The Lonely Assassins.

Osgood (Ingrid Oliver) is attacked by Weeping Angels.

Release Date: Mar. 19, 2021. Written by: Amelia Chung, Priya Kulasagaran, Rebecca Hee, Gavin Collinson. Designer: Jeremy Ooi. Producer: James Baines. Released by: Maze Theory. Version Played: Nintendo Switch.


THE PLOT:

After finding a lost phone, you receive a call from Petronella Osgood (Ingrid Oliver), scientific advisor to UNIT. The phone's owner, Larry Nightingale (Finlay Robertson), has gone missing, and Osgood enlists your aid in scouring his phone for clues about what happened.

Browsing through his email, chats, gallery, and search history reveals hints about what he was investigating. Larry's new neighbor, the thoroughly unpleasant Edward Flint (Ceri Mears), had purchased the Wester Drumlins estate - the spooky old mansion in which Larry and his friend Sally Sparrow had trapped Weeping Angels many years prior. Flint was renovating the old house, and Larry worried that the structural changes might free the statues from their captivity.

The disappearances of Larry and his wife already indicate that something very bad has happened. As you scroll through the phone, you discover garbled data - a virus of some sort. Osgood recites the Doctor's warning that anything that captures the image of an angel becomes an angel... including a phone that was used to take pictures and video.

The Weeping Angels have contaminated Larry's phone. And through that phone, they may now be coming for you!

Larry Nightingale (Finlay Robertson) prepares to face the Angels.

CHARACTERS:

The player character is a complete self-insert, never named and never seen on screen. You are allowed to shape a bit of personality through optional conversation responses, though, with the game developers even allowing you the ability to hang up on people or ignore incoming calls. I hung up on Osgood in the introductory phone call and got an indignant text as a reply, which I thought was an amusing touch. Actual freedom is limited - refuse Osgood's plea to get involved too many times and you end the game before it properly starts, and the story is 100% on rails. Still, various moments let you react with enthusiasm, fear, or snark, which aids with immersion.

The two characters who get the most attention here are Larry and Osgood. The script gives a decent sketch of how Larry has progressed since the events of Blink, from turning the store he and Sally ran into a successful business to settling down with a woman who shared his love of old TV shows and movies. Sally herself is MIA, which is unsurprising given the trajectory of Carey Mulligan's career, but at least the game mentions the character in text messages.

Osgood is your main point of interaction, with you exchanging texts with her throughout the investigation and, at the climax, viewing through security camera feeds as she faces the Angels directly. The character remains engagingly quirky, and the oddball aspects are kept mostly low-key to avoid interfering with the suspenseful tone of the piece. Jodie Whittaker's Doctor also gets a voice cameo and another, quick post-credits line if you unlock the game's "best" ending, which helps to make this feel authentically a part of the series.

The Angels infect the phone and inflict an obscure puzzle on you!

GAMEPLAY:

If you saw either the movie Searching or its spinoff, Missing, then you have a fair idea of what to expect here. The entire game is you searching through a phone, opening and downloading files, following links, and at one point hacking a set of security cameras. It's basic but reasonably involving, particularly when the tension starts to rise around the midpoint.

There are a couple of puzzles, one of which ("Moth to a Flame") is so obtuse that I doubt many solved it without benefit of a walkthrough. There are also points at which you have to enter information from emails or texts, and the game fails to provide either a "Copy/Paste" function or even a "Memo" function to take notes - both of which are functions that an actual cell phone would have! Instead, you get to relive the CRPG days of yore, having to jot down notes on paper to use later.

Outside of that, gameplay is fairly straightforward and not at all difficult. Even if you fail a timer at one point (as I did when I couldn't figure out the "Moth" puzzle), it's not a "Game Over," though it will lock you out of the best ending.

Data corruption infests Larry's phone and slows the investigation.

THOUGHTS:

The Lonely Assassins is a direct sequel to the classic episode, Blink, and it basically acts as its own "Doctor-lite" episode. It's also a better "found footage"-style Doctor Who than Sleep No More was, using both the interactive elements and the restriction of action to the phone screen in ways that increase both tension and immersion.

Like Maze Theory's earlier The Edge of Time, this is a short game. If you have a free morning, you could pretty easily play this through in one sitting. Unlike their previous title, though, the short length feels right for the story. It's nicely structured. At first, it's relaxed, even a bit slow. You're essentially poking around Larry's phone, piecing together the current state of his life. You receive prompts via an app Osgood planted on the phone, which alerts you when you find evidence to send to her.

