Before I start on the games, I'm going on record as saying that I love the Doctor Who series and having watched every episode of the new series I can safely say I know my way around the franchise sufficiently enough. Even Series 5 starring Matt Smith was though roughly enjoyable despite what the unpleasable Doctor Who fanbase might say, and well I didn't enjoy it as much as the other new series I've watched, that's still like being the softest part of a Diamond.
Right then, blind praise over with, let's dig into City of the Daleks, Blood of the Cybermen and TARDIS. The games are all developed by Sumo Digital, and their Wikipedia page tells me that they developed Sega Superstars Tennis, Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing, and a couple of other games I haven't heard of, and having no playing experience of their past work I didn't know what to expect, all I know is that the two I mentioned seem to have averaged 80% scores from what I've read. I mention this because as far as I know, Point and click Adventure games are an unfamiliar territory for them, and it really rather shows.
This is the part where the reviewer mentions what genre the game is in more detail, the Doctor Who games take the form of point and click Adventure type games, which on paper sounds like the best way to represent Doctor Who in video game form (Which the makers of the videogame version of the Doctor Who Top Trumps game seemingly didn't care about.), and if you looks at the trailers the game seems like it understands what a Video Game Doctor Who should be.
And then...
Once starting them up, I noticed several things, firstly the fact that the controls are not up to scratch, secondly, the graphics are godawful, and thirdly it's extremely slow paced. The controls consist of looking around and interacting with the environment with the mouse, and using the W,A,S,D buttons for moving, which sounds fairly standard until you notice the camera has a hard time behaving itself and secondly The Doctor and Amy move very awkwardly and often get caught behind centimetre high protrusions from the floor. The mouse controlled mini-games, which is just one mini-game repeated to the point of annoyance, is dragging a circular object through an electric maze with strange hit detection and slug-paced mouse speed when dragging it.
As I mentioned, the pace of the games is extremely slow, a huge contrast to proper Doctor Who stories where the plot moves very fast due to The Doctor's extreme skill and intelligence, which is something the designrs noticed the average player lacks and adjusts the puzzle difficulty accordingly. In the TV based episodes, The Doctor might discover an alien threat and defeat it in the time it takes to do several extremely minor tasks in the game versions like rerouting electricity or building something to stop Amy from being erased from time (Spoiler Alert). The reason The Doctor has human companions in the series is to provide a point of view character who is just as immediately unsure of what's going on as you are, so it's rather jarring to see The Doctor taking several minutes to do an extremely mundane task like MacGyver together a useful device which would take a few seconds for him normally, and this is why I reckon the game would be more interesting if you played as Amy all the time, since you learn things along with her rather than The Doctor who does all the explaining.
For example, at the end of the third episode 'TARDIS', you have to pilot the TARDIS, which while being every fanboy's dream, is very difficult to do for multiple reasons. First of all, despite vaguely seeing him work his magic in the episodes, you don't know how the TARDIS works, secondly, before you start doing this, you have to memorize the names of the numerous components with no mentioning that it'll be important, thirdly, you're timed by a minute and have to start from the beginning for seemingly no reason. And since you play as The Doctor whilst doing this, very much annoyed me since you as the player could act in no way like The Doctor, which is the primary reason for implementing a TARDIS flying sequence in the first place.
Another problem with the episode TARDIS, is that, the setting is that you're inside the TARDIS and you have to solve problems in there. To fans, this means "Holy Poo, we can finally explore the TARDIS!", to the makers, this thought "Let's only let the players explore one room beyond the control room that we see all the time and give them a kick up the bum and send them back to the start if they dare to explore anywhere else.". This makes the game extremely boring because it goes against all your expectations and is basically the first two games minus big enviroments and Stealth, it really shows how lazy the Game designers are when there are precisely two rooms in the whole game.
Another instance of design laziness is Amy's outfit. Yes, I know girls in miniskirts are apparently nice to look at but she wears the same outfit every single game, even when it doesn't make sense such as in Blood of the Cybermen when she's wearing a miniskirt IN THE ARCTIC, this is explained away by The Doctor in a single line saying the TARDIS is keeping her warm, something it definitely could not do before. And is very obviously the designers not bothering to make a little variation from game to game.
And being a Doctor Who fanboy, I should also mention how much I loathe the implementation of the Sonic Screwdriver, in that its use is limited to unlocking maybe three doors in the entire games and being useless in all other occaisions, even in instances where it doesn't make sense to not work such as when it fails to open a simple 20th century padlock and you have to slowly push a car slowly through the gate instead. Sure it'd be boring if everything was solved using the Screwdriver but I expected to use it at least in the smallest way possible, but no, you hardly ever use it at all, which was a massive disappointment for me.
Being episodic based, the games are all extremely short, in fact I completed TARDIS in one sitting, and the first two in maybe two or three sittings, I would've easily done those in one sitting if not for the fact that Cybermen and Daleks patrol almost every corridor and will shoot on sight if you get caught in their field of vision, and sometimes even if you clearly don't. And when you're navigating past guards, Amy and The Doctor will crouch and walk head-deskingly slowly, giving them ample time to walk back to your location and spot you, though mercifully you're suddenly allowed to run if you're spotted, not that this helps because they can and will shoot you from across the room unless you're behind something solid, then their dopey guard mentality will set in and they'll instantly forget about you once you're gone. This is a bad implementation of Stealth in a non-stealth game and annoyed me immensely.
As mentioned, if it wasn't obvious from the trailers and in-game screenshots, the graphics are extremely bad, the characters move very unlike their TV counterparts despite being motion captured by their actors, their faces barely change expression and give a noticeable Uncanny Valley look, and the graphics are...just plain bad. My guess is that they were trying to make the game playable to everyday Doctor Who fans who don't have colossal Super Computers that can render Devastator from Transformers. But come on, I have Gamecube games with better graphics than this. I would've much preferred it if they used say, exaggerated, cartoony and maybe even cel-shaded graphics, all of which would've operated normally on a standard computer I imagine.
Overall, I was immensely disappointed with games, despite the vast possibilities readily available, all they made was a boring Adventure game with barely any adventure at all. We had hopes of using the Sonic Screwdriver, battling The Doctor's arch enemies and travelling through time, we got several poorly used concepts. And then of course there was the poor design and controls, which were extremely glitchy and poor.
So that's my opinions on the Doctor Who games so far, as I said at the start, I'll probably get the other games against my better judgement, especially since the PC and Mac versions have been free in the UK, and no self respecting fan passes up the opportunity for free merchandise, despite how rubbish it is.
