Doctor Who adventure game

So after spending Friday throwing darts into my most hated dartboard, a little board covered with pictures of groups I hate such as Fox and Micheal Bay, I was suprised to find that the Doctor Who adventure game thing that I'd hear about sometime ago had been released. Hooray! I thought to myself someone has had the brains to mix together three of my favourite things, Doctor Who, Video Games and Steven Moffat. So lets delve through the mirk of what should have been an easy to hit love fest for me.

Downloading
Right so I woke up at about 8 am on Saturday morning, ready to sonic some screws and exterminate some Daleks, only to find the game was still downloading 8 hours after I started and proceeded to go until noon... okay not a great start. So finally having the download complete I was ready to install and get going, only to have th game tell me, "Woopsy you don't seem to be contected to the internet, do you want to fix that and try again later?" This was despite the fact I was chating on Facebook at the same time. So after hiting my computer for an hour I moved down to the desktop and finally got it working

Story
So it opens up with the Doctor and Amy heading to 1963 to go and watch the Beatles, only to find that the Daleks have completly changed the course of history and taken over the earth, so its a quick trip back to the Dalek home of Kaalann on Skaro, along the way we run into:
- A lady with an ace-esque explosion fetish
- A dissapearing Amy, ala Back to the Future
- Varga Plants
- The Emperor Dalek and his colourful friends

In all the story was actually quite good, drawing on the old and the new it blended quite well and I found myself interested in how they would make sense of what they had done, which seems to be a staple of this Moffat era. But another staple was also present in the form of the homage, now I know that Moffat is, like me, a massive Whovian geek but do I have to have this fact launched at me like a midgit in a cannon every 20 minutes? As well as that aspects like the Varga plants felt like they'd just been thrown into the plot cause we needed to make the game harder as it went on, but I guess thats more of a gameplay thing than a story aspect

Gameplay
Okay now I've said very nice things about the story so I think its about time I said some mean things. God the general game aspect of this thing was atrocious, about every 5 minutes in the first half an hour I found my self pressing ctr-alt-del, just to give the game a quick defribulator to the chest and get it moving again, however once it really got going these problems seemed to slowly disappear, only to reappear in the last few minutes and remind me how pissed it got me. Now I'm sure you could tell me it was just my computer, but I've played Crysis on this thing and not had a problem so I don't see why this game, which is for all asthetic purposes like sticking a sheet on some manekins and having them run around, while it may look okay it just doesn't feel as natural as real DW or even other games. But even when I was moving around it was like trying to move a mouse covered in grease that was stuck to the floor with honey, it can be done but you'll piss around for ages trying to work it out. I think my whole feeling for the gameplay can be compounded into my final 15 minutes of playing, as the Doctor I had just finished setting of a final trap and all I had to do was run through a short maze and up a ramp to amy within the time limit, and once I'd worked out where to go it should have been easy. But whenever I wanted to move away from the death dealing shooty walls my mouse seemed to think it would be hilarious to screw with me and run right into them, fantastic.

Other Things I'd Like To Say
There are actually a few other things I'd like to rave about, first Nick Briggs I love you, there is something about your Daleks which is just haunting and wonderful at the same time. Also whatever I read about this being a point and click adventure game has lied to me, this whole thing is actually one of those small kiddie games where we run around learning about stuff and beating the bad guys, like a dumb version of those Carmen San Diego video games we played as children, but that also depresses me if this is the level of people they consider t be playing these games. And finally, the red Daleks are not scary.

Conclusion
So what can I really say about this game, well while I quite enjoyed watching the Doctor run around, and as gratifying as it was to kill Amy a couple of time for hilarity value, these things don't out way the massive problems I had with the general game controls, so for this whole thing I think I would rather have seen the gameplay budget spent on upgrading the visuals a bit and just having them make an animation, it would have taken less time for me and it may have even enjoyed it more.