Once you upload a certain amount of evidence, Osgood uses what you've provided to unlock hidden files and data. Then you go back through the phone, with the newly unlocked files drawing you into the next layer of the story. On a gameplay level, this loop is repetitive, and it doesn't really change until the last part of the story. On a narrative level, though, it's very effective, with each new iteration filling in pieces of what happened to Larry and what's happening at Wester Drumlins. The player character is eventually put into danger - but the story had me hooked well before that point. It helps that, while it's clearly a lower-budget title, both production values and performances are on par with the television series.

Though I enjoyed this, I do have a few nitpicks. I already mentioned the lack of ability to either type in memos or copy and paste, which would have made the relatively simple puzzles feel more realistic and less "game-like." I'm also not personally a fan of having the Angels taunt the characters. I know this was also done in television episodes such as The Time of Angels and Village of the Angels - but both of those were more artful in the taunting scenes, using it to build characterization, whereas the Angels' sing-song threat of "Petronella goes to hell-a" just sounds like the jibes of a high school "mean girl."

A phone call from the Doctor helps to make this
feel like an authentic "Doctor-lite" episode.

OVERALL:

It's a sadly low bar, but The Lonely Assassins is easily the best story-driven Doctor Who game I've played to date. It's well-scripted, with a careful story structure that uses the interactive elements both to advance the plot and to draw the player in. Performances are good, with Ingrid Oliver's Osgood as winning as ever, and the Angels remain an unsettling presence, even if I could personally live without the taunting.

It's available fairly cheaply (as of this writing, Steam has it listed for under $10), and it provides a good three hours of entertainment while doubling as a solid "Doctor-lite" episode in its own right. If the "found phone" format holds any appeal to you, I think the odds are good that you'll get enough entertainment value to justify the purchase.


Overall Rating: 7/10.

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Return to Earth.

The TARDIS encounters the beleaguered starship, Lucy Gray.

Written by: Oli Smith. Directed by: Jon Hare. Produced by: Glen Parry, Simon Bailey, Howard Neumark. Released by: Asylum Entertainment. Platform: Nintendo Wii.


THE PLOT:

The Doctor and Amy are drawn to the Lucy Gray, a giant starship that's been battered by an asteroid field. Getting onto the ship is difficult, and the time travelers are quickly separated. Worse, the TARDIS is in outer space - not far, but far enough to be totally inaccessible!

They work their separate ways through the ship, whose entire crew is in cryo sleep. All systems are mechanized, and the asteroids have left some systems on fire and others out of order. It falls to the Doctor and Amy to fix these problems by collecting colored crystals and zapping balls of the same color with their Wii-motes... er, sonic screwdrivers (yes, Amy gets one too, parceled out by the ship itself!).

The Doctor discovers that the ship's current state is part of a plan by the Cybermen, who have taken control of the ship's main computer. The computer gets a message out to the Doctor, trusting him to save the Lucy Gray again.

Which is odd, since he's sure that he's never been on this ship before...

The Doctor and Amy stare out at the planet Earth.

CHARACTERS:

Matt Smith and Karen Gillan do a fair amount of voice work for this game - though an awful lot of that consists of telling the player how easy a task was after that player has just spent far too long struggling with the horrible controls to actually accomplish it. "Well, that was easy," the Doctor smirks - after missed shots have left me traversing the same moving platform three times to collect the right crystal to open a door.

One of the very few nice things I will say about Return to Earth is that Smith and Gillan give slightly better performances than in DS counterpart title, Evacuation Earth. Even so, the comment I made in my review of that game, about it sounding as if they were sight reading lines that had been just handed to them?  That still mostly applies, with their line readings carrying a stilted, oddly emotionless quality throughout.

Amy traverses moving platforms to collect some crystals.

GAMEPLAY:

Return to Earth's gameplay is ridiculously repetitive. To summarize most levels: Move down a corridor (or in later levels, across moving platforms) to obtain crystals of various colors. Find a bouncy ball of the same color. Use the "1" and "2" buttons to cycle to the correct crystal, then zap the bouncy ball. Red crystals puts out fires. Green crystals unlock doors. Orange ones will open "secret areas" where you can pick up cash to unlock production art (exciting!). And blue ones allow you to "repair the circuit" to finish a level.

