Doctor Who: The Mazes of Time

Doctor Who: The Mazes of Time – It’s not easy being a timelord

It’s funny how regardless of the various escapades of the famous Doctor, the timeless question that will rattle on possibly longer than the series in its various guises is just who is the best Doctor Who? I could stoke the fire by telling you who I think it is, but I’ll raise myself above all that and simply review the game – Doctor Who: The Mazes of Time.

For any top down puzzler fan, this game will certainly be quite appealing. Of course, if you happen to be a fan of the show, you will be even more enthralled by the prospect of playing with Dr. Who and his assistant.

In fairness, this game is a co-op style puzzler where you must use the attributes of both Dr. Who and his assistant. The Doctor can push objects around (e.g. to position a block on a switch) and climb over objects but his assistant can walk over weaker surfaces and crawl under objects. So it involves a fair amount of logical thinking to get you through the sprawling levels.

As you can guess, as the game develops, the harder the levels become. Testing not just your logical thinking but also your reaction and ability to avoid being ‘deleted’ by Cybermen or exterminated by those pesky Daleks!

The game is appears almost exactly as something from The Sims and when playing I almost expected the same bizarre language and it was with a bit of disappointment that after such attention to detail in graphics, there wasn’t the same attention to detail in the sound department and rather than watching speech bubbles, the voice-overs could have made the game more authentic – especially as the bad guys all were eerily sounding as you’d expect.

Putting this to one side, I initially was thinking this puzzle game would only really appeal to the young and dare I say geeky. However, I’m delighted to say this game does offer a fair bit of a challenge and the more mature gamer will be probably entertained quite a bit more regardless of the interest in Doctor Who. More to the point, perhaps this game will help endear the new Doctor more to me than his various prior counterparts.

Positives

Co-op challenges

Plenty of tricky levels to master

Appeals to the younger child in me

Negatives

A tad repetitive

Lack of voice-overs by the actors

The ability to look around the level using a free-roaming camera would have helped

3 stars