Will The Doctor be deleted by the Cybermen?
After the conclusion of “The Pandorica Opens” and “The Big Bang” I needed a while to recover before I could get to writing about The Doctor’s latest adventure against the Cybermen. Blood of the Cybermen follows a familiar pattern to City of the Daleks, although instead of walking around the decaying ruins of London you and Amy are walking around an arctic base trying to respond to an SOS. Of course, it’s never as simple as that…
There’s a virus going around which has transformed some members of the base into Cyberslaves and its upto The Doctor to find a cure, while Amy has to stop a supply ship from coming in and getting infected. There more to the story than that, but I wont spoil it for you. Sadly though it isn’t as strong or memorable as COTD’s story.
You control The Doctor for the majority of the game, using the Sonic Screwdriver with specific items and finding the odd collectable. One of the puzzles from COTD returns, while some other new ones emerge that aren’t particularly fun or challenging to do. The stealth sections still apply, but they are easier than in the past episode…despite the Cyberslaves being much faster than the Daleks. Apart from that, there’s not much else new in terms of gameplay apart from a small “create-a-path” section for a character called Chisholm.
You do get to play with Amy for a little bit, but her section isn’t that memorable either and the game STILL doesn’t give you full control over the camera, so still no peeking up Amy’s skirt (insert frowny face here) Ah well, at least the voice-acting from both Matt and Karen is still as good as it was in the first episode. The visuals remain the same and although look dated by most standards, for a free game they are acceptable.
The Verdict
It may not be as good as City of the Daleks, but Blood of the Cybermen is still a fairly good episode for fans. It lasts roughly the same time and doesn’t have the framerate issues of the first episode, apparently Episode 3 will have original monsters so I can’t wait to see what that will be like…
