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Match three gems to defeat
the deadliest foes in the galaxy!
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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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