As if sensing that this was too simple even for a game marketed to children, the developers added stealth. Really bad stealth, worked into every facet of this game. Not only do you have to sneak around avoiding enemies - You have to sneak up on the crystal dispensers, because they'll seal shut if they spot you! This makes no sense at all, and it quickly becomes frustrating when the dispenser you need is located right next to an enemy.

Oh, and if an enemy sees you? Your only recourse is to flee, because the Doctor and Amy are not allowed to defend themselves. If a monster spots the Eleventh Doctor, the incarnation most likely to resort to violence (at least of the ones who don't have the word "War" in their title), he is as helpless as a newborn kitten.

Finally, most chapters end with a mini-game in which you complete a circuit by navigating a ball through a maze filled with fans, lasers, and other obstacles. In some cases, you do this while being chased by another ball, which throws in the added "fun" of rushing you through these mazes. These sections are pure torture, and I'm pretty sure their only reason for existing is to pad out the running time.

The Doctor sneaks up on a dispenser. This takes
up a surprisingly large amount of the game.

A PROBLEM OF CONTROL:

Nintendo reportedly paid £10 million for the gaming rights to Doctor Who. And then promptly gave that high-priced license to Asylum Entertainment, makers of cheap shovelware often based on licensed product. Since they spent so much to get the license, couldn't they have spent a comparable amount to get a competent developer to make a game someone might actually want to play?

The Official Nintendo Magazine labeled Return to Earth "an insult to Doctor Who fans," and it's hard to argue. The game is visually ugly, its graphics below par for a PS1 title, never mind something made in 2010 for the Wii! It's hard to credit that this belongs to the same console as: Xenoblade Chronicles, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, or The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

Gameplay is aggravating, all the more for attempting to utilize the Wii's motion controls. Even when well-implemented, these tend to leave me struggling with the Wii-mote to make whatever motion the game wants and have the console detect it correctly. But well-implemented isn't an issue here - Return to Earth's controls are horrible.

As I've mentioned, much of the game consists of using the Wii-mote to shoot colored bouncy balls. Aiming is less than terrific, which in fairness is not surprising for a Wii game. But this is made so much worse by the time limit! Yes, if you take more than three seconds to aim, you will prematurely fire your colored crystal into thin air. Also, all those moving platforms? Be careful walking from one to the next, because there is noticeable input lag. By the time the Doctor or Amy moves from their current platform, the destination has moved on; if you didn't start the move early, your character will plunge to their doom.

But all of that pales in comparison to this:

The task that almost defeated me:
Unscrewing a panel to get to the actual puzzle!

Yes, I was almost defeated two chapters in by the simple task of using the Sonic Screwdriver to unscrew a panel. What you're supposed to do is press the "A" button while twisting in the correct direction, to simulate a screwdriver. This is about as simple a motion control task as can be devised... but I couldn't do it, because my sensor bar couldn't detect the turning motion. I spent more time sorting that out than I did playing through the next three chapters combined.


STORYTELLING:

Writer Oli Smith tries to do something interesting in the way he links this story up with Evacuation Earth. Both games revolve around the Doctor and Amy helping the Lucy Gray. Evacuation Earth happens first chronologically... but for the time travelers, it occurs second. In the DS game, they are familiar with the Lucy Gray, but they are strangers to everyone around them. In Return to Earth, the ship's computer hails them as heroes and trusts them to save the ship "again," with the Doctor and Amy having no idea what she's talking about.

Unfortunately, the storytelling is sabotaged by the game's format. Evacuation Earth may have been a blatant Professor Layton ripoff, but at least its adventure/puzzle format allowed for character interaction and a sense of building events... at least for the first half. Return to Earth has no guest characters, probably because the budget wouldn't stretch to three dimensional models of people other than the regulars. The Doctor and Amy are separated for almost all of it, so the only real interaction is with the ship's computer.

Oh, and the game features the exact same problem as Evacuation Earth. The actual story gets resolved... and then an extra Act is bolted on for no reason other than to throw some Daleks into the mix. Because you can't have Doctor Who without Daleks. Except for, you know, the vast majority of the actual television series...

In fairness, I've seen worse PS1 graphics...
Wait, what do you mean this was for the Wii?

OVERALL:

If you're curious to know if the Doctor Who Wii game is as bad as its reputation... Yes, it is. Return to Earth is ridiculously repetitive, ugly to look at, and frustrating to play. The only positives I can think of are: (1) it uses music from the show, so there's at least one competent element; and (2) it's extremely short. Unless you feel a ghoulish need to experience this trainwreck for yourself... Avoid!

