Doctor Who "Worlds in Time" is one of two Doctor Who games out this quarter and the first MMORPG based on the series. A cute, brightly coloured cartoon style game, WIT is more akin to online games like Neopets than the glossy action games usually associated with big scifi brands (the soon-to-be-released "Eternity Clock" will be taking on this mantel.)
Worlds in Time is centred around a story in which time itself is fracturing. The Doctor picks you up in your pyjamas and sets you the task of collecting time shards -pieces of frozen time - and bringing them back to the TARDIS.
To aid you in this task you will have the help of various companions who accompany you on interventions (levels); you are also given a "gadget", a sonic screwdriver like device which you will use to interact with the world around you. When you first play you will get to create a character avatar for the game, you can choose from Human, Silurian, Cheem or Catkind species and a variety of changes can be made - in humans you can choose face and nose shape, hair style and colour, other alterations can be made to different species. The default outfit you wear is a pair of rather sexy pyjamas but you can buy all sorts of outfits and accessories to change into later.
Progress is made through the interventions by playing small games, similar to the sort of short, simple puzzles on Neopets. Playing the games accomplishes tasks such as unlocking or barricading doors, hacking computer terminals, conversing with locals and fighting enemies. Each task has its own unique game associated with it, conversations are similar to "Bejeweled", unlocking doors is more akin to "Bubble Shooter" and barricading doors is a sort of reverse Tetris in which the goal is to keep the blocks as high up the game board as possible. Often several mini games are in progress at once, for example you may need to unlock a doors while an enemy is attacking. This is where your companions come in.
You can assign each of your companions to one of the tasks which they will work on until it's completion, at which point they will reassign themselves to any remaining open task. The more people working on a task, the faster it is completed. The assignment system is also useful if you don't particularly enjoy one of the games; I don't especially enjoy the game used for hacking computers so I can always assign that task to one of my companions and do something else myself. However one thing I noticed in playing is that if an enemy turns up while everyone is assigned elsewhere, no one will automatically drop out of their task to fight it, they will stay where you put them and get shot. Instead you will need to drop out of your own mini game (there’s no penalty for this) to attack it yourself or reassign your companions.
Completing an intervention will reward you with coins, materials and a time shard of varying size, it also unlocks more interventions, missions and other planets you can travel to. Different planets have their own interventions and traveling to them can unlock new outfits and items for you to use. Once you have completed an intervention and located a time shard, you can choose to continue on to the next intervention, assuming you can afford to, or to head back to the TARDIS. Aboard the TARDIS you can open the shards (for a cost which depends on the shard size) to discover the items inside. These can be items to decorate your room or materials for crafting parts for your gadget. Decorating your room has no real purpose in the game as far as I can tell, other than showing off the items you have found or bought by sharing room pictures on the game's forum. Crafting parts allows you to upgrade your gadget with components called charges and powers. Charges* "grant a charge bonus to the gadget when a specific action in a minigame occurs"* and powers "increase the completion of a minigame, heal allies, or improve rewards", you charge your gadget in the games in order to use its powers. In order to use a component, you need to have a free slot available in your gadget, more slots open as you level up. The components currently in your gadget determine the gadget’s name and look, charges control the look of the handle and powers control the tip - my gadget is currently an “Electron Jack”. Crafting items for your gadget also incurs a cost that varies depending on the level of the item you want to build.
There are two forms of currency in the game, coins and chronons. Most items have a cost in both, for example a dress for my character costs 9 chronons AND 200 coins. Coins are awarded for completing interventions, the more complex it was, the more coins you will generally receive. Chronons can be received in two ways. Free chronons are generated automatically at a rate of about one every half hour, this includes time when you are logged off so you will have more waiting for you when you come back; however you can only have a maximum of 50 free chronons. You can also choose to purchase chronons with real money - something you will have to do for any item costing over 50, or to open a "huge" time shard which costs 60. Going on interventions, crafting components, opening time shards and purchasing decorative items or clothing all cost chronons and as free ones regenerate so slowly, you have to carefully consider your spending during a game session if you want to avoid using real money.
As “Worlds in Time” is a MMORPG, the game can be played cooperatively with friends or strangers. I had my husband sign up for an evening to test co-op play out and the first thing I discovered was how difficult it is to actually find another user. I knew his avatar’s name but there is currently no way to search for another user, instead you have to be in the same virtual “room” or on the same planet surface as they are - a fact made all the more difficult by the game’s use of multiple servers. I instructed my husband to go to Earth and went there myself, but we were on different servers and so couldn’t see one another to become in-game friends. To overcome this I had to choose a level for us to play and set up a team, then tell my husband over Google Talk which level to select to find my team. We weren’t able to become friends until after we had played through the level when I was able to click on his avatar and select "befriend" from the pop up menu. Gameplay is almost identical with friends to playing with the game engine, except that you cannot control your friend’s avatars. You can play with up to three friends at a time to make the standard team of four players - if you team up with fewer the game will generate NPC companions to make your numbers up to four. In later levels, having human players with you becomes a benefit as the games increase in difficulty and human players with customised gadgets can perform better than NPCs. Another nice option is that you can offer to pay for your friends to play levels, so a wealthier player who has paid for Chronons with real money could pay for a “poorer” friend to join them in a level. Of course this does present a potential problem for parents as kids could squander money paid into the account for them by gifting levels to their friends.
Another potential issue for parents is that of strangers. Through its “team up” option the game allows you to play levels with strangers, a chat window opens up for everyone to talk as you play through the intervention. What kind of bothered me was what happened at the end of the level, my husband’s avatar ended up in my TARDIS “bedroom” and a private one-on-one chat window automatically opened for us to talk. I’m not sure if this would happen with a young teen’s account (the game’s sign up age is 13+ with 13 - 15 year olds needing parental consent) but in this age of heightened awareness of online “stranger danger” I found it a little odd that a stranger’s male avatar would be brought into my private room where we could talk in private, especially as the game never asked me if I wanted to invite him over. The chat is moderated at all times but just how closely a private chat session would be monitored - especially if it didn’t flag up through appropriate language - isn’t clear.
One of the disappointments for me in this game so far has been the lack of The Doctor himself. For a "Doctor Who" game, I have barely even seen the man himself. He appears at the beginning of interventions and missions to tell me what's going on and he gave me my gadget the first time I played, however I go on my interventions with friends or random companions and he doesn't appear on the TARDIS when I return to my room. While I appreciate the storyline, the Doctor is staying aboard the TARDIS to try and fix time while I run errands to help him, it would have been nice to actually have him around a little more. All things considered however, this is truly my sort of game. I really enjoyed playing it and although I can't see the game ever become a "must play" with me running to spend any available free minutes logged in, I can see myself returning frequently for fifteen minutes of light-hearted fun.
