For some reason, the capture software I used to get screengrabs decided to render a busy cursor that wasn't there when I played...

If you have seen my Twitter page, which is very unlikely, you will have already seen my one word review of Doctor Who – The Adventure Games Episode 1: City of the Daleks, a strong contender for Least Wieldy Game Title Ever, up against such fare as Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People Episode 4 – Dangeresque 3: The Criminal Projective. If not, I’ll paraphrase it for you: “AAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!”

And now, a slightly more erudite review.

Before I start, I should point out that many problems I have with CotD are not anyone’s fault but my own. See, I make a point to only play games several years old, so my creaky 2005 laptop doesn’t have an aneurism over trying to play a game designed for 2010 PCs. However, as we are talking about a game described as an additional episode to Series 5/1/31/Fnarg/Whatever, I decided to ignore the BBC website’s warning that my processor was not man enough to take on the dizzying heights of a freebie adventure game. Therefore, playing with a frame rate that would make a flipbook drawing sneer did nothing but exacerbate problems.

...as well as not rendering some things I distinctly remember being there.

Also, after completing it in a single infuriating afternoon, it was after I mentally wrote this review that the BBC then seemed to psychically detect what I was about to write, and immediately turned around and said “Oh yeah, it’s a beta”. You know what? Screw you. I was not told that when playing or evaluating, so this, BBC, is what happens when you release a beta without saying it’s a beta. I don’t want to see any comments claiming my issues with CotD have been fixed in the final version, if you trick me into thinking a beta is the final release, I’ll treat the beta as if it were final, as that was what it was called when I downloaded it.

With that said, the review.

And it's all downhill from here.

So the story is standard Expanded Universe couldn’t-do-this-on-TV fare you’d see in any given comic strip or novel. The Doctor takes Amy to 1963 to meet the Beatles (“Why doesn’t anyone ever want to meet Ringo?”), only to find the entire Earth in ruins. Actually, I tell a lie, we see a small town square in London in ruins, and are simply told the rest of the Earth is destroyed. Even games have budgets. Go figure.

Thankfully, by virtue of making sure to pull the Plot Convenience lever whilst landing, the Doctor and Amy manage to find the only surviving human being left in existence (an ordinary black girl with no previous battle experience, natch) within moments of landing. After an opening which continues the production team’s axiom that the pre-credits sequence in the new series is equivalent to an Episode One of the old series by having a shocking reveal that the Daleks are involved despite the fact that they’re in the title, the opening cinematic ends and the gameplay begins.

Holy hell! A Dalek! In a Dalek story! What are the odds?

Now, there’s a reason there hasn’t been any Doctor Who games released until now (except the Flash mini-games on the BBC site, and I think there was a Sinclair game somewhere…), Who just doesn’t fit well into a game formula. It works best when the Doctor defeats his enemies with words and ingenuity, not action scenes, and a great deal of problems are fixed by pointing a sonic screwdriver at it. Of course, this would not make for exciting gameplay… except a point and click adventure game, which if you think about it is actually more fitting for something called “Doctor Who – The Adventure Games”, but we’ve got foaming-at-the-mouth hyperactive Halo-playing kids to aim for, dammit! Point and click games sadly require actual thought to play, and are just SOOO Nineties.

This is why CotD falls flat. While there are hints of where we could get some nice Tomb Raider-esque 3D puzzle segments, we’ve got kids to think about, so it not so much holds your hand as outright clamps down on it hard and refuses to let go. So, when a young, creative level designer said “Hey, why don’t we have the Doctor and Amy follow Sylvia (aforementioned Red Shi- I mean guest star) into the Underground by having them push a derelict Hackney cab into the boarded up entrance?”, his boss said “Yeah, and let’s have Daleks with incredibly narrow lines of sight running around? That’ll stretch out the scene no end!”. Yes folks, I’m sad to say this is largely a stealth-based game, lots of not being seen because you’re bent over slightly and not quite in the vision range, enemies staring at walls every other minute just long enough for said slightly-bent-over hero to walk two feet behind them without hearing anything, and several enemies staring into space in the middle of a large antechamber, positioned just so there’s a path where someone could sneak through the large open area with no cover without being seen… somehow. It’s sad to see a Dalek, the greatest enemy the Doctor has ever faced, stare at a wall or pile of crates for several seconds every minute. I mean, we’re already fan-baiting by going to Skaro, why not put in the Ogrons? I’d happily believe they’re thick enough to stare at a wall long enough for me to get by.

