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Jan. 16th, 2013 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedantherHave just finished story mode in Doctor Who: Worlds in Time. Pretty sure "Whew! Now I can drop this and start playing something I'll enjoy" isn't the reaction the game's designers were aiming for.
The game has, as Rossini is reputed to have said about Wagner's operas, some beautiful moments but some terrible quarters of an hour. The gameplay gets repetitive very quickly, except when it's arbitrarily unpredictable. (A common recurring element is that you have to complete a task before some monsters break in. At different points in the game, failing to complete the task in time may result in (a) immediately failing the level, (b) a swarm of monsters rushing in, or (c) one monster who's so little trouble to fight off that you might as well have saved yourself the effort with the barricade -- and there's no way to know in advance which outcome it will be.) The quality of the story-writing varies considerably, and even when it's good it's often undermined by the limited character animation and a lack of consistency in how the story and the gameplay interact. (Sometimes the correct action on meeting a group of monsters is to fight, sometimes it's to run, depending on what the plot requires at the moment. I've lost count of the number of times the plot called for us to run away from a group of monsters no larger than the group we'd handily defeated five minutes earlier.) The Doctor is generally well-captured -- the bit about the cabbage was a highlight of the end-game -- but not all the monsters fare so well. The Daleks in particular, hampered by the visual style and more so by gameplay limitations, fail utterly to achieve any noticeable air of menace.
There was a point, way back in the first story arc, when the repetition was first getting to me, where I nearly gave up on the game. (Then I met Watkins, the first of the NPCs with enough personality that I actually cared about what happened to him.) I'm not sure, now that I've played through, that I wouldn't have been better off if I had.
The game has, as Rossini is reputed to have said about Wagner's operas, some beautiful moments but some terrible quarters of an hour. The gameplay gets repetitive very quickly, except when it's arbitrarily unpredictable. (A common recurring element is that you have to complete a task before some monsters break in. At different points in the game, failing to complete the task in time may result in (a) immediately failing the level, (b) a swarm of monsters rushing in, or (c) one monster who's so little trouble to fight off that you might as well have saved yourself the effort with the barricade -- and there's no way to know in advance which outcome it will be.) The quality of the story-writing varies considerably, and even when it's good it's often undermined by the limited character animation and a lack of consistency in how the story and the gameplay interact. (Sometimes the correct action on meeting a group of monsters is to fight, sometimes it's to run, depending on what the plot requires at the moment. I've lost count of the number of times the plot called for us to run away from a group of monsters no larger than the group we'd handily defeated five minutes earlier.) The Doctor is generally well-captured -- the bit about the cabbage was a highlight of the end-game -- but not all the monsters fare so well. The Daleks in particular, hampered by the visual style and more so by gameplay limitations, fail utterly to achieve any noticeable air of menace.
There was a point, way back in the first story arc, when the repetition was first getting to me, where I nearly gave up on the game. (Then I met Watkins, the first of the NPCs with enough personality that I actually cared about what happened to him.) I'm not sure, now that I've played through, that I wouldn't have been better off if I had.