It's hard to credit that the best Doctor Who game I've played so far is a Match Three mobile title...


Overall Rating: 1/10.

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Evacuation Earth.

4 episodes. Written by: Oli Smith. Produced by: Glen Parry, Simon Bailey, Howard Neumark. Released by: Asylum Entertainment. Platform: Nintendo DS.


THE PLOT:

The Doctor and Amy materialize on Earth in the distant future - just before the Lucy Gray, the humans' final evacuation ship, leaves the dying planet. The evacuation is not going smoothly. Many of the ship's key components are not working, leaving it up to the Doctor and Amy to make repairs ahead of a planet-wide extinction level event.

The situation is further complicated when the Doctor goes back to the TARDIS... only to discover that it was mistaken for stray metal and made a part of the Lucy Gray!

Amy's worries prove to be all too justified...

CHARACTERS:

Then-current stars Matt Smith and Karen Gillan lent their voices to this and several other attempts at Doctor Who games made during their tenure. Unfortunately, voice work is limited to a handful of scenes portrayed through still frames; and while the two actors do their best, there is a distinct sense that they are sight reading lines that were just handed to them (which is probably not far from the truth). Smith comes off better than Gillan, likely in part because the Doctor's character is at least recognizable while Amy is reduced to "generic companion" status.


GAMEPLAY:

Doctor Who attempts to be Professor Layton, with dubious results.

Gameplay consists of two phases. Most of the time, players navigate through a series of still screens, selecting arrows to move from one location to the next and selecting people and objects to unlock dialogue, add items to inventory, and advance the story.

The rest of the time, players will solve basic logic puzzles. The Doctor's and Amy's quest to assist the Lucy Gray will see them: determining a correct answer based on a set of conditions; assembling circuits like miniature jigsaw puzzles; or finding safe pathways around enemy patrols. Basically, Professor Layton... if that series had an easy mode, and if it lacked any significant variety in the types of puzzles.

Puzzles that just might be a slight
challenge for a six-year-old.

THOUGHTS:

In 2010, at the height of Doctor Who's popularity, Nintendo signed a £10 million contract with the BBC to bring the franchise to games consoles. This resulted in exactly two titles, both developed by Asylum Entertainment: the Wii game, Return to Earth, and the DS title, Evacuation Earth.

Evacuation Earth is largely regarded as the better of the two titles... which is enough to make me morbidly curious about its Wii companion, because Evacuation Earth is absolutely not a good game!

The initial scenario is promising, with the adventure/puzzle format proving a decent fit for Doctor Who. For the first part of the game, story progression works pretty well: Chapter One sees the Doctor and Amy trying to find the TARDIS, while Chapter Two sees them putting forth a stronger effort to help the Lucy Gray.

The storytelling starts to go awry in Chapter Three. First one old enemy is brought into the tale, but they provide very little excitement or even complication. The Doctor and Amy get captured; but after they solve a few puzzles, they escape and resolve this underdeveloped subplot in a single cutscene. Which leaves Chapter Four to start a new crisis by wheeling out the Daleks, strictly so that the game developers can justify sticking the metal pepperpots on the cover.

If Chapter Three was underdeveloped, this final chapter is positively anemic. From here, there are only a few puzzles that are all reskins of previous ones, and the already-thin storytelling devolves into a series of "...and then this happens!" Several of the exploration panels look like slight rearrangements of each other. Really, this entire (very short) piece screams that the developers ran out of time, or money, or both!

Oh, and the puzzles? I spotted two with obvious logic errors, including one "find the conditions" puzzle in which it's impossible to find the right answer if you actually match all of the stated conditions. Professor Layton would never approve.

The Daleks show up to exterminate
any lingering entertainment value...

OVERALL:

The best I can say for Doctor Who: Evacuation Earth is that it's relatively painless. It's a clear reskin of the much better Professor Layton series, but that format is a decent fit for this franchise, the initial parts of the game are reasonably diverting, and it's short enough to play through in a couple of sittings.

Unfortunately, the storytelling starts out weak and gets worse as it goes. The second half is rushed and haphazardly plotted, and the final chapter is downright poor pretty much from top to bottom.

If a game of this type interests you... just play any of the Layton games instead. You'll get better characters, better stories, better artwork, better puzzles... and really, a just plain better overall experience.


Overall Rating: 3/10.

Set During: Series Five

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Doctor Who Infinity: The Orphans of the Polyoptera.

