Doctor Who: The Adventure Games Review

Who is your favourite Doctor? Doctor Who: The Adventure Games is a game that has a series of episodes with each episode featuring a different story just like the TV show. It follows and stars our beloved Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith and his companion Amy Pond. Both characters are fully narrated by Matt Smith and Karen Gillan themselves. The game is published by BBC Wales Interactive and developed by Sumo Digital that was formed back in 2003.

So was Matt Smith your favourite doctor? If he was, then you may enjoy this game. As I have already mentioned this game sis a series of episodes. It is like having a bunch of interactive television episodes to watch and interact with. The first episode involves a battle with one of the Doctor’s long term enemies the Darlek’s. As you travel in the Tardis to Liverpool 1963 to visit Ringo from the Beatles, you find the world is not as it should be. You soon find that you are faced with a world full of Darlek’s. As you play each episode you have many enemies that you will recognise from the TV Show. Let the adventures begin!

As you proceed to play you get all the sounds and music that you get on the TV. It really adds to the feeling that you are playing a doctor who adventure. Having all the speech narrated by the real life actor is pretty nice. From the start you can tell this game is aimed at a vast audience and you will find that the game itself is pretty easy. You are tasked with controlling either the doctor or even Amy Pond and have to solve very basic puzzles to proceed. The controls are using the keyboard and mouse. I could not get my gamepad to work at all so I am guessing they didn’t bother with that. This is pretty strange as nowadays we pretty much live in a society that virtually every game has support for a gamepad built-in. This doesn’t really harm the games enjoyment though, so don’t worry.

The controls are also very simple. You use the keyboard and mouse to move and open a basic inventory to access objects that you have picked up and need to use at various points. As I have said the games I extremely simple. The puzzles hardly feel like a puzzle at all as the game has no real exploration at all. You are almost forced in the right path to find the objects you need to use. You will find yourself maybe stuck for about two minutes maximum until you work it out. I can presume it is like this so that younger gamers don’t get frustrated. This game is not really aimed at adults; it’s more aimed at fans of the show.

This game does have many fundamental issues. The graphics are very simple. You can tell the developers didn’t have a massive budget to play with. You get a lot of graphical tearing and other issues. It also feels pretty rushed. I felt that the developers didn’t make this game as fans and for the love of making a decent game, but it was more of a chore for them. This does harm the game pretty badly.

As you play the game you also have various collectable cards to pick up and examine. As you try to collect them all you are given various information about characters and facts about the show. You also have at various points objects that when you examine them you are given some sort of fact about the real world. Like a fact about a glacier and how they move in the summer. These facts can be interesting, but somewhat odd. I suppose they are there as it is a game published by the BBC after all.

If you are a huge Doctor Who fan and looking for a game that will give you a few hours of entertainment then Doctor Who: The Adventure Games may be the game for you. I would have no problem letting the young ones play it as well. I am a huge Doctor Who fan and although it is a very easy game; it was fun to play and was quite nice to have an adventure game that I could play through without taxing the mind too much.

If you are however looking for a hardcore adventure game then stay away this is not the game for you. I cannot score the game highly at all as it is only a few hours long and although enjoyable does have a lot of bad points. It is a shame as I expected more from the BBC.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Bonus Stage for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to press@4gn.co.uk.