I will never understand the big hype surrounding Top Trumps, if there is any. Top Trumps is a card game where you have to try and guess whether or not your card has a higher stat than another. This game tries to incorporate this card game together with the successful franchise of Doctor Who, and to be honest, as much as I love Doctor Who, I had little fun with this game, purely because it's just Top Trumps with the Doctor Who franchise slapped on it.

There really isn't much to this game - you get a deck of cards, each card with a Doctor Who character on it, including various stats including Height, Intelligence, Monster Points, Darkness and Courage, each of which has a number next to them. The goal of the game is to try and win all of the cards from your opponent, by guessing which stat might be higher than your opponent's. It doesn't sound like much fun, but to shake things up, you cannot see what your opponent's card is. Now granted, in a card game like poker, it might be fine to have a game based on guesswork and chance, but when you have to go through a story mode and the AI at later stages seem to near always have a better card than you, it's annoying to play a game mostly compromised of blind guesswork.

There are special power-ups available in the game - if you manage to fill your meter all the way to the top, you can use your special power. The annoying part about the special powers is that some are way too overpowered, such as Time Warp, which enables you to see your opponents current and next cards, thus making the game too easy, or in the case of your opponent using it, too frustrating. Meanwhile, the Chameleon power used by the Slitheen is just plain useless as it clones your opponent's card, meaning that no matter what stat you choose, it'll come back the same.

Eventually, what it comes down to is this; the game is all about Top Trumps so I must advise fans of the Doctor Who series to not be fooled into thinking you're getting a genuine Doctor Who gaming experience. If you like Top Trumps, you'll probably enjoy this, but for the most part the game just feels like nothing more than blind guesswork and relies on luck. I can't really recommend this to fans of Doctor Who unless they like Top Trumps as well, because otherwise while you could probably get some enjoyment out of it for the first brief time you play it, it quickly gets old.

 

RATING:

5/10