We are all here in anticipation of trying the first episode of the new games series now named City of the Daleks. There are so many there to try the game that we are split up into small groups and otherwise entertained with an advance screening of the next episode of the TV series whilst we wait our turn. The episode we were shown was very good.
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| And here he is in all his digital glory. | The Doctor and Amy arrive in a Dalek infested 1963. |
As luck would have it we weren't kept long. Crammed into a small room with the game's BBC senior producer Mat Fidell as a guide through the Dalek's home world. City of the Daleks begins with the Doctor arriving in London in 1963, planning to take Amy to see the Beatles. They are confronted by a devastated city ruled by his arch enemies and not the thriving metropolis that it was in 1963.
By way of a short cinematic introduction the Doctor and Amy watch the Daleks chase a woman they call the 'last surviving human'. She evades them and escapes into the London Underground and the action begins with us controlling the Doctor in order to dodge the deranged machine-bound creatures to find the woman and ask her what happened.
Given that the game is an episodic series and is being steered in the right direction by point and click legend Charles Cecil, we were expecting a fairly simple point and click affair, but this couldn't be further from the truth. There is plenty of object collection in order to solve various problems, but the story is also driven by a combination of stealth action and Professor Layton-style logic puzzles.
The first playable sequence in the game sees the Doctor avoid being seen by patrolling Daleks in order to find a way to descend from the devastated Trafalgar Square into the underground tunnels. The Doctor is controlled via either a fairly traditional mouse and keyboard combination or solely via the mouse using the right mouse button to trigger his movement. This works fairly well although we found using the mouse and keyboard to have a better balance to it. Of course the code we are playing is still very much in the alpha stage and any jitteryness and lack of balance will be ironed out by the June 5th release date.
The Dalek's vision is actually quite punishing and we took several attempts to successfully evade them and get to the Tube entrance. This is actually where some of the game's extra features are revealed. All of the levels are very lovingly created from some blisteringly beautiful concept artwork. In order to encourage players to explore the levels Sumo have hidden collectable character cards featuring many of the series' classic characters in the levels which are just off the beaten track.
At this point we get into the Tube station and are confronted by a locked gate. Of course the Doctor makes light work of the lock with his Sonic Screwdriver and we continue to find the last surviving human cowering behind some sandbags on the platform. She explains that the Daleks appeared in the sky and quickly swept across the planet decimating any resistance they found.
Mat Fidell invites us to skip forward now to the second act of the game in order to experience some of the logic puzzling and, more importantly, the City of the Daleks itself on their homeworld of Scaro.
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| The Daleks have made a mess of Trafalger Square. At least the pigeons are gone. | The Doctor has some taxi trouble. |
The series really takes a leap beyond what you experience with the TV show as this is the first proper time that we see the Dalek's home planet for real. Charles Cecil and the game's creative director Sean Millard were very excited at this point as it gave the team the opportunity to really define one of the key elements of Doctor Who lore. Until now the images of the Dalek's homeworld have been vague and sketchy, mainly due to restraints on what can be done on the telly.
The team have really gone to town with what they can do, taking full advantage of the strengths of video games and have created a rich and very memorable idea of what Scaro really looks like.
To play, the second act is very similar to the first in style, with a real emphasis on stealth. As Amy is from a timeline that no longer exists, the Doctor first has to scavenge some Dalek technology to create a device that will protect her from time re-arranging itself long enough for the Doctor to fix the damage done by the Daleks.
This time the Doctor is sneaking around inside the Dalek's main facility on Scaro. The full worked up concept art is used as a backdrop and provides for some breathtaking views out of the windows of the facility. In order for the Doctor to move around the facility he needs to extract a piece of circuitry from a disused Dalek head, which causes the doors to open automatically.
This is our first encounter with the game's logic puzzles. It's based on the old 'guide an item round a maze without touching the sides' affair and is fairly simple. As we learned later, all the puzzles are made using a template allowing Sumo to modify the puzzle complexity with great ease. A later form of a similar puzzle proved more challenging, but not overly so demonstrating that Sumo are committed entirely to making the game tough enough to entertain seasoned gamers, but not so difficult that casual players will be put off.
What we are playing is part of the final game so we won't give away any more to spoil the fun come summer. What we have played through so far, despite being in a fairly rough state is very impressive and the game seems to have been produced to a standard that would be perfect as a commercial project similar to other episodic series like Sam & Max. The real wonder of the new Doctor Who series is that it will be completely free to gamers in the UK as we have all technically paid for it as part of our TV License.
What is equally impressive about the series is that, in order to reach as many players as possible, each episode will be 250MB in size and delivered through a download platform based on the BBC's iPlayer technology. It is also exceptionally scaleable meaning that the game will run on a Pentium processor and Pixel Shader version 2.0 graphics card.
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| Lots of Cybermen. That's the next episode... | Give me all your hot soup. |
Even with this scalability it still looks absolutely gorgeous on current spec machines and the BBC and Sumo have worked hand in hand to make sure that the game sits very well alongside the TV series. They were stressing that the current series of Doctor Who is actually 17 epsiodes rather than 13, with the four episodes due out this summer being very much part of the BBC's vision for how Doctor Who will develop.
Doctor Who: City of the Daleks is shaping up to be a very impressive title when it finally materialises on June the 5th. The second episode, which we can reveal features the Cybermen in an Arctic setting is due out three to four weeks later. With the BBC and Sumo releasing such a high quality game for free, this summer could reshape the landscape of the way we consume games.
