When I heard that Doctor Who was being adapted into a game for the iPhone, I was exuberant. Soon I would get to play as the 11th Doctor Matt Smith and virtually become The Doctor. Sadly my exuberance clouded my thinking. I forgot that this was a licensed property, typically the bane of a reviewer's existence. Sure enough, after playing Doctor Who: The Mazes of Time, the game joins the litany of licensed titles that lack vision, creativity and seamless controls.

The Mazes of Time begins with a very Doctor Who-like beginning. The Tardis arrives at the brink of a disaster and The Doctor must figure out a way to save the day. In this particular story, if you can call it that, a Dalek scientist invades the Jones' family's spaceship. When it tampers with the engine room, the Jones are scattered throughout time. The Doctor then travels through time trying to rescue them. While the game appears to have a story at first, you'll quickly realize that it's nothing more than a series of dungeon puzzles strung loosely together.

Companion Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) joins The Doctor along for the adventure. In trying to keep with The Doctor and the Companion motif, you'll have to work your way through every board swapping between The Doctor and Amy in order to exit. Once one character exits a particular dungeon room, control will then be automatically switched to your second character so that he or she can escape as well. The swapping in and out is irritating to say the least. There's actually a point to the switch that you discover after playing through a few boards. The Doctor can push objects, because he's the strong man, and climb objects. Amy, on the other hand, can walk over cracked dungeons tiles without falling to her doom, since she is apparently so light weighted, and can also crawl under objects that The Doctor cannot. These "abilities" are somewhat uninspired. Outside of the character models and appearances by the Daleks and Cybermen, any other two people could have replaced these characters. Even the dialogue seems to lack the Doctor Who wit. Amy and The Doctor often joke about why she can crawl underneath objects and he can push heavy blocks, attributing these abilities to The Doctor's taste for too much pie.

Basic movement is controlled through the thumbstick. Instead of being locked to the lower left hand corner of the screen, it actually appears wherever you put your thumb down. This novelty quickly wears out its welcome as your characters end up moving around sluggishly with a lot of stop-and-go movements.

There are ten time periods to play through, starting with an ancient Incan temple. In a very basic way the puzzles are a throwback to the old Legend of Zelda dungeons. You'll have to activate various tile levers that open doors or cause spikes to stay down. Some tiles stay down forever once pressed, while other tiles stay down for a short time, trigger doors or spikes in adjoining rooms or require constant pressure to stay activate. Often you will need one of your characters to stand on one square, while the other character walks over the depressed spikes to either activate another tile switch or retrieve Time Orbs and gold coins. By now you're probably wondering when the Sonic Screwdriver comes into play. It doesn't, except in dialogue. The Doctor will state that he can use the Sonic Screwdriver to convert the gold coins. However, there's no big payoff at the end of each level, you will only see a tally of the objects collected as well as your time.

The puzzles are not that difficult to work through so even as a standalone puzzle app it's barely memorable. There are moving platforms, spikes and several Cybermen with proximity sensors. Fall off a platform or get hit by a Cyberman and you will explode into three balls of regenerative fire. Amy, surprisingly, also lets loose a regenerative explosion when she dies. You're characters are safe from Cybermen when they are in the doorways. However, if you swap them out anywhere else they become fair game. Some boards involve multiple rooms, but these are often more tedious than challenging. Gamers will have to do a lot of backtracking in addition to completing the board twice as Doctor and Companion.

The game is somewhat forgiving with some of the platforming puzzles. For example, sometimes you can hang off of a moving platform, without falling onto the spikes below. Instead, you can just wait to get picked up by another moving platform. Also walls that are marked for you to climb, will allow you to climb over the adjoining walls as well.

At the end of every time period you will find the Tardis and head on over to the next time period. Once you beat a level, it will be open to play at any time outside of the story mode. The hope is that you will want to best your old time. Sadly, by then your interest in being The Doctor may have already disappeared along with the Jones family.

Final Grade: C-