PREVIOUS                                                                                  NEXT

 26TH JUNE 2010

(INTERACTIVE EPISODE)

City of the Daleks provided an enjoyable, if flawed, start to BBCi’s new series of Doctor Who Adventure Games. Blood of the Cybermen was therefore under greater pressure; it had to prove that the games could work as a series, by being more than just a rehash of City with different monsters and backgrounds. It had to be different, and it had to be better. Thankfully, for the most part, it pulls that off, and is a marked improvement on its predecessor.

The gameplay here is certainly improved, not radically, but enough to make playing a more satisfying, less frustrating experience. The controls seem  improved; a little smoother, with less of a tendency to send your sprites suddenly running off in the wrong direction. There are still moments of curse-inducing annoyance, such as the final sixty second dash for safety that closes the game; something that would be highly enjoyable, if the two other characters following you didn’t choose to suddenly stand stock still in front of you, blocking your way while you’re trying to rescue them. The puzzle sections remain rather more fiddly than puzzling, but there is a little more variety to them. Generally though, there’s more to this game than the non-stop sneaking about of the first, although that does come into play. There are reasonable platform sections, albeit rather linear and constrained, and sections that involve exploration, effectively breaking the game up into more than the single long stealth sequence that was City of the Daleks.

The story is also improved. Enjoyable though the Dalek invasion of time was, it was fairly straightforward and predictable. While it’s impossible to call Blood of the Daleks complex, it does have more to involve the player. We get two new characters, the sympathetic engi-neer Chisholm (ably voiced by Barnaby Edwards) and the icy Project Manager, Meadows (Sarah Douglas). They both feel like genuine characters, in contrast to the previous story, which involved only one human cipher for a very brief sequence.

The Cybermen are used very effectively. At first they are a mostly unseen presence, their crashed time ship using its AI to coordinate stealth attacks. Having been buried under the Arctic ice for ten thousand years and only just revived, the ship has sent out a swarm of Cybermats to convert the human digging team. The classic series creepy-crawlies are updated very effectively, now injecting an artificial nano-virus into their victims, assimilating them, Borg-style. The humans’ slow transformation into Cyberslaves, their flesh gradually converting to metal, is surprisingly creepy, as are the finished slaves, which lurch, zombie-like, their heads hanging at unnatural angles. While the Cybermen state “delete” to their victims, the Cyberslaves moan, simply “die.”

Once the Doctor and Amy break into the ship itself, and witness the revivification of the Cybermen, the plot picks up pace, with full blown Cyber drones on the offensive. All this takes place in the evocative environs of the Arctic, providing nostalgic hints of The Tenth Planet. The graphics reproduce this environment excellently, and, pleasingly, the human characters all have visible breath.

With improvements in the two areas that truly matter - gameplay and script - alongside the still impressive graphic and sound design, Blood of the Cybermen elevates the Adventure Games from being merely reasonably fun diversions to successful installments of Doctor Who.