This was a pretty remarkable audio I quite enjoyed and would recommend. The Dalek Occupation of Winter does a lot of plot threads from other Doctor Who stories, especially Victory of the Daleks, Blood of the Daleks, and even Daleks in Manhattan, but I think is more polished than any of those other stories. With a lot more focus, and an excellent performances from the likes of Peter Perves, Robert Daws, and Sara Powell, this was a great audio I think definitely worth anyone's time.

What I like most about it is that the Dalek Occupation of Winter feels like it could be on the level of something like classic serials such as The Daleks or The Chase, but the Dalek Occupation of Winter manages to stand out in little ways that it works as a great additional story - not a remake of any previous Dalek work, exactly, but something nice and standalone that works really well if you are familiar with the classic Dalek adventures of the original series. This informs stuff like the Doctor, Steven, and Vicki's individual reactions when seeing the Daleks, all of which I think is done well.

The Daleks themselves are really creepy and awful in this tale. They remind me a lot of their horror-heavy earlier appearances. You get a sense of their brutality not just in the dread our main characters experience at just the sight of them, but they also do some fun stuff with their mutant forms along the way. Still, it does feel a little like we've done a lot of this content before - we've seen these characters even in the guests, who fall into a lot of what I'm recognizing more as Big Finish tropes, especially around Majorian's character, and there are little things along the way that feel a little pointless, like Vicki's part of the story here which is a little shallow and goes for long periods of time without much development.

Still, I enjoyed myself more than I didn't. Winter the colony was a great setting, a little island of human life on the edge of reality, so cold it can barely support life. I get why things seem desperate here, and there is a sense that these people just aren't kind or warm. It's a great story thematic to the season of winter, to be sure, and a lot of little details like that go to making this audio play pretty special, even if it does have a few limitations.