4 episodes. Written by: Gary Russell. Released by: Tiny Rebel Games.


THE PLOT:

The Doctor and Jo find themselves in an English village in 1942... but the bombs that fall as they arrive are not German. The Doctor recovers one and is startled to find it is organic - chitinous, like an insect shell.

Lily, a teenage girl, begs them for help and takes them to an injured priest. The Doctor is unable to save the man's life - but as he dies, the priest asks them to save "the orphans." Lily takes them to a derelict mansion, where the Doctor discovers a time portal that leads to 1842. There, an old enemy lurks in a nearby mine, plotting to use the Doctor's timeship to rule over time and space...

The Doctor and Jo help Lily, a young orphan.

CHARACTERS:

The Doctor: Portrayed at a remove, with his dialogue either paraphrased by Jo's narration or delivered in unvoiced comic book-style bubbles. The result is a fairly bland characterization of the 3rd Doctor, with none of the intemperance or flair Pertwee always brought to the role. Save for a brief but excellent moment in which he marvels at an alien being, the rest of the story reduces him to a simple problem-solver and little else.

Jo Grant: With the narrative presented much like a Big Finish Companion Chronicle, as a tale being related by Jo many years after the fact, it's more her story than the Doctor's. Katy Manning does her usual splendid job with the narration, bringing to life Jo's fundamental bravery and decency - alongside her tendency to rush into danger without thinking first.

Enemies are bizarrely vulnerable to
the Doctor successfully matching gems...

GAMEPLAY:

Doctor Who Infinity was the follow-up to Tiny Rebel Games' enormously successful Doctor Who Legacy. Like their earlier title, gameplay takes the form of a series of puzzles in which the player matches colored gems. Unlike the earlier title, there is far more emphasis on telling a coherent story. Story sections can run for several minutes before the next puzzle, and the puzzles themselves vary in style and goal in order to tie in with and advance the narrative.

I love this idea... in theory. In practice, the results are mixed. Different puzzles have very different sets of rules, which makes it difficult to pick up on an overall pattern. Some puzzles are basic matching ones. Others involve fighting enemies. Still others require you to arrange gems in a certain pattern within a single turn. Because the rules and objectives keep changing, you're given little chance to "get good" at one type of game before you're playing something completely different.

That said, most of the puzzle types recur throughout the story. The constantly switching puzzles are aggravating for the first two episodes, with a lot of trial-and-error involved in figuring out exactly how to play each type. By the final two parts, however, most players will have a decent grasp on the basics, and these last two installments are far more enjoyable as a result.

Oh, and one tip, unless you enjoy aggravation: Go directly into settings and disable the timer.  Unless you have ninja-like reflexes, a few of those one-turn puzzles border on the impossible if you don't do that first.

Illustrations are in the style of a comic book.

THOUGHTS:

I suspect most of my gameplay thoughts, both positive and negative, will recur for each of the Doctor Who Infinity stories. Still, I've decided to review each story individually. With scripts by different writers, performed by different actors, I feel certain my reactions to the individual stories will differ, even if my thoughts on the gameplay end up remaining the same.

Writer Gary Russell has indicated that The Orphans of the Polyoptera will be his last work of Doctor Who fiction. Russell is most notable for overseeing what I consider the golden age for Big Finish productions' range of audio stories. At a time when Who was off-air, he made sure that the audios offered a variety of story types, with a sense that each story was important in itself, making each month's release an event despite the occasional misfire.

While I will always respect his stewardship of Big Finish's first several years, I'm afraid
I've never been as fond of his actual writing. His Doctor Who stories as a writer are regularly competent in pacing and structure, but in my opinion have rarely been standouts.

This is true of Orphans as well. Russell's fannish tendencies are on full display: It's not only a sequel to a famous (if subpar) television story, but also to a story from an old Doctor Who annual. Continuity references are made to both The Three Doctors and The Curse of Peladon.  Meanwhile, Who clichés are worked in at the end, complete with a ranting villain and the Heroic Self-Sacrifice (TM) of a guest character we barely know and therefore feel nothing for.

That said, Russell's strengths are also in evidence.  The story is well-structured. The first episode layers in clues to the identity of the returning monster, so that the revelation falls neatly into place instead of coming out of nowhere. Pacing is fast but controlled, and the tale visualized through attractive illustrations drawn very much in the style of a comic book, complete with multi-panel presentations for action/suspense scenes. The episodic structure also works well, with effective cliffhangers that would have fit entirely with the Third Doctor's television era.


