Back to the Future: The Game

The Good
I really like it how the game perfectly copies the true Back to the Future atmosphere. You always have the same sense of adventure as if you were watching the movies and the humor is also identical. This is very nice for fans of the franchise and people who never watched a movie will probably like it as well because it is just brilliant. The crowning moment is probably when Marty hooks his guitar up to a huge speaker and uses it to bring down the guards that were trying to catch him and Brown.

This game tells it's own story instead of just making a game version of the story that has already been told through a movie. This is nice because it expands the story further or in this case provide a "what if" scenario instead of just telling us the same story again. We get to see some old characters like Emmet Brown and Marty Mcfly again, but there are also new faces like Edna Strickland and Arthur Mcfly. The story still feels like it's written by the same writers though which is weird considering twenty years have passed since.

The story is about you'd expect from a Telltale game, the whole story is separated into five episodes which all start where the previous episode left off and all end with a cliffhanger for the next episode. Something I really like though, is that every episode ends properly and it never feels like all your efforts didn't make a difference after all. Most of the time you solved the problem, but a small fragment of it was left unresolved, so you have to go back and fix it.

The humor is pretty damn good and fits the Back to the Future theme perfectly, I especially liked some winks at jokes that were in the movie and even one or two jokes about some of the lines everybody remembers (like: "You'll see some serious shit", I am not going to spoil the joke though). I admit I had to laugh a lot while playing this game and that comes from somebody who doesn't really care that much about the movies. If the adventure is the glue in this game, then the humor is the polish that makes this game shine.

The Bad
If you can't figure out a puzzle and you need to think for a while it will be constantly interrupted by character's saying the exact same lines over and over again instead of them just shutting up while you are trying to think. This is incredibly annoying and got me close to just muting the game, but I figured turning it off would be a much faster solution to my problem. Honestly, who thinks these design choices up, is there just somebody on the development team who suggested that characters should always talk even if they long ago ran out of dialogue?

Everything is just so slow and takes way too long to complete; the walking feels like Marty is eighty years old, every action is accompanied by an animation that can last several seconds (even if you already did that action before a hundred times) and there is talking around every corner. It makes me wonder if these people ever played Amnesia, there you just pick up stuff by picking it up, you don't need to see an animation of your character picking it up, you just do it. The biggest problem we have her is that a lot of puzzles require you to temporarily distract somebody, but if you don't finish the rest of the puzzle in time he will come back again.

The game takes place in the 1930's which is a nice setting with a lot of style to it, but for some unexplained reason they never did anything with the whole "mafia-style" that was going on at the moment and is even the main threat in the game. Hill Valley looks nothing different from what it did in the 50's and 80's and all the gangsters are cartoon villains who are just trying to be mean to people and sell alcohol (yeah alcohol, apparently that stuff is very illegal). They don't even have any machine guns, they only use pistols when they really have to. Why