Doctor Who and the -World Guardians-

Name: Doctor Who and the World Guardians

Developer: Primadori

Story: The game opens with exposition. There are beings that keep the balance between Chaos and Order called "World Guardians". While they keep this balance, they can't directly interfere with the affairs of mortals. It's a great premise, but...I'll save it for later. Moving on. The Doctor finds himself on Planet of the Week where a strange girl just runs into him stepping out of the TARDIS. BANG! Here's his new companion. Really, this is typical of the impulsive Doctor. She's being pursued by soldiers for theft. As he and the young girl race to safety, they meet a World Guardian who recruits the Doctor to save the world. Also, this Doctor uses the Allons-y catchphrase, unique to David Tennant's Doctor, so now we know which Doctor we're playing.

Writing: Errors...errors everywhere. Grammar errors, Mary Sues, Deus ex Machina (not that these two things are uncommon in Doctor Who, it's still a good thing for a new writer to avoid. Trust me. I've been writing for twenty years, and if I don't have enough experience to get away with Mary Sues and Deus ex Machina, then you don't either), continuity, consistency *begins counting off fingers*...The grammar errors, I will address here. Maybe the dev's first language isn't English. Doesn't matter. If that's the case, syntax errors and parsing errors are forgivable, but not these spelling errors. In the age of spell checking, these copious spelling errors are inexcusable. Sure, a few spelling errors here and there are okay, but not this. If you're not a good speller, write your stuff in a word processor first. OpenOffice and Word both have spell checkers. Seriously, it hurts to read this. Mary Sues: I will only say this about them; if any of your characters remind you of you or are what you wish you could be, get rid of them. They're bad.

Continuity: Yes. This needed it's own section. First, the Doctor. THAT. IS. NOT. THE. DOCTOR. Okay, here's the thing about fan fiction; it has to be done right, or people are going to be mad at you. You are not writing your own original characters (it is true that you add original aspects to them, but these are formed and based on other people's work); you are writing an established character with established manners and established behaviors. If you deviate from their established behavior in any way, people are going to notice and they are not going to like it. Fans are peculiar breed. Often, a miswritten character will be viewed as an insult. Has the Doctor killed before? Yes. Does the Doctor kill as a solution to problems? No. He will allow an enemy to engineer it's own demise. He has killed by accident. He will kill when there is absolutely no other alternative, and he won't even kill to save himself, so that alternative literally means that lives other than his own are at stake. The Doctor is a pacifist. If a guard arrests him, he surrenders. He does not fight his way out of situations. He talks, reasons, and tricks his way out of problems.

The World Guardians...I'm going to make a bet, here. I'm willing to bet that you've never watched Classic Who, or if you have, you've watched very little of it. I will further wager that you didn't know that what you thought were original characters (your World Watchers), have not only been done in Doctor Who, but have a place in Doctor Who history as high as any of the regular players in the mythology. In the original 1960s serials, we meet the Celestial Toymaker. Now, he only gets one story, but during Tom Baker's run, the showrunners want to bring him back, then decide to make new characters based on him; the Guardians of Time, who are basically the show's equivalent of God and the devil. They live in Calabi-Yau space, which is the algebraic formula that is said to explain how 6 to 10 dimensions of space time can exist within 3 dimensions of physical space (what is your World Guardian's etherial realm, again?). They are charged with keeping the balance between Order and Chaos...is any of this sounding familiar to you? Another thing about fan fiction: Doctor Who's been running for over 50 years. If you're going to create an original character, you should probably consider that there's a good chance some form of that character has been done before.

Magic...the new companion can shoot thunder. The World Watchers refer to their realm as the Etherial Realm. This sounds a bit like magic to me. I take issue with this in a Doctor Who story. In fact, the very word "ether" was heavily used in the spiritualist community at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. While people like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were trying to justify and prove this spirit substance that exists outside of space, while people like Harry Houdini were exposing it for the pseudoscience it was. There's nothing wrong with the theory, but the word "ether" hearkens back to the days of frauds and charlatans and their dupes. It was a con artist's method of convincing gullible people that there was a scientific justification for magic.

Now, up until this point, my complaints have remained within the confines of the game. If I go any further on continuity, I'm going to start addressing ideas outside of the game, so I'm going to move on now.

Gameplay: It's fine. It uses the very basic RPG Maker VX Ace engine and relies solely on the RTP. It's balanced on the easy side with the Doctor being overpowered. I don't take issue with the gameplay per se. I take issue with the decision to use a combat system. If you're going to do that with a Doctor Who game, at least don't make the Doctor a playable character. Let someone else be the fighter.

Graphics: RTP exclusively, except the TARDIS. Bland and uninteresting. It's used in the most basic way. It's used competently, though there are several errors. It's a nice TARDIS graphic. Mostly though, the appearance of this game looks like any other first game and it plays as well as a competently made game. So the only real complaint here is that it's RTP. It's fan game; we could have overlooked a few rips. It's not like it's exactly toeing the line with copyright laws in the first place. Go through the tutorials. RTP can even be made more interesting than it is here. Here's a few recommendations: Natural Mapping - Forests, Mazes, and Cliffs, Town Mapping - Creating a Village, Shift Mapping. I can't recommend these three enough.