Harry's Reviews > Doctor Who: Winner Takes All

Not a bad new series adventure but I have to say, it’s better than The Clockwise Man. I reckon that some of the ideas in this book are still pretty relevant today as the video game industry is massive and to take the idea of aliens using video games to take over the world is quite an interesting thought, but a frightening one. While the novel isn’t as well paced as The Monsters Inside, it still has a decent flow to it which is one of the reasons I prefer it to the first Ninth Doctor book; The Clockwise Man, as that really did suffer from pacing issues.

Rayner does a brilliant job of perfecting the characters of The Ninth Doctor and Rose. You can just hear their voices whilst reading their dialogue in the book. Jackie Tyler is also in it to as well as Mickey Smith which is by no means a bad thing and they too are also well characterised. Surprisingly, Mickey gets quite a lot to do and is somewhat a significant part of the plot. We’re also introduced to a character called Robert, a young boy who really just wants a new life and I think it’s implied that he is schizophrenic. While I didn’t mind his character, I thought the sections with him were quite distracting and weren’t all that interesting.

My main problem with Winner Takes All is the main villains. The Quevils are a pretty lame concept and I never really got a sense of them being a real threat in the story. At times I even found them to be rather annoying than scary. While their plan and motivation were ok, they just weren’t interesting creatures or very imaginative either. Because of this, the scenes that were meant to have tension when they were bellowing threats weren’t very tense at all. I could imagine them being in a 90’s B Movie.

Overall it’s a fun book with the two regulars being very well written with great interaction. However the distracting sections with Robert and the weak villains make this book to be just above average I’d say.