Doctor Who: The Adventure Games - City of the Daleks

The living room sofa then, its castors squeaking and tangled in carpet fuzz, will suddenly be placed in front of the family PC (or Mac, if said family are posh London types) to act as a guard against a new entry point for the Doctor Who menagerie.

The dream is for those who are historically non-gamers to join us in our accustomed interactive bubble: mother and father up front on said sofa, earnestly discussing the doctor's next move, and 2.4 children hiding behind it, rolling their eyes when they come out to help with the difficult bits. Or indeed, vice versa.

Inclusion is everything: Doctor Who loves everyone equally. It's presumably because the Doctor considers the entire human race to be so very special.

However, the Venn Diagram that shows the bridge between hardcore UK gamers and Doctor Who fans has an extremely crowded centre - and although the conversation is great in there, people's ponytails keep on getting tangled. Vast numbers of fans are already comfortable with gaming, and they too demand high levels of entertainment.

Can City of the Daleks please everyone? Can the children of earth and their progenitors be amused to the same degree as my own, personal, tribe of increasingly middle-aged gamers who've been dreaming of blowing holes in eye-stalks and plungers ever since the introduction of the Special Weapons Dalek in 1988?

Probably not. Having played the most part of City of the Daleks, it's clear there are more than enough gameplay niggles to cause it problems. But the churlishness of this reaction is fairly extreme: these four downloads are free, earnest, authentic and part of a forward-thinking and exciting interactive strategy from Auntie Beeb. As a signpost for the direction we're going in, they're pretty mind-blowing.

The game begins in 1963, as the Doctor and lovely lovely Amy Pond amiably chitchat about the Beatles in the Tardis - showing off both the excellent voice acting of the new leads and dialogue that (while not instantly hilarious) is happily on a par with that of the series.

The Tardis then opens up on a scene, however, that anyone who's ever caught a Night Bus in central London will recognise. Trafalgar Square is a scene of chaos and destruction, full of undesirable characters wandering around in circles and talking to themselves.

The Daleks are patrolling the area around a decapitated Nelson's Column - and a cut-scene shows them taking 'Exterminate!' potshots at the last Earth survivor, a nice black lady with a taste for explosives and purple hipster clothing. Your first task, then, is to track her down in the Underground, and the way you're going to do that is through the medium of an old and much-missed friend: instadeath stealth.

First things first though. Unless you've got a thing for cursor keys, Matt Smith is controlled entirely through the mouse. Right-click has him manfully stride forwards in a Tony Adams-style upright jog (comparison stolen from an upcoming episode of Doctor Who: Confidential), left-click has him interact with objects and obstacles (climb/jump/talk/initiate mini-game) and the middle mouse button brings up a small-scale inventory screen should the Sonic Screwdriver need an airing.

Lovely lovely Karen Gillan, meanwhile, traipses along behind in case you need a brief chat about what you should be doing next, or if you just want to platonically gaze at her lovely face. In the presence of enemies, however, gazing at said lovely face is less of an option: both Doctor and Amy will automatically hunch their backs and enter stealth mode. Avoiding death is a serious business.

At this point I'm dangerously close to entering the aforementioned realms of the churlish when discussing the way that stealth works in Doctor Who. For a start, when you've got a hero who gets out of every situation through a) running around the place, b) non-violent and somewhat imaginary science and c) Jammie Dodgers, then stealth is the primary way to go.

Then also you've got the fact that the code I played up at Sheffield development house Sumo Digital will no doubt have work done on its difficulty before its release. You've also got to take into account everything formerly underlined about these games being free, and all.

Now we're all caveated to the hilt, however, it's got to be said: the Doctor Who brand of creeping around the place does grit the teeth. As soon as you enter the Commandos-style green vision triangles of roving pepper pots you're fair game: instant Extermination will follow, even if you make a feeble sprint to get away.

Everyone, from six to 60, will grumpily bash a wall at some stage of the game, floundering in and out of patrolling Dalek vision. The problem is compounded, however, by the fact that the game is currently poor at letting you know which direction you should be heading in, and which on-screen level furniture will prove useful. The clever signposting and wink-and-a-nod visual indications of modern gaming aren't really here, and these rough edges coupled with the frequent deaths of the Doctor give off the feeling of a game of an earlier (re)generation.

Back to the action though. It's not long before the game whisks you off to Kaalann, the Dalek capital city that lurks on the evil acid-tinged face of the planet of Skaro. It's here that the destruction of the 1960s can be remedied, but first of all a few sci-fi widgets need to be foraged to stop lovely Amy's lovely face fading in and out of reality, in traditional Marty McFly fashion.

As you begin the hunt you can't help but have a nerd-tingle or two as you gaze out of the facility's spherical windows and into a beautiful new imagining of Skaro, but after your gawping there's more stealth to be slunk through Dalek-manufacturing zones and mini-games to be completed while avoiding the watchful gaze of giant librarian eye-stalks.

Throughout the episode these games include wiring up circuit boards, dragging balls through electrified mazes without touching the sides, and arranging and rotating relevant Dalek symbols as the corresponding letters cascade towards you. They're simple affairs, yes, but still consistently entertaining and the stimulus behind pleasurable levels of mind-nuzzle.

How to leave it, then? Despite the potential niggles, City of the Daleks is fun to play, authentic and amusing in its casting and dialogue and part of an online strategy that puts other broadcasters to shame. It's also clear that it's a better product than the drivel that's seeped out of big-budget American shows like Lost and Prison Break over the past few years. What's more, to underline, if you live in the UK it's going to be free. Did I mention that already?

I can't stand here and say that this first episode is going to be an all-out success as a self-contained game - especially not for an older and more game-literate audience - but when viewed as a story-focused episode built to complement, and indeed stand alongside, the current excellent run of Doctor Who of a Saturday night, it will fare better.