Doctor Who: An Unlikely Heist (iPad): COMPLETED!

This is a bad game. Do not play.

You want more? Sigh. Fine. Doctor Who: An Unlikely Heist, which was renamed in an update to “Doctor Who: Hidden Mysteries” presumably because there was no unlikely heist in the game, is a hidden object game. I’ve no beef with hidden object games. They can be fun but they are very shallow, and usually, that’s fine. However, it’s not just a hidden object game because there’s a tenuous Doctor Who story here too, about some magical cloud which is turning things into the wrong things from another time period and The Doctor (the 13th one) and Yaz have to sort it out. How? By you finding a list of objects in various scenes to earn canisters of magic dust that you can then use to unlock the next bit of story.

Which, limited in scope as it sounds, in itself is OK, right? Nothing fancy, a bit of Who fan service (with trips to locations from the TV show, appearances from various aliens and even – for no discernible reason – the 10th Doctor), and finding stuff. The problem is, it goes on. And on. And on and on and on and on. Each tiny bit of story progression requires you to complete several levels to get the required number of canisters, with that number generally increasing as the game goes on. After 30 hours, probably more, I reached level 1023, only to discover that beyond that point the levels went into “endless” mode and no longer gave you magic dust, and there was still story to unlock. The game was broken.

Thankfully, they updated it (and that’s when they changed the name), so I could finish it off, but it was so, so tedious getting there and certainly not worth it for the plot. Over 1000 levels to slog through, when they’re mostly the same thing. Sure, they mix in a few rule variations – they flip the scene horizontally, or have it so you have to find two of the same item at once, but it’s not hard (you have powerups to help you find objects – I never used them, never failed a level, never got close to running out of time) and it’s certainly not fun. It also doesn’t help that there’s no naming consistency (a bin is sometimes a trash can, or a rubbish bin, or in one case, a battery) and there’s US naming some of the time and others there isn’t. And this, this one really got me annoyed: A chess set is an “outlet”?!

So yes, bad game, do not play. I did so you don’t have to.