Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins

Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins is a point and click adventure game, ported to PC from smart phones, where you get a phone randomly and you need to stop aliens, from take over the Earth. Let's talk about the story first. Well... before that, you need to know, that this game is part of the Doctor Who universe, and knowing a few things about it could be valuable, however you could play the game without knowing it, but it won't be that satisfying... that's certain, sadly. The story is a sequel (or sort of) for the original Doctor Who episode 'Don't Blink'. It shows what happened at there after 16 years and I must say, it was interesting. You will meet important characters from the series, and basically the game give a nice addition. However, there are some logical issues with the story, mostly about the ending, which raise some question and also, some characters has some weird choices, but this was certainly okay in the game. Next is the graphics. So the game is emulate a phone mostly, which on mobile phones would work all right, but obviously on the PC looks a bit off. However, this is not the biggest issue with the game, it's mostly some effects, which could cause epilepsy. Some effects also looks off, but in general, it's decent. Photography looks good, just like the videos, so at least that's on point. About the sound design, it's also works fine. Every dialogue is understandable, it's from the original actors or from new ones. However, the game don't have too many music tracks, so it could be a bit boring playing the game, looking for clues and not hear anything else. And probably the issue with the game mostly: is the gameplay. In general, it's about looking for clues and sending to Osgood, who asked your helped. You can read some background story, searching clues, but that's it really. There will be 2 times I guess, when the game tries to scare you (no wonder that this game is from the maker of Simulacra and Sara Is Missing). There will be 2 or 3 puzzles which will be a bit interesting, but nothing impossible. It's really about to gather information and use it properly, and because of this the gameplay is lacking. Thankfully it's short, so you won't get annoyed by it, but it could have add more to it. And yes, if you know the series, you can be happy to find some parts from the series or some Easter Eggs, but it's really underwhelming to be honest. Works all right, but not enough spice.

I hate to say it but this game is incredibly boring! I was really looking forward to it, but it's a series of slow placed chats between clicking around the phone and being spoon fed with a yellow button that lights up every time you need to click on the page to send it to the person chatting with you. There's no real investigation or putting clues together, jus tedious clicking, interspersed with a bland, overly dragged out story line. If you think you're going to be getting video chats or other real time interactions with the Doctor or the angels, or fast paced exciting events, this is not the game for you. (The trailer for this game is extremely misleading to the point of false advertising. You don't go anywhere. Instead the game uses the back to front method of tell don't show by getting others to do interesting things and then telling you in a couple of lines what they found.) Instead think of waiting for the next bubble of text to come up (it's on time delay to simulate someone typing which is irritating) then picking from 1 to 4 pre-written answers to "text back". Yep, that's it. Read, wait, click. Rinse and repeat for the rest of the game. There's occasionally a voice message to break this up but some, particularly Mr Flint's, are painfully over acted and not particularly interesting either. What you text back doesn't even seem to have any impact. At one point I started picking the "this is boring" type responses and just got the "Well you should be invested. This is someone's life so get back to it!" or "But I think your the doctor's chosen one for this task... so get back to it." (Ah who is that doctor you're talking about? You know in this universe I haven't watched a TV show about him right? Right???) Your "choices" might give you a line of different dialogue and otherwise you're straight back on the rails. The story pushes hard that you should be invested in this case, but gives you little reason to. You find a random phone, and get a random call from someone you don't know asking you to find out more about who owns the phone and where they are now. This same person keeps spouting vague hints about an alien doctor who lives in a time traveling phone box in the most cryptic yet casual way possible. I mean if this were actually real (which is what it's supposed to simulate) how many of us would be thinking this was all some kind of poor taste prank? It's also badly designed. I mean we're meant to be looking for Laurence. We get a corrupted...