Shh! If we bend over slightly, they'll ignore us!

So after our first round of Dalek-avoiding and non-action, we are introduced to our not-quite-a-companion character, Sylvia. She courteously info-dumps the plot after an exchange you might well be familiar with if you’ve seen The Dalek Invasion of Earth (“Where have you been?” “Away.” “Them Daleks bombed us, then invaded!” etc etc etc). Then, joy, another Dalek sneak scene. Here we have a first indicator of how annoying this game can be. After being told in the previous scene that getting too close to a Dalek will alert them whether you’re in their line of sight or not, I was dutifully keeping my distance as a single Dalek trundled towards where I needed to go next. Luckily, a sand-bag barrier, perfect for hiding behind, was positioned right where the Dalek would pause to stare at debris for a while. The Dalek does so, and I make my way to the-

It turns round, staring right at me. This will be but the first of times when the game pulls something out of it’s ass to make first-time players who don’t know what’s going to happen or when lose repeatedly. Bugger, rumbled. Strangely though, I don’t run. Why? Because I’ve seen this bit a dozen times before. The Dalek realises it’s the Doctor, screams some variant of “IT-IS-THE-DOCTOR! EX-TER-MIN-A-A-ATE!”, the Doctor will yell something like “Stop!” or “Wait!”, the Dalek will inexplicably listen to the Doctor’s demands, then explain all it’s plans/take him to the leader who will then explain all it’s plans, then the Doctor will escape, probably with some flavour of sonic-ing involved-

PRSSHUUUUM! Argh! *thump*

Erm, that was unexpected. Seriously, after umpteen episodes with the Daleks NOT doing it, it seems somewhat disturbing to see a Dalek do the sane thing and actually shoot on sight for once. After a quick reload, I stay far closer than anyone should to it, and make it through. Then follows the first of many pointless mini-games that look like they belong on the website, when you have to rewire a fuse box. Admittedly, this was one of the few moments of fun while I tried to figure it out.

FUSE BOX COUNT: 1

(Apologies to TheSpoonyOne for stealing his bit, but honestly, how could I not?)

However, the plot’s finished with Sylvia, so after she twiddles with a trip-wire bomb, a Dalek promptly removes her from the equation, before hitting the trip-wire. In an unintentionally hilarious moment, the Doctor, seeing Sylvia die, screams… shouts… sort of mutters “No!”, before immediately climbing away from danger like nothing happened. Really, from both his and our perspective, nothing really did.

And now on Non-Sequitur Theatre, this surreal moment when collecting a ‘collectable’, a move made to try and squeeze out some replay value:

All right! SIXTH DOCTOR was caught! New Pokedex data will be added for SIXTH DOCTOR. Do you want to give a nickname to SIXTH DOCTOR? SIXTH DOCTOR was transferred to BIG FINISH!

So, after another round of dodging Daleks with less spatial awareness than a guard in a Metal Gear Solid game, we return to the TARDIS and, in what will shock no-one since this was trumpeted everywhere long before now, we indeed return to Skaro, specifically the city of Kaalann. Even games have budgets, though, so all we get is a look at a nice CG landscape painted on a wall, before we’re running around bland grey metal corridors. Slightly amusing about Skaro’s establishing shot is that it looks just like RTD-era Gallifrey, but with some Dalekanium panels with trademark bumps plastered in places.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, this is in fact a sequel to Victory of the Daleks. The Daleks are making good on their promise to rebuild their race, by returning to Skaro and recommencing a Power of the Daleks-style production line. So, wait, if Skaro isn’t part of the Time Lock preventing travel into the Time War, and the five Daleks left at the end of Victory is all that is needed to start up the factories again, then why didn’t the RTD Daleks think of this? Maybe that knowledge was contained in the Progenitor, so the RTD Daleks wouldn’t have known, but how about some clarification on that point? What, so the RTD Daleks never thought to check? And how come if they’ve only just started up the Time War-era factories again, why are they producing 2010 Daleks? Oh, who cares. Let’s just get this over with.

Oh, but we’ve yet to come across the bane of this game. In order to do… something, the Doctor needs to remove a scanner from a dismembered head of a Dalek. Fair enough, but this leads to quite possibly the most infuriating mini-game I’ve ever played, an Operation-style game where you lead the scanner along a maze without touching the walls or a buzzy thing whizzing around in a loop. This would usually be a slight irritant, but with a crapped-out frame-rate, this becomes a hair-pulling test of endurance. It’s like early versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator. You try to turn, and end up careening towards the ground. You try to compensate, but then you end up too far the other way, and crash. Same here. You slowly creep your way along with your imprecise mouse, get too close to one wall, overcompensate, and crash into the opposite wall. I don’t know how I did it, dear reader, but I did. Barely.

