Look out Doctor Who fans, the Doctor is back in a new adventure! I hoped above all else that the game was here to stay (as there were talks of more games in the series) but after 30 minutes of play my initial excitement turned into utter dread!
Mind you the story line starts off promising enough as you find that the Doctor and his beloved Tardis are both caught-up in a time storm and are unable to escape its grasp. To make matters worse the time storm could also destroy the planet Earth! So in typical Doctor Who fashion, the Doctor quickly lands the Tardis so he can examine the damage and also to investigate who or what has caused the storm.
For reasons unknown, he finds himself in the Bank of England in the not so distant future and it’s here that you get to encounter the gameplay for the first time as you control the Doctor across a scrolling 2D landscape, opening doors with your sonic screwdriver and solving puzzles. Unfortunately the controls are not very intuitive as your right stick is used to waft about the sonic screwdriver while the left is used for movement. Jumping and crawling are also required to navigate the various tunnels and platforms but the control methods can also be a little cumbersome.
After your attempts to escape the vault have concluded, the story then jumps to another Doctor Who regular by the name of River Song. Your task as River Song is to escape your cell (which can be frustrating to say the least) and find your time manipulator and ray gun, then time jump back to the Doctor so you can help him before it's too late.
The gameplay is something I would expect to find on the internet for free and that's where it should have stayed. One thing that hit me straight away was the aforementioned 2D graphics - hello, we have moved on since the PS One, as no modern PS3 games are true 2D anymore (most 2D games have 3D elements included in some form), so I was very disappointed!
As a results I found it hard to see where I was going and I also had trouble seeing where the Collectable's (an attempt to prolong the game's life by allowing you to collect the previous Doctor's hats and River Song's journal) were as you can't examine the environments that easily.
The story is very samie once you do the first mission - thus the next three levels don't really keep you entertained for long. Plus I hate running from a fight and that's the only thing this game seems to have i.e. loads of running and little action. For example your sonic screwdriver can't disable the Cybermen and River's gun only stuns so you are doing a lot of cat and mouse movements.
The only thing I truly enjoyed were the one liners and quips that the Doctor comes out with (similar to the TV series), plus the puzzle elements are ok at times, but that still does not save the game from my disappointed score of 3.5 out of 10.
