Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock

The Eternity Clock has a reputation for being buggy as shit, a rush job to cash in on a suddenly huge US fanbase - and while that may well be true on the PS3 (given how many people have complained, I would be amazed if it's not), I have to say that on the Vita I experienced exactly zero technical problems. If you're going for the handheld on this one, you shouldn't have anything to worry about.

Not that it's an amazing game, granted - like most tie-ins to films and TV shows, it's pretty simple, clearly aimed at the casual gamer, and underdeveloped in a few areas. Yet it's also better than the most of the things you could compare it to, and has a lot going for it. The plot manages to take in an impressive range of staple Whovian bad guys - Cybermen, the Silence, Daleks, and Silurians all appear - while sticking to a single companion in River Song, which is the exact opposite of what I'd expect. (Perhaps this is explained by a disconnect between how the US and UK respond to Dr. Who, but I know if I was trying to design a game that would make money I'd be including as many of the recent companions as possible, focusing solely on the Daleks as the most iconic of the antagonists, and probably pulling out all the stops to get David Tennant and Tom Baker involved in some way as well.) It hangs together impressively well despite the switches between bad guys, which often accompanies a switch in overall mood in the show; the plot involves an unexplained fluctuation in the time/space continuum that throws Song and the Doctor through various periods in London's history (including the future), and which leads to a race against time to collect pieces of the titular clock to be able to control its power, which neatly explains the presence of all the different races of enemies (they all want to control time, naturally).

It all plays out as a fairly basic puzzle platformer that's intuitive and easy to control. The sonic screwdriver is implemented particularly well, being controlled with the right analogue stick and allowing for all manner of useful abilities from the obvious (unlocking doors and moving lifts) to the more subtle (keeping the Silence within your eyeline, which is something the game leaves for you to figure out by yourself). Staples of the genre, like moving boxes to reach higher ledges, are present, as are some basic stealth mechanics to mix things up. The puzzles, meanwhile, come in four types are of the type you might expect to find in brain training games. It's all pretty simple and nothing here is going to blow anybody away (although Matt Smith and Alex Kingston go about their business as voice actors pretty well; both are clearly taking this project seriously, which is refreshing), but it's fun enough and it's pretty cheap, and at a time when avid Vita users were often overtaking the market in terms of available games, that's enough to make it worth something.