If there is a hell, this is what it will look like.

So, naturally, with the world ending in 1963, Amy is now a paradox, and despite “TARDIS protection”, she starts fading in and out Marty McFly style. I have to add at this point, ‘additional episode to the series’ or not, this story really lacks what I call ‘that Moffaty taste’, the cleverness and ingenuity of the new series is reduced to trace levels here. The only hint of it is with this fading from history bit. When you take control of Amy, she can use this briefly fading from existence effect to sneak through vision cones undetected, which is actually a really clever idea.

Ah, but one clever idea is swamped by bad ones. See, in order to ‘stabilise’ Amy’s timeline, the Doctor has to come up with a chronon blocker, and has to, you guessed it, sneak past Daleks to get the components. Once done, you have to build said bracelet by doing ANOTHER OPERATION-STYLE MINIGAME. For God’s sake, at least the first time it made sense, the Dalek would have security systems to protect vital components that would destroy the component if someone attempted to tamper with it, and the mini-game is a simplified representation of the Doctor’s attempts to bypass that. Here… just, why? Why do we need to repeat the same unbelievably frustrating mini-game? Not just repeating it, no, making it even WORSE! Instead of guiding one object from the centre to the edge, you’re guiding TWO of them! From one edge all the way through to the other! Not through the same way though, no, to two different holes! With two buzzy things at different orbits to give you even more things to keep an eye on! Not ridiculously unfair enough for you? Well, if you get one component to a hole, then hit a wall or buzzy thing on the way to the second… guess what? YOU REDO THE FIRST ONE AGAIN.

So, after a long stream of retries and screaming foul obscenities at the screen, we get more sneaking past Daleks! But them game designers, they be creative folk, so we spice up the Dalek-dodging with huge-Dalek-eye-set-into-wall-dodging! Oh, still my beating heart. Oh, but that’s not all. See, to shut down the huge-Dalek-eye-set-into-wall, we have, in a stunning turn, a mini-game! A grand total of two minutes after the last one! Hooray!

This one is slightly better though. Like something you’d see in The Crystal Maze, a series of random symbols slowly glide along a line towards a circle. You’re given a load of buttons with symbols on, and you can put a symbol in the circle by pressing buttons. Have the right one in the circle when the gliding symbol enters, rinse, repeat. It’s made slightly more complicated by the fact that the symbols can be flipped at 90 degree angles, so not only do you have to locate the right symbol in a very short time, but you also have to rotate it in time. You do this three times, because in games everything comes in threes, the huge-Dalek-eye-set-into-wall looking around faster each time you complete- I mean ‘reconfigure’ a console. Having done so, we find that the Daleks are ruled by a resurrected Dalek Emperor. Okay, I will admit a little fanboy within me squealed seeing the RTD Emperor 2010-ised. Noting strange temporal co-ordinates, and I imagine about to turn to camera to shout “This is a plot point”, the Doctor heads off to confront the Emperor. The Doctor and Amy don’t get far though, as the lift opens to reveal two Drones (apart from one Supreme later on, I don’t remember seeing any normal Daleks that aren’t red, introduced in Victory as ‘Drone’. You’d think simply retexturing the same model would be pretty cheap). Oh well, time to reload… No wait, it’s a cutscene. Daleks are back to being stupid again.

So, we get the standard “Stop this now” scene between the Emperor and the Doctor (lovely to hear the deeper Nick Briggs voice for the Emperor again after all these years, by the way). I will say, although the game’s animation looks like a sub-par The Sims machinima, when the Doctor reveals that yes, he IS the Doctor, the two Dalek escorts immediately stop looking up at the Emperor and stare straight at the Doctor, before quickly backing away from him. It’s a lovely little touch that only makes you wish the rest of the game was that good.

But screw that, the Emperor’s got plans to exposit! He’s using Gallifreyan Artifact #392, the Eye of Time. One wonders if they meant to use the Eye of Harmony, but either hit copyright issues or just messed it up. Anyhoo, the Eye of Time will royally mess up all time and space in Dalek hands (when did this suddenly turn into a Sylvester McCoy story?), so the Doctor and Amy escape through the Eye, using the sonic screwdriver as a distraction (I freaking told you!). They land back in time just before the Daleks arrived. The Doctor quickly MacGyver’s a trap together with nothing but some debris, a length of wire, and a console (with copious sonic-ing, of course), and blows up the Daleks sent back after them.