OVERALL:

The Orphans of the Polyoptera is a decent story, but it's far more successful on that level than as a game. Despite too many continuity references and some unfortunate clichés, it's an entertaining tale that's wonderfully performed by Katy Manning. The gameplay is uneven, however. Several puzzles are fun, particularly as it goes along, but too many others are just plain aggravating.  It's never good when the worst part of a video game is the "game" part, which proves to mostly be the case here.

I did largely enjoy it, particularly the latter episodes; and I expect I'll enjoy the remaining installments as works of fiction if nothing else. But given how much fun the same creators' Doctor Who Legacy was, I can't help but feel a bit disappointed that the gameplay isn't more enjoyable.


Overall Rating: 5/10.

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Dalek Attack.

The Daleks invade Earth! (Yes, again.)

Written by: R. D. Hulley. Produced by: R. D. Hulley. Released by: Alternative Software.


THE PLOT:

In the year 2254, Earth has advanced to the point that Davros, creator of the Daleks, has determined humanity to be a threat. The Daleks mount a full-scale invasion, leaving the Doctor and Ace racing against time to stop them. In the usual Doctorish way: You know - Zapping everything in sight with the lethal sonic screwdriver while blowing Daleks up in their casing with bombs...


CHARACTERS:

This is an arcade-style action platformer, so it's unsurprising that there really isn't any characterization beyond "Davros and the Daleks are evil." The version of the game that I played did offer the option to select a Doctor for gameplay sections (2nd, 4th, or 7th) - but given that the 7th Doctor is the one portrayed in all of the comic panel story segments, it's fair to label this a 7th Doctor game.


THOUGHTS:

I'll be up-front: arcade style platformer is decidedly not my genre. While I've found that I can enjoy many different types of games, ultimately I'm most enthusiastic about those that deliver what I most enjoy about books, movies, and television programs: good stories, interesting ideas, and strong characterizations. Arcade style platformers are, by and large, unlikely to offer any of these - beyond which, I have always hated platforming sections in video games (with the exception of the Uncharted series, which somehow makes them fun. But I digress).

In other words, Dalek Attack is a game that is not really for me. I promised to do a review of it, and it's playable online for free. Even so, I ended up abandoning it after just a few levels. I probably would have stuck with it, had in-game saves been possible... But again, it's arcade-style, which means that when you run out of lives you're back at the beginning again.  And there's only so many times I'm interested in going through sewers before jumping around post-apocalyptic London.

A few YouTube videos assure me that, other than perhaps growing in challenge, the basic gameplay remains the same throughout. A lot of jumping, crouching, shooting, jumping, running along rooftops, and jumping. Did I mention jumping? To the extent that there is a storyline, it exists to justify the gameplay.

I will allow that the gameplay is reasonably engaging, in measured doses, once you get over how bizarre it is to have the Doctor shooting everything in sight. However, without the ability to save progress, there's no ability to play in measured doses; and after a while, the whole thing grows a bit tedious.


OVERALL:

Dalek Attack is a well-made game in its genre. Controls are reasonably intuitive, and the in-game action is responsive to controls. As platformers go, there's nothing to match the pace or variety of Nintendo's major platform franchises... But for a game made in the early 1990's, it looks good and plays well. Platforming enthusiasts should find much to enjoy.

Unfortunately, I'm anything but a platforming enthusiast.  So for me, this was like attending a party where everyone else was a stranger.


Overall Rating: 5/10. Well enough made for what it is... Just not the kind of game that holds much personal appeal to me.

Set After: Survival (not yet reviewed)

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The Edge of Time.

Your first sight of the TARDIS.

Written by: Gavin Collinson. Directed by: Marcus Moresby. Produced by: Russel Harding, Marcus Moresby.


THE PLOT:

A trip to the laundromat takes a decidedly weird turn when the phone on the wall rings and you, for whatever reason, decide to answer the call. A woman's voice informs you that she's been kidnapped and thrown to the edge of time and space. At that moment, a wave of distortion settles over everything. The laundromat is changed into a dark, nightmare version of itself, with deadly creatures inside the washing machines. The woman informs you that this is a "reality virus," and that the entire universe will end up being engulfed.

The mysterious but bizarrely chirpy voice guides you out of the laundromat and into a back alley, where you gain a sonic screwdriver that you use to summon a time and space machine that's in the form of a blue police box. You're informed that this is the TARDIS, that the woman is the Doctor, and that she's trusting you to gather three "time crystals" to help her fight the reality virus.

