Doctor Who: The Adventure Game is a series of 4 free episodic games that link in to the new series of Doctor Who starring Matt Smith and Karen Gillan. Both actors return in the video game adaptation of the series and voice their own individual characters, as does the voice actor who voiced the Daleks. The games are not adaptations of current episodes, rather they are new original episodes set in the Doctor Who universe.
The game has two major environments. The first is a ruined 1960's London after the Daleks came and destroyed everything, and the second is the Dalek homeworld of Skaro. While the models and textures aren't of a particularly high quality, they all fit together very nicely and represent the areas that they are trying to portray very well. Unfortunately, the overall appeal of the graphics are brought down by the lack of high quality post processing effects and the dreadful lighting.
The gameplay seems to be made up of 3 major sections. Stealth, Minigames and Exploration. Exploration makes up the bulk of your gameplay experience and is dominated by Monkey Island style exploration where you walk around, pick up small objects and try to make them react somehow with the environment. This is done relatively well and works very smoothly, but they aren't too challenging as only two objects mix together and you can't combine inventory items like you can in other popular adventure games.
The stealth aspect of the game is mainly you, The Doctor, sneaking by Daleks to try and get to other places in London/Skaro. The stealth is a bit too easy as the Dalek's field of vision is shown in a radar like format on the floor, so you don't have to watch for any visual clues or anything like in other popular Stealth games. The movement in the game is also fairly clumsy as the doctor is slow to react to presses of the movement keys, and when you let go he still takes two or three more steps. While in the exploration this is fine, in the stealth it makes precise movement far too difficult.
The minigames in the game are typical of what you would find on websites such as Newgrounds or Kongregate. The very first minigame you encounter has you rewiring a circuit board. You have to connect the same coloured points to each other without any of the wires crossing over. While the minigames aren't all that original or interesting, they are executed fairly well and are very easy to understand.
In conclusion, the game tries to combine aspects from other popular games and while none of those aspects are particularly bad, none of them are that good either. If you are a fan of the Doctor Who series then you will definately want to give this free 300mb download a go, otherwise you will probably want to give it a miss.
SCORES:
Graphics: 3/5
Story: 4/5
Gameplay: 2.5/5
Edit: FRONT PAGE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
