It's taken me a bit longer than intended, but I eventually got around to buying Doctor Who: Return To Earth for the Wii. I'd like to say it's been worth the wait, much like I'd like to say that right now I'm being fellated by an attractive young lady. Sadly neither of these statements are strictly true.
To be fair, it's not that the game exactly AWFUL per se. It's just... not very good. It is not, for example, a patch on the adventure games for a variety of reasons. Aside from being not as fun to play you have to consider that the adventure games are FREE, whereas this has an RRP of £30+. You don't have to be Adric to work out the maths.
To be fair, even Adric doesn't want to be Adric
Still, lets break it down and try to work out where it all went wrong. Graphically the game is nice enough, and looks pretty good. The art style does seem a little odd though, the big headed proportions making the Cybermen look more like Lego men, and Amy look like... well, jailbait.
The really crazy part being that somehow the Doctor himself looks fairly normal, thus proving that Matt Smith is in fact a weird looking guy.
Then we have the gameplay, which I suppose is where it all falls down. Initially it seems like the game might be building on the adventure games template of stealth / puzzle solving / almost exploration. However it adds to this mix, rather bizarrely, balloon shooting and platforming. Along with a pretty dire camera and a lot of frustration. The shooting part is the vaunted Sonic Screwdriver action promised on the back cover. What it works out to is you have to sneak up on a dispenser to get the right coloured ammo, and then shoot the corresponding egregious smiley faced balloon which is for some reason floating over the point of interest, thus activating a platform or putting out a fire or whatever. Whilst this may sound okay on paper the reality is often rather different, as most of your time is spent running around trying to get to get the camera to show you the security field of the dispenser, filling up on whatever ammo, trekking across the room to the bit your meant to be zapping, missing all your shots, and then trekking back to the dispenser to start the whole process again. Of particular note are the blue crystals, which not only activate the marble run puzzles, but act as lives within them. Some of there little assault course can be okay, but they're not without issue. For example, I accept that if you hit something you lose some health. That's fair enough. But what seems to happen most of the time is that the hazards are coated in superglue, so that rather than knocking you out of the way or even being able to outrun a slow moving fan blade you just stick to it and then explode. Even though it's moving around in the same direction as you and you can move faster than it. Then there's the time when there's an EVIL marble in the run with you. This would be less annoying if maybe it didn't start about a second after you and was actually impeded by the obstacles in some way. So for example why you get to sit waiting for a sequence of gates (thus having the evil marble instakill you) on the rare occasions you do make it through it just ghosts through like there's nothing there.
Then there's the platforming. You don't get to do any jumping of course, but there's several sections of moving platforms that need to be navigated with impeccable timing lest you plummet to your death. I'm not quite sure what game design school whoever is responsible for some of these graduated from exactly, but I'm guessing he skipped out on the days they discussed camera placement. Suffice to say it is not best helpful to place the camera as far away from the character as possible when navigating a split second jump, neither is it a great idea to have the camera suddenly change position in the middle of said crossing, thus changing the direction in which the stick is moving your character.
All these problems of course lead to my main gripe about the game: The loading screen. The loading times are, it has to be said, a tad overlong. In some section I was spending more time loading than playing until I finally managed to overcome whatever it was that was killing me and move on to the next part. They may not seem long at first, but after the first few times you notice that the amount of time you've spent waiting to load has crept up and up into the minutes rather than seconds. Although I suppose if you're a lot better at the game than me this may not be so much of a problem.
Even after spending half my time dying like a bitch I can't say that the game felt particularly long. I mean, I only started playing it Saturday evening, an I completed it today. And that includes time for Guild Wars in between. It has to be said that this isn't entirely a bad thing though, as the game does feel a little stretched out as it is. I don't think there's enough ideas here to sustain it for any longer.
This I suppose leads us to the plot. I suppose technically there is one, though you'd be forgiven if you missed it. It's not often that you find a game that really needs MORE cutscenes, but this really does. A few lines of disjointed voiceover is the best you get, often referring to things that simply haven't happened. There's little to no context in any of it, and rather than advancing any sort of story you just find yourself crossing rooms, because there's a star on the shitty next to useless radar that you're apparently supposed to be heading for. Quite what was stopping them getting a proper cast here I don't know, but the voice acting isn't really up to much. Even Matt Smith and Karen Gillan seem to be rather phoning it in for what is maybe a couple of hours studio time, tops.
All in all I have to say that this is rather a failure. When you think about the sort of thing you could do with a Doctor Who game, the sort of game the franchise really DESERVES.... Well, this isn't it. It could be worse, but it SHOULD have been better. Sadly though it seems they operating to a rather fast schedule judging by the amount of time between the announcement and release, and in these sorts of circumstances somethings going to give. Unfortunately what gave was the gameplay and storytelling.
Now, if you'll excuse me I'm gonna go play Guild Wars.
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