Recovering the crystals won't be easy (well, actually it kind of will be, but we'll pretend otherwise). You will have to travel to three different parts of time and space, facing mysterious creatures in the night of a deserted alien planet, Weeping Angels in the cellars of something very like a haunted house, and finally the Doctor's greatest enemy - the Daleks. And if you succeed, you'll still have to face The First, the force behind the reality virus, who is determined to wipe out all life in order to start anew!


CHARACTERS:

The Doctor: Jodie Whittaker lends her voice to this game, and to her credit she gives a committed performance. Unfortunately, much like most of the Eleventh Doctor games from several years ago, the script flattens her character out. She mostly is in "chirpy, bubbly" mode throughout - Which readers of my television reviews will know is my least favorite side of the Thirteenth Doctor. Whittaker's also not in very much of it. She guides the player through the prologue, then comes back between missions to deliver exposition. The impression is very much that game developer Maze Theory had very limited time with Whittaker, and likely recorded all of her material in 1 - 2 sessions.

Emma: For the bulk of the game, you are accompanied by Emma (Jennifer Saayeng). She basically fulfills the same role in the main missions that the Doctor does in the prologue - a voice in your head that guides you to the next checkpoint, dropping increasingly clearer hints every time it becomes obvious that you're stuck. Saayeng does a good job with the material, and infuses Emma with a reasonable amount of personality. While the Doctor is constantly enthusiastic, Emma is more circumspect, amusingly admitting at one point that she would prefer staying in the TARDIS to actually going on adventures.


THOUGHTS:

The first big console game for Doctor Who since the ill-fated The Eternity Clock in 2012, The Edge of Time offers the selling point of truly putting you in the Doctor Who universe via the magic of virtual reality. The title is currently VR-only, available on Playstation VR, Oculus, and Steam. This review was completed using the PSVR version; some mechanics may differ from the PC versions, though I believe there are no content differences.

The game is short. I played it a chapter at a time over a few weekends, but I would guess a full playthrough would run a little over 3 hours; on replay, when you know how to solve the various puzzles, it would probably take about 2 1/2 hours to complete. On the plus side, it's not expensive: I paid a little over $20 on the Playstation Store for my copy, and I do feel that I got my money's worth.

Even at a reasonable price, however, there is definitely a sense that some parts are a bit underwritten. It's very linear, offering few opportunities for exploration. The Weeping Angel and Dalek levels are quite brief, with few complications. In the (admittedly creepy) Angel level, you just have to keep the Angels in sight while you crank up a generator to power a lift. Imagine if we actually had to walk down one of the dark corridors, keeping an eye out for angels with only a flickering torch between us and doom.

The game's biggest plus is also its selling point: The VR. Though the Thirteenth Doctor's TARDIS is one of my least favorites, I still took great pleasure in walking around the console room, looking up at the pillars, studying the roundels, etc. And there's something just a little bit mind-blowing about standing outside the TARDIS on an alien world, looking into the tiny box and seeing a vast world beyond that's entirely different than the world around you.  It's a real showcase for VR, which can convey the sense of wonder and impossibility in a way that a 2D television image just can't.

And yes, the Weeping Angels are very creepy in VR. One of the game's better puzzles has you freeing an angel from a painting. Every time you turn your head, the image of the angel moves - Until finally, it's halfway out of the painting, hand outstretched, inches from your face. The single most effective jumpscare in the game.

There's also a genuinely fun shooting level near the end, when you are inside a Dalek casing, blasting away at Daleks and Dalek drones. It's daft - You're all but invincible, while the enemy Daleks might as well be made out of paper - But it is great fun, if over a bit too quickly.

"Over a bit too quickly" is the major criticism here. The first mission, on the planet Lucia Minor, feels very well fleshed-out, with its own complete story and even an effective ending to that story. I would have liked the same for the other two missions, which instead come across as just set pieces. The three missions don't feel particularly unified, with no connection between them and The First's plot. The endgame is also far too simple - Destroying a Dalek pillar ends up feeling more like a "boss fight" than the confrontation with the actual villain of the piece!

In the brief time since release, the controls improved noticeably with the addition of two patches. On release, I fumbled around with the Move controllers like a drunkard, finding it a challenge to successfully grab hold of any object. By the time I finished the game, updates had made the controls much smoother - Though I still wish there was an effective Dualshock option, as I generally dislike using Move controllers.

