Destiny Of The Doctors is the one big Doctor Who game. Yes, there's all the Matt Smith stuff, but they don't want people outside UK playing them so I won't count them, either! And certainly not Top Trumps.
The premise is excellent: The Master(Anthony Ainley) has taken control of a planet which is enveloped in psychic energy and has used that power to twist reality and capture the first seven incarnations of the Doctor(First and Second are voiced by imitators, Third's dialogue is from stock and the rest return) in an area similar to the Death Zone. The eighth incarnation is absent as the game was set to release in 1996, but was held back due to Pertwee's death.
And here is where it gets crappy: you play as the Blob. Yes, the Blob. Moving around is annoying, fighting is difficult and the countdown clock doesn't help. It tries to serve as both the life bar and as a... well, clock but it just gets in the way and ruins the fun.
The game starts out okay enough. You're inside the Doctor's TARDIS and can access a record of his travels(literally everything to do with Classic Who). The second thing you can do is travel to any of the seven places the Doctors are trapped in. But then you have to leave the console room. As you go, you meet up with an enemy like the Cybermen, the Daleks or the Quarks(insert Ferengi joke) that try to kill you. Your weapons include water pistols and fire extinguishers and oil squirters. Yay.
Your mission is to get outside to the Master, who will give you a number of tasks to choose from that you must perform in order to get access to the Determinant(where the Doctor is being held).
The tasks are represented by various symbols. And that's the whole game, right there. Complete the task, complete the challenge. Seven times.
There are multiple tasks to choose from, but you'll quickly find the least hazardous one and choose it for the rest of the game, because it's very easy to to die here. How many times has the Master downright cheated and given me a game over despite me having brought him the damn thing he asked for...?
Not to mention that everything you do sucks out your life/health timer apart from standing or moving. Using objects sucks your life, jumping sucks your life, crouching sucks your life.
The enemies are all slow-moving and wobbly, with their guns seemingly firing in slow-motion(it can take three seconds for a blast to hit, giving you ample time to move away and look at the energy ray zooming past you) with the lone exception of the Daleks, who move pretty fast. It's still easy to dodge them, though.
The entirety of the game takes place in either the Doctor's or the Master's TARDIS with portals that you pass through(and which suck your life) to get from one place to the other. The Master's ship seems filled with aliens, all in their natural habitats(a Cyber-base, a Sea Devil tank etc.)
The only useful object in the game is the sonic screwdriver, which knocks out every enemy, giving you just enough time to get past them(killing them takes longer, thus sucking the timer more). There's also the radio which you can use for some random info from the Brigadier(Nicholas Courtney), but it's not helpful at all. It can be used to listen to a song if you use it at an Auton though, thus interrupting its radio signal somehow.
The primary variation is in the challenges themselves.
To rescue the First Doctor, you travel into the Celestial Toybox and confront... erm, Quarks whilst looking for him.
To rescue the Second Doctor, you chase the Master through the London Underground and try to hop in front of his train and then pull the brakes.
To rescue the Third Doctor, you shoot down the Dalek ship that the Master's in.
To rescue the Fourth Doctor, you travel into his brain(it's a rip-off of the First Doctor's challenge) and confront... erm, the Raston Warrior Robot whilst looking for him.
To rescue the Fifth Doctor, you have a jousting battle with... erm, a Sontaran.
To rescue the Sixth Doctor, you travel to Mars and have to collect stars to deactivate a force field and get him. Don't go near the field before you have six stars.
To rescue the Seventh Doctor, you chase the Master through England(it's a rip-off of the Second Doctor's challenge) and try to hop in front of his version of Bessie and then pull the brakes.
After all's said and done, the game finally sucks out the rest of your time/health to stabilize each Doctor. If you don't have enough left, game over. If you do, you win.
Pros:
1) Excellent cutscenes with Anthony Ainley, who put in a magnificient effort for his final time as the Master(minus rose-stomping. There was no need to be cruel to real plants). I especially loved his opinion on each of the Doctor's incarnations.
2) The TARDIS console room and all its attributes.
3) Great quotes and references to past stories.
4) The enemies look visually decent.
5) Much better than Dimensions In Time.
Cons:
1) Difficult controls.
2) Ridiculous and pointless weapons.
3) Nonsensical instructions and maps that you can't bring up again.
4) Playing as the Blob.
5) No clues whatsoever.
6) No Doctor Who intro or anything, the game just starts. There is a big one at the end, though, with all the incarnations' faces.
7) Really crappy graphics(I know its 1997, but at least in Dark Forces 2, I was distracted by gameplay).
8) No subtitles(sometimes it's hard to hear what they're saying and that, coupled with short and unrepeated instructions is a game over.)
Overall, there is effort, but it's amateur-ish and dysfunctional. Only for the classic fans of Doctor Who.
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