I recently obtained and read through the first three of the Doctor Who Find Your Fate adventures. My thoughts follow.
The first in the series, Search For The Doctor, was released in 1986 and authored by David Martin, who was the scriptwriter of the 1979 Tom Baker episode (of the actual show) The Armageddon Factor. Kudos to the publishers for trying to get someone with Doctor Who ’street cred’ involved but… well they could have found better. Martin’s tale (involving the sixth Doctor) just doesn’t feel very much like something from the Doctor Who universe. Yes it involves Omega and Drax (Martin’s own creation, using an absurb car-Tardis) but the characterization is all wrong, the story just boring and the book makes very poor use of the choose-your-own adventure format.
The book has a grand total of 33 entries across 100+ pages. Very few actual choices occur, and even if you make the ‘wrong’ choice you are usually sent back to the previous entry and told to make the other choice. Some entries simply end with a direction to go to a new entry, which is sometimes the very next one sequentially (so why even split them?)! Choices are often left to dice rolls for no reason, and some are even more strange, such as one time the game simply tells you not to continue the story until you decode an anagram (but the anagram doesn’t contain the number to turn to…)
All in all, quite a bad read.
If Search For The Doctor is bad, then the second release – Crisis In Space – is just appalling. The author seems to have no experience with Doctor Who at all, and writes a story involving you (the ‘hero’), the sixth Doctor, Peri and Turlough. Nothing about the characterization is believable or entertaining, not the least being the fact everyone near-continuously puns. As an example:
The Doctor: “You two are too much for me to handle.”
Turlough: “I’d rather go for Handel. Smashing composer.”
The Doctor: “Pull yourself together!”
Peri: “Why, is he coming apart?”
Then we have the doctor shooting down armies of robots with laser weapons, and amidst this Turlough just cracks jokes like a madman while Peri see-saws between imbecile and juvenile.
A shockingly awful book.
It is perhaps at this point I should quote myself. Referring to these three books, I said to KLS the other day: “There wasn’t a single second when I was reading any of them that I felt entertained in any way.”
After the first two I suppose I should have expected The Garden Of Evil to be a dud, but here David Martin manages to produce a work even worse than the first book in the series. The galaxy is starving (a point ignored shortly after the book begins) and Gallifrey has become a cosmic refugee camp. The Time Lords have allowed thousands of alien species to squat on their planet, and martial law is enforced by a race of snake-men working on behalf of the Time Lords.
See what I mean about these books having nothing at all to do with Doctor Who?
All sorts of garbage and nonsense follow, and the structure of the book and use of the format is even worse than in previous volumes. This book was in fact so tiresome and boringly-difficult to read it took me a week or so to finish and it’s only 37 entries!
There are 3 other books in the series, and I can only imagine they must be absolutely terrible based on what I have already read. In fact I’d wager a guess they’re so awful they are simply not worth reading at all, and certainly not worth buying.
I’ll be sure to post a review once I obtain them 
