I want to believe that licensed games can be good. But the more Evacuation Earths that come out the harder it is to make that argument. Or should that be Evacuations Earth?

Playing only one minute of this game will tell you almost everything you need to know about it. It’s a fairly blatant Professor Layton clone, and not a very good one. They’ve lifted the structure of those games without investing in good puzzle design or slick presentation, hoping that a layer of Doctor Who theming would be enough to make a compelling package.

The Matt Smith era isn’t my favourite Doctor Who but it is pretty good. Having him and Karen Gillan doing the voices is a nice idea but they sound tinny and you only hear the occasional soundbite outside of the occasional cutscene. And the game’s 2D likenesses are not exactly flattering. The writing can be amusing for sure, although Amy is suddenly a lockpicking expert for some reason. It’s also undermined by lines sometimes appearing out of order, a symptom of the slipshod construction of the game.

Evacuation Earth is not put together well. The menus are perfunctory, tap targets are unclear, and there is a frequent flickering in the screen during dialogue that is highly distracting. The music is bland and extremely repetitive. And as I alluded to earlier, the puzzles are a pale shadow of Layton’s brainteasers. They’re often so easy as to be boring, and puzzle types are often tediously repeated. The only time I had trouble was with a sliding panel puzzle, a notorious blind spot of mine that eventually had to be resolved by my wife. All you can say about them is that, unlike Layton, they are integrated into the game world as things that other characters need doing or are related to your environment.

As with other licensed games I’ve sought out, by far the most appealing part of the package is having new material based on the license. In this case it does feel like an interactive episode of the show, which is helped by the writing and environment design. The plot is vaguely linked to the episode The Beast Below, with people fleeing Earth due to solar flares or something. I liked the junkyard, with a scrappy (ha) group putting a ship together, giving you lots of opportunities to fix things for their launch and meet some quirky characters. A nice twist arrives with some Silurian stowaways. Good conflict, and a chance for Doctor-ish peacemaking. Unfortunately the implications of an alliance are immediately shoved under the rug with the intrusion of (of course) Daleks, who boot the Silurians out of the plot. Then there’s a series of door-unlocking puzzles and you beat the Daleks. It’s rather a lame third act, although it does pay off a few things that were set up earlier including the long-term goal of retrieving the TARDIS which had been built into the ship.

So I give the game a pass on the story, but it’s difficult to enjoy it with how bad the game is. Unfortunately there’s not much going in Doctor Who games, and all are critical flops. At least this one doesn’t have super uncanny 3D models?