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Friday, March 29, 2024

Time and Relative Dimensions in Games: An Isometric Doctor Who Video Game Retrospective

After the final rerelease of Dalek Attack came by far the most interesting of the Doctor Who games: a full on FMV 3D action adventure by the name of Doctor Who: Destiny of the Doctors. Developed by Studio Fish and published by the BBC themselves, the game is really odd, and difficult to categorise. It is, in essence, a first person shooter with adventure elements, clearly taking more than a little inspiration from the game Descent, with tank controls, sway, and six degrees of movement (though not quite with the mind bending gravity defiance that Descent had).

Notable in that it is the only game in this article where you do not in fact play as the Doctor himself, but as a strange floating organism known as Graak, who is challenged by the Master (played for the final time by Anthony Ainley) to save all seven of the Doctor’s incarnations (this of course despite the fact that there was an eighth Doctor by this point!). You do this through a mix of puzzle-solving, and very awkward combat, the Descent-like engine not entirely designed for the tight corridors and puzzle-solving this game provides. Graphically the game looks actually really good, especially for 1997, when the only real competitors were the admittedly gorgeous MDK, and Quake 2 by the end of the year.

The control scheme isn’t brilliant, struggling to mix the mouse controls of an adventure game with the keyboard controls of Descent, and comes without the ability to map the keys at all, which means that certain frantic moments will inevitably cause frustration.

Quake II? Ha!
Quake II? Ha!

That said, it is probably worth a look as a rare abandoned piece of Whovian history, but do keep in mind that with games this old you have the inevitable issue of compatibility: It will not work on Windows 7 natively, and problems are reported with Windows Vista and XP, so if you do plan to seek it out, Windows Virtual PC or another virtual machine is probably your best bet. Even after getting it to work, you get problems with screen tearing, and that, combined with the canted camera angles, can serve to make you feel sick.

As a game it’s a mixed bag, but as a celebration of classic Doctor Who it does manage to hit the right notes, with Anthony Ainely and all the living actors participating and just having the faintest air of that mystery, that adventure, and, to a degree, that horror of travelling time and space.

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There would be no Doctor Who games for thirteen years after Destiny of the Doctors (because let’s face it, Doctor Who Top Trumps barely counts!), but, as David Tennant cried how he didn’t want to go, and we learned that fans will eat any disgusting thing if it’s on their favourite show, the great and powerful Sumo Digital, makers of games such as the Devil May Cry reboot and the sensational port of Outrun 2 for the Xbox, started work on a new Doctor Who game. And my was it ambitious! A big budget action adventure game with all the cast and crew (well, Matt Smith and Karen Gillan at least) with television pacing was a big ask, particularly since the game would be released for free in the United Kingdom (Which is still the case). It sounded almost too good to be true!

Guess what it turned out to be!

One of the rare games where screenshots do the game better justice than actually playing the game...
One of the rare games where screenshots do the game better justice than actually playing the game…

It had a bunch of design flaws that really hampered the game, some of which, like the awful control scheme, could have been fixed post release, but simply were not, and the schizophrenic novice-of-all-trades gameplay. This would be fine if the adventuring was more involved, the actors didn’t sound like they were woken up at two in the morning and shoved into an accurately-sized police box to record the lines, and the action gameplay wasn’t focused on stealth and escort missions. These two elements more than anything cripple the game, as the only thing worse than a badly implemented stealth section is having to babysit Amy Pond while you do it, especially since she travels about fourteen yards behind you and thus makes timing your path through the myriad foes a nightmare. And then you get levels which consist of three rooms, showing the deep problems with the episodic game model as well.

What is by far the worst thing, though, is that Doctor Who The Adventure Game is far and away the best Doctor Who game released this century. Everything else is so much worse than this. Doctor Who: Return to Earth for the Wii feels like a cheapened, even less controllable version of the Adventure Games. Evacuation Earth on the DS is the shoddiest Professor Layton knock-off ever conceived (a miracle given the vast numbers of shovelware puzzle games on the DS), Worlds in Time is less a game as a legal cute means to financially exploit children, and The Mazes of Time is as generic an iOS game as they get.

The Doctor Who/Gears of War crossover didn't go over quite as well as people hoped...
The Doctor Who/Gears of War crossover didn’t go over quite as well as people hoped…

Out of the new batch of Doctor Who related games, the only one that comes close to even being a game is The Eternity Clock, and even that is riddled with problems. The game plays similar to older rotoscoped platformers like The Prince of Persia and Flashback, although with a lot more minigames, as per Doctor Who game tradition. It’s a Doctor Who game in only the most superficial ways: there’s the Doctor, there’s River Song, there’s the TARDIS and the Daleks, and that’s your lot. Pretty much everything else can be found in better 2.5d platformers like Shadow Complex or Rocketbirds’ Hardboiled Chicken (though that’s not really 2.5d).

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So, what have we learned from our rich and perhaps overly detailed romp across time, space, and really awkward computer games? Well, it is that invention is at the heart of Doctor Who. Invention and creativity, despite everything, makes the show work, and gives it that wonder and, indeed, that horror that has made it a teatime favourite for generation after generation. Translating invention into a licensed video game is one of the hardest jobs in the world, but even attempting it makes the game stand out. It is a total shame more Doctor Who games did not exploit that potential, and really make something innovative and mind-bending. Or should I say, time-bending?

Do you have a particular memory of Doctor Who gaming, or disagree with my rather harsh verdict on the series as a whole? Feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of the article, on Facebook or via the Geek Pride Twitter page @geekpride1 . Thanks for Reading!

David Rose
David Rosehttp://clinkening.blogspot.com
An upstart young literary critic, reviewer, novelist, lyricist, metal vocalist and master of hugs, with a particular tone mixing academic critique with bouncy childish glee.

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