PREVIOUS                                                                                  NEXT

 25TH DECEMBER 2010

(INTERACTIVE EPISODE)

This was made available for download at Christmas, and it’s only now, at the end of February, that I’ve actually started playing it. This may give you an indication of how little enthusiasm I have left for the Adventure Games. Though the first game, City of the Daleks, was flawed, it at least had novelty on it side. Blood of the Cybermen was a bit more of the same, adding a few creepy moments to the mix. TARDIS was a huge missed opportunity. So my hopes for the fourth and final title were pretty low.

What we get here is exactly what I expected. It’s the same game, essentially, as the first two ‘episodes,’ but in a new location and with new monsters. Sadly, neither of these adds any real colour to the proceedings. A seabase is a fine idea, in theory, but it amounts to running up and down a series of virtually identical corridors - rather like the often mocked idea of how the television series seemed to many back in the old days.

The Vashta Nerada were a frightening concept on television, but even there they became less effective when in their man-in-a-spacesuit guise. The deep-sea diver versions on offer here are visually more appealing, with some very nice design work, but nonetheless they amount to little more than zombie-like slow-moving sprites whose function is to provide stealth-based sections. These drawn-out games of sneaking around are no different to the previous ones featuring Daleks and Cybermen. The gigantic mutant shark that threatens the base is rather better, a great bit of monstrous design, but whose bright idea was it to do this at the exact same time that the Doctor is facing sharks on the telly? It only adds to the “been there, done that, seen it all before” feel.

It’s a shame, because there’s a fairly good story in here somewhere involving the Phil-adelphia Project, and a rift in space / time that has allowed the shadowy Vashta villains to arrive on Earth in force. The dialogue is in keeping with the series and the voice work is as top-notch as ever. It’s a real shame that it’s squandered in linking scenes for another rep-etitive, uninspiring game. Perhaps making the four games smaller parts of a single release would have worked better; but, even then, the repetitiveness would have set in quickly and put me off completing it.

With another four Adventure Games set for release sometime this year, it is to be hoped that the developers try to broaden their horizons and try something new. That said, these remain free-to-download games, and the costly Nintendo games that recently hit stores are reportedly even less inspiring. It seems to me that, rather than focusing on arduous stealth runs and pointless fiddly mini-games, it would be best for the creators of the Adventure Games to remember what makes Doctor Who so enjoyable: the concepts and dialogue. A more role-playing game, with its emphasis on character interaction, would surely be a much more effective way to translate Doctor Who to the computer game medium.