Doctor Who: Worlds in Time

  I wish I could tell you this game is a lot of fun and has the charm of the t.v show, but it isn’t and it doesn’t. And my love for everything ‘Who’ is so huge that for that I am sorry… I am so, so sorry. (See what I did there?) But I have to be honest here.

  This idea in itself had a lot of potential and maybe it’ll be done right given some time. To be fair, this game isn’t done yet. It is not a final product. Still, I have to review it for what it is, and not what it might become one day.

  First of all, perhaps the worst offender is the lack of any option to have a friends/contacts list. If this game has something fun, it is the community it has. It is a great joy to stop in common areas between missions and chat with fellow Whovians, but sadly there is no way given by the game to keep track of the people you get along with. You can send private messages and party up with others, but those are short-term options. As soon as someone logged out, good luck finding them again! One can see exactly where the ‘add friend’-type option will be added in the game later on, but in my opinion it should have been included from the get-go! It is the most important aspect of an online community after all, otherwise what’s the point? There’s just no good reason to have allowed the game to be known and played if there wasn’t a way to make online friends.

  The game at least comes with lots of winks for those who know the show’s history. The script is decent, you get your own room in the TARDIS that you can customize and you can choose how your avatar will look via choices of hairstyle, deciding if you’ll be human or alien, the clothes you’ll acquire through missions, etc. Sadly for everything it gets right, it gets other things equally wrong.

  The mini-games that you have to do to complete missions are boring, sometimes unclear, repetitive and don’t always work right. For example, often I found myself playing a mini-game with the handicap that I couldn’t use my computer mouse-wheel to spin some objects for a puzzle game, it simply scrolled down my browser. I checked with other players to see if it was just me, but it wasn’t. I’m not saying these types of browser-based online environments can’t be fun, ‘Gaia Online’ is an example of that model done right, but ‘Doctor Who: Worlds in Time’ lacks that charm. This is clearly supposed to be an all-ages game, but I fail to see kids being entertained by it very long and it has even less to hold the interest of a teenager or adult.

  Other aspects of the game will leave you scratching your head in confusion. Why isn’t the actual music from the show included? Why is the Sonic Screwdriver given to you by the Doctor called a ‘Gadget’? And so on and so on. I really wish it was at least possible to turn off the sound of the game so one would be able to use their own Doctor Who soundtrack on their computer, but you can’t.

  Until they at least add a working friends list to that game, I won’t be stepping into my TARDIS room again. The game in itself isn’t worth your time but the community it attracts might just be fun enough to make you put up with it and share adventures with others just as an excuse to start talking about Doctor Who a few minutes afterwards.