human alive’! With than in mind, you’re handed the reins.

The idea seems to be that it’s a blend of stealth and point-and-click adventure, with some very annoying minigames thrown in for good measure. The stealth thing’s good enough – you’ve got to sneak around, keeping out of the Daleks’ very MGS-like cone of vision. If you do get spotted… well, there are various levels of ‘spotted’. There’s green ‘not at all’; yellow ‘caught a glimpse’; and red ‘you’re going to die now’. The stealth elements are reasonably competent (this does seem to have been designed with kids in mind), and while they’re not Splinter Cell-good, I wouldn’t expect them to be, and they are at least functional.

The next major element is the point-and-click puzzles. Well, I call them puzzles -usually the puzzle is ‘use sonic screwdriver on thing’. The puzzling parts are facilitated primarily by the stealth – in the second act, you’re on the Dalek home planet of Skaro and you need to get some bits and bobs to build something. Other than the Doctor’s alarmingly precise knowledge of the layout of his arch-enemy’s rebuilt home base (which he’s never before visited) you don’t have much to go on, so mostly you’ll be finding the parts through process of elimination (invisible walls keep you within certain areas).

Once you get the parts (or whatever) you have to put them together by a minigame which, as I may have already mentioned, is needlessly annoying (and it can be very, very annoying). So, it’s like that game where you’ve got to move the metal thingy around the shape without touching the sides, or you get buzzed. Except you’ve got to do it with three things. And if you fail one, the other three fail. There’s a simple ‘connect the dots’ puzzle as well, but the maze puzzle – don’t misunderstand me, it’s not complicated, but it is rather difficult to do without wanting to kick the screen in.

Presentation? Well, the character models are all right – not top-notch fantastic, but they do the job just fine – the characters are recognisable, the Daleks (while in their new Power Ranger incarnation) are done quite nicely. Environments are similarly quite good. The best part (as has been pointed out elsewhere) visually is looking out of the windows in Act 2 at the cityscape of Kalaan, which looks really beautiful. The sound is probably the best part of the game, with both leads lending their voices, and Nick Briggs doing the voices of the Daleks. There’s also plenty of bombastic Murray Gold score, which is jolly good as well.

But what of the story? Well, the story for this … thing was written by Phil Ford. He co-wrote The Waters Of Mars with Russell T. ‘The End of Time’ Davies. Now, I – well, I hated The Waters of Mars, with it’s stupid robot, poorly used monsters, fires on the surface of Mars, Doctor behaving like a moron, magic water, bad writing, that asinine biography thing, and the stupid bloody robot. Thankfully, it’s less torturous here – it doesn’t make a great deal of sense, feeling rather like an incomplete story idea – but perhaps I’m holding it to the standard I would expect an episode to meet. It does the job it needs to with minimum fuss, and there are some things I have a feeling we might see again (although I feel obliged to point out for the record that I’m fairly sure it should have been called the ‘Eye of Harmony’, not the ‘Eye of Time’, but maybe this is something RTD changed and forgot to tell us).

Well then. Plenty of damning with faint praise. It was at least functional, and the story… well, it was better than The End of Time (although I think that’s setting the bar too low). I thought that the point-and-click elements were underused, and that the slightly dodgy stealth mechanic was overused, and the mini-puzzle mechanic shouldn’t have existed in the first place. Nevertheless, this is a game both for free and for children (as far as I can ascertain), and things can only improve. I hope. (Note: if you like Doctor Who… well you’ve played this already, but it is worth playing if only because, well, you’re playing as The Doctor! Were I not a Doctor Who fan, I would have been less amused, but as a Doctor Who fan, I enjoyed it more despite myself)