So I played Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality. and where do I begin? I guess I can start by telling you that If you ever wanted to play the previous game, Doctor Who: The Edge of Time, but you don’t own a VR Headset, well, now you can play it! Because the games are almost identical in every single way except Doctor Who The Edge of Reality has an expanded side-story including the 10th Doctor, David Tennant.
Doctor Who The Edge of Reality starts off exactly like Doctor Who The Edge of Time and it goes without saying that the key differences between the two is that it’s not in VR, and they’ve expanded the gameplay aspect of the story, adding in collectible items that you can find through the various worlds you visit.
In the Laundromat, you’re tasked with building your receiver to summon the TARDIS to your location like last time. However, now you have to avoid being spotted by the Daleks flying overhead and patrolling around the Laundromat, all the while solving various puzzles and problems to help you get to where you can build the receiver to summon the TARDIS and escape the Earth, which is slowly being destroyed by the reality virus that you encountered in Doctor Who The Edge of Time.
Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality continues on like this for the entire game, adding new content to expand on the base story from Doctor Who The Edge of Time and teasing it early in the game once you start progressing through to the next stages. Pulsating echoes of a figure start to appear all across the Universe as if they’re trying to tear into our reality, and you don’t get to figure out what it actually is until the fourth chapter of the game, which didn’t appear in Doctor Who The Edge of Time.
The Cyber Reaper a highly advanced Cyberman that pursues the player relentlessly through all the stages of the game, whether you’re traveling with the 10th Doctor or the 13th Doctor. Its relentless pursuit is incredibly nerve-wracking, as you can hear the static from its body and the thumping of its feet.
It’s not until the end of Chapter Four that you learn what the true purpose of the Cyber Reaper is. It’s not to force people to upgrade, and it’s not to delete anyone who refuses to upgrade. The Cyber Reaper exists to nullify any threats to the Cyberman Empire, and in this case, it’s the Doctor.
You’re tasked with being the Doctor in the same way Clara was when she fought against the boneless when the 12th Doctor, played by Peter Capaldi, was detained when the TARDIS was losing power and he was trapped inside. So you must decide what to do when confronting the Cyber Reaper, and it’s not an easy decision to make, as it draws on Doctor Who lore all the way back to the 10th Doctor’s adventures in the episode “The Girl in the Fireplace”.
Once you finish that chapter you get to enjoy a little scene of the 10th Doctor and the 13th Doctor talking about a companion that traveled with the Doctor back in the day whom you were never aware. The time loop continues uninterrupted as it had before in Doctor Who The Edge of Time, which I still have complaints about. You cannot put someone with a finite lifespan into an infinite loop because eventually they will die and the antagonist of Doctor Who The Edge of Time will come back and destroy all of reality by taking a long way around.
But besides the story misgivings I have towards these two Doctor Who titles, Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality has one major problem, or should I say hundreds of major problems. I’ve encountered buggy games before but this game takes the cake.
The main menus can only be navigated with the arrow keys. You can’t adjust the game controls or even rebind the keys, but you can adjust mouse sensitivity, and trust me, you’ll need to do that. You don’t even have proper audio controls. You can’t adjust the sound effects, music, or the character voices on separate tracks, only one single “Master Track”.
Doctor Who The Edge of Reality also has a glaring issue with clipping. It’s hard to imagine the TARDIS landing in a large forest when the forest is cutting into the ship itself from the outside. In some states, it even forced me to restart because it spawns the player at a fixed point where they cannot move, but we need to move to interact with the world to progress the story. Even in the final stages of the third chapter of the game. where you’re fighting against the Daleks as a Dalek, the sights on your screen are not indicative of where your lasers will be fired, which is both frustrating and infuriating as they’ve added fast enemies to the game to increase the difficulty of that stage. In short, Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality is an extraordinarily buggy game.
Would I recommend it?
I mean if you want to play a fun Doctor Who game and can forgive a lot of the glaring issues the title has, and you’ve never been able to play Doctor Who The Edge of Time, I’d say give it a go if it ever goes on sale at some point in the future. Despite the bugs, it’s a fun but very short game.
An autistic gamer with opinions on games who also enjoys making dumb videos on the internet!