I will add that you can use the Dualshock - But it basically just acts as a Move controller.  A single Move controller - Dualshock players get to simulate playing as an amputee, allowed the use of only one hand.

Still, the visible improvements to the game's performance across a mere three weekends indicates a dedication to identifying and implementing improvements, which is very much to Maze Theory's credit.


SUMMING UP:

Ultimately, the value of The Edge of Time depends on how much you want to experience Doctor Who in virtual reality. The story isn't terrible by video game standards, but it's clearly just there as a clothesline for the various puzzles and set pieces, and I woudl personally have preferred it to be about twice as long as it actually is. Voice acting is good across the board, from Whittaker to Jennifer Saayeng to Adjoah Andoh, and there is a lot of fun to be had - But it would be stretching a point to say that this fully lives up to my pre-release hopes for it.

It is a lot better than The Eternity Clock, though.


Rating: 6/10.

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Doctor Who: Legacy.

Match three gems to defeat 

the deadliest foes in the galaxy!

Written by: Lee Cummings, Ben Badgett. Produced by: Susan Cummings, Jack Yee, Peter Hickman. Publisher: Tiny Rebel Games.


THE PLOT:

The Doctor and Vastra arrive in Cardiff in 1978, but something is very wrong. The Sontarans have invaded the Earth - something the Doctor knows did not occur! They quickly discover that the Sontarans have acquired time travel, and are rewriting history to make themselves into the ultimate conquerors.

To stop this, the Doctor will need help. So he plucks companions and even other incarnations from across time and space. But just when it seems he has the crisis contained, he discovers that the Zygons are involved. And multiple incarnations of the Master. And Daleks and Cybermen and Cyberkings and a rogue's gallery of enemies. And the only way to stop them is to line up colored circles before time runs out...


CHARACTERS:

Given that Doctor Who Legacy is a mobile game, it's not surprising that there's very little to speak of here. Plot, let alone characterization, consists of brief, thinly-sketched text sequences designed mainly to get us from one "battle" to the next, and a lot of the time the game doesn't even bother with that much. You do get a full complement of Doctors and companions, but they are mostly all written in broadly the same way, save for the occasional catch phrase.


THOUGHTS:

I was fortunate enough to download Doctor Who Legacy onto my iPad early last year. Very fortunate, since the game's servers were taken offline not long after. Thankfully, Tiny Rebel Games had consideration for existing players, and made sure the game was playable offline; if you have it, you can still play it. Sadly, if you don't already have it, there is no (legal) way that I know of to obtain it. Hopefully, it can be made available again in the future, as it is a very good example of both a Match Three Game and a mobile game.

As the description above may indicate, this is not a title that's heavily focused on plot and character. Which may be just as well, since after four chapters and hundreds of levels, the story (such as it is) remains unresolved.  Ultimately, this is a match three game that happens to have a Doctor Who skin.

But - and it's difficult to overstate this - It is a genuinely very good match three game, with some surprisingly complex gameplay as it goes on. You can largely just get through the first Chapter with basic color matching and nothing else. But by Chapter Two, the game throws curvegems at you. Some enemies will hit you with poison, in which your characters' health will drop every turn. Other enemies will take away the exact color gems that you need to either heal yourself or defeat them. If you don't learn strategies to counteract these moves, you will ultimately not progress.

The key to the gameplay then becomes arranging and leveling up teams with abilities that counter those enemies. For example, the Eighth Doctor can cure poison or, at a higher level, heal the party to almost full health. Some companions can change the colors of certain gems, while others can add the damage done to enemies by certain colors. That can be combined to devastating effect. For example, one character you can add to your party will change all blue and (at higher levels) red gems to gold. Another character can cause gold to do additional damage. Use those abilities in tandem, and you can usually one-shot an entire screen of enemies - But if you do it too quickly, on a screen with only a couple of foes, you may find yourself without those abilities exaclty when you need them the most, making strategy an important factor in gameplay.

These twists and curves make Legacy a lot of fun to play. The storytelling may be weak, but the gameplay itself is addictive; on many occasions, I found myself sitting down to play for just a bit, to kill 15 minutes or so... only to find myself still playing an hour later.

It's all backed by a genuinely good music score, that captures something of the feel of the series while also being very much of this game. And even if the actual writing and character work is very thin, there is a certain rush to be had from seeing your favorite past Doctors and companions added to your inventory of available characters.

It's just a pity that it's not currently available for new audiences to discover.


Overall Rating: 9/10.

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