Luckily, the Daleks don’t think to send any more, as the Doctor and Amy rush off back to the Visualiser Room (aforementioned huge-Dalek-eye-set-into-wall room), and we see the taxpayer’s money at work. As Amy, we sneak past the original Daleks who started this whole mess as well as Varga plants (nice touch, but I can’t tell how faithful they are from crappy quality telesnaps), and proceed to collect two items from the Production Facility. You know, like when we snuck past Daleks in the Production Facility to collect two components for Amy’s chronon blocker NOT HALF AN HOUR AGO.

Okay, after a long, tedious segment avoiding stupid Daleks and annoying Vargas, we get back to the Doctor. He’s going to build a thingy that will affect the Daleks’ eyesight. This is no doubt routine stuff for him, after doing it in Planet, Remembrance, and probably the early days of the Time War as well, before he went all Oncoming Storm. I don’t recall the technobabble-y name for the device, so I’ll call it what I call it’s spiritual predecessor, the Spiridonian Tape Recorder. But can you make an STR out of just a Dalek gun and an eyestalk? No! You need a third component, the huge-Dalek-eye-set-into-wall! So, yeah. They’re going to deconstruct ‘beyond repair’ (game’s own description) the thing you needed in the future… past… whatever? I wouldn’t be too confident if our A-plan to fix a paradox is to make another one.

But, wait. We need to build a device with three components… No, it can’t be… Video games’ Rule of Three… That’s impossible… We’ve only done two so far… Oh please God, no…

So we build the STR with a third round of Operation- OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE! It’s bad enough that this teeth-grindingly annoying mini-game is even in this game, but they had the balls to do this THREE TIMES? Were they so proud they could program an average-level Flash game that they made you do more than once? Again, what does Operation-maze mini-game have to do with construction? And yes, you guessed it. One edge to the other, three buzzy things on separate loops, three different holes you need to fill, one fails you go back to the start. I couldn’t believe it. I literally stood up and left the room to get a drink, anything other than face this. It was all I could do, since I doubt the monitor would have liked the journey through the window or the following drop to the ground. Fortunately, even though it made the game barely playable, the laptop saved me that day. After one attempt, I suddenly twigged that I might give the USB mouse a rest and try the laptop touchpad. It was then I remembered why I got the USB one in the first place, just doing this short mini-game nearly melted my fingerprints off like that scene in Men in Black. Mercifully, with care, slowly inching through with the boiling hot touchpad, moving so slowly that there was a few hair-raising moments where I just missed the buzzy things, getting each component to the home stretch and moving on to the next, I managed to complete this godforsaken mini-game on just the second try. God willing, I will one day meet the designer responsible for these segments, and his head will cease to meet his body.

With the STR primed and ready to go, Amy takes it into a control room swarming with Daleks… Wait, why is she slightly bent over? I do not bother with stealth, sir! I am armed! I stroll out into the view of… a Supreme (i.e. white) Dalek! Wow! I’d almost forgotten there were other colours of Dalek beside red. So it turns on me, yelling at it’s comrades that there is an intruder standing right in front of it that they should really be paying attention to. I sneer, open my inventory, and activate the STR! There’s a pause. The Dalek does not decide to fire randomly, screaming “My vision is impaired!” or whatnot, simply staring at me, bemused. Oh, wait, it said in the We Think The Audience Is Stupid tutorial moments ago that it’s short-ranged. Stupid me! Of course, the Third Doctor had to practically touch the Dalek with his STR! So, I get in closer, even though I’m already about four feet from him. I try again. That living eye inside the stalk looks right through me. Erm… Enter? Space bar?

PRSSHUUUUM! Eek! *thump*

Oh, COME ON! You could at least have told me it was just a package I had to deliver to the other end of the level, not a weapon! What was all the ‘short-ranged’ lark about if I can’t use it outside of cutscenes, then?

Yeah, a non-Drone Dalek! Surprised?

Anyway, after attaching the STR to the Dalek Emperor’s derelict casing somehow boosts the signal to all Daleks in the area, you go back to the Doctor, who has to mess with a console on the other side of a room filled with blinded Daleks who, naturally, are shooting carelessly in random directions. Fortunately for the Doctor, the Daleks are not shooting in random directions at all, they’re shooting in the same direction over and over and over, and when you take into account all the Dalek’s blaster paths, creating safe paths someone could walk through if they’re careful- are you getting the gist yet?

But wait, we have to have a thrilling climax! Oh no, we’re out of budget, though! So, we simply have more abstract pathfinding through linear gunfire, but against the clock! Well, I say against the clock, I can’t be sure if it’s not just like the final level of Halo 3, simply counting down closer to the limit the closer you get to the end. Anyway, joining Amy in front of the Emperor casing, they jump through the Eye, again, and the Eye escapes. The Doctor and Amy, meanwhile, end up back at the TARDIS, through the simple expediency of ‘ending where we entered’. This is, if you think about it, complete rubbish, if that’s true they should have ended up in the Control Room with the Emperor and a swarm of angry Daleks. Or, back in ruined 1963, without the TARDIS. Speaking of, why did stopping the Daleks from using the Eye remove 2010 Emperor from history? Well, they must have brought the Emperor back using the Eye, after all being erased by Rose would have been pretty permanent even by time-travelling race standards. But, would it have been too much to ask to have explained this? Just a simple throwaway line would have sufficed. Look, even I can write one:

DOCTOR: So, can’t say I’m pleased to see you again. How did you get around that, by the way? In my book, people erased from history tend to stay that way.

EMPEROR: This is why the Dalek race is superior, will always be superior, Doctor. As long as one survives, all survives! With the Eye of Time, think of what we could create! My resurrection is merely the beginning!

I don’t know, maybe it’s supposed to be Evil’s Emperor. In which case, why is he RTD-styled? Who knows. We’re so close to finishing, I’m just leaving it. But the fact that they land back at the TARDIS is so convenient for ending the story quickly it’s hilarious. It’s like they had a great big epic climax planned, but oops, we’re out of budget. Ah, just plop them back at the TARDIS and make up some mumbo-jumbo about ending where we started or some crap. I’m reminded of the ending to the Tiny Toons Adventures movie, where the leads are stuck hundreds of miles from home, cornered by a madman five minutes from the credits, so they accidentally fall down a ‘Plot Hole’ that lands them right back at the school gates on the first day of school just as it starts. The difference? TTA WAS A COMEDY. Even one of the characters remarks on the way down “I was wondering how those hack writers were gonna end this”. Ending a serious action adventure… Well, a unintentionally funny non-action stealth game… like this is just unacceptable. I’d rant about it more, but we’re so close I can just smell those credits.

So, we get the routine epilogue. All of time will straighten itself out, Sylvia’s alive again and will never know about what happened. She provides the end-of-episode irony by asking her overbearing mother on the phone (Young black girl reassuring overbearing mother over a phone that she’s all right? This seriously has to be an intentional sub-text, they can’t have thought we wouldn’t notice this) that her staying out late is “not the end of the world!” Ah-ha-ha-ha! You see? She’s saying it’s not the end of the world, and yet the rest of the story has been about nothing but the end of the world! Oh, my sides. Anyway, you know what’s coming, so sing it with me! KEEEEERRRRROOOOWWW! Well, at least now it’s-

Wait, what? Another quick TARDIS scene? Why? We’ve already had the end line, what else is there to say? Oh right, off to meet Ringo. Huzzah. Seriously though, this is probably another glitch. Much of the sound is pretty poorly synched due to my five-year old processor sweating buckets, and the scream was supposed to come in after the last TARDIS scene, but actually, it kinda fits. I never realised until now what great incidental music Mr Gold’s themes make when used over a finale scene like this one, especially as the melody kicks in as the credits do. I can’t tell you how much better the sitcom-esque “So, you wanted to meet Ringo?” “Doct-OOORRR!” ending is with a little DUM-DE-DUM in the background. Although I can’t see the old series themes having the same effect (except maybe Debney). That’s probably down to Gold’s ability to write great incidentals but questionable themes. I mean, have you HEARD SJA’s theme? If you didn’t know it, you would never have guessed it was the theme. As for his main theme interpretations, purely as music to listen to, I like them, and have no problem with their use as the official themes, but Mr Stewart would disagree with me there.

One final thought occurs before I go running for the hills and never touch this game again, though. It seems somewhat odd in hindsight, after several weeks with Rory to suddenly have a Rory-less TARDIS aga-

“YOU did this!”

SHIIUM!

“RO-O-ORRRRY!!!”

Oh, wait…

Hang on…

Damn it! I’ve got a crack in my screen…