Oft-delayed Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock finally reaches the PS Vita

After nearly half a year of delays, Doctor Who will finally have a chance to shine on Sony's flagship handheld.

When Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock was first announced, it was billed as the first “mature” take on the long-running Doctor Who mythology to ever hit the video game scene. This excited the legions of Who fans the world over who had grown up with the character, but were now adults, with relatively adult tastes in entertainment. Unfortunately, when the game hit the PlayStation Network, it wasn’t exactly a shining pinnacle of game design.

That would have been the end of the story for Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock, but this was a title that was initially planned for release on both the PlayStation Network and on the PlayStation Vita handheld. When the PSN version arrived, players began to wonder what had become of the Vita version. Keep in mind that this was back in May, and for the longest time neither developer Supermassive Games, nor publisher BBC Worldwide Digital Entertainment, had any comforting words on when the handheld iteration of this game might appear.

Now, nearly five months after the debut of the game on the PlayStation Network Store, it has been revealed that the Vita iteration of Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock will finally arrive on October 9. As with its earlier incarnation, the game will be available solely through PlayStation Store download.

Intriguingly — especially for those who wrote this game off based on its milquetoast PSN iteration — Simon Harris, executive producer at BBC Worldwide, claims that the Vita version of this game features new and re-worked puzzles designed to take advantage of the Vita’s touchscreen capabilities. It also includes features that utilize the system’s “Near” application to swap collectible “Gallifreyan” medals with other Vita owners, as well as cloud-save functionality that lets players enjoy the game on the Vita, save, then pick up right where they left off on the game’s PSN iteration. Likewise intriguing (though largely meaningless from a gameplay perspective), Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock is scheduled to debut as the first Vita title built on Epic Games’ incredibly popular Unreal Engine 3.

While we won’t fault any Who fans for being excited about this release, given our aforementioned experience with the initial version of the game, we aren’t holding out much hope that the Vita edition will be able to improve on the laundry list of issues seen in its earlier analogue. We hope it does, as the Doctor Who license really deserves a quality video game adaptation, but we’re not about to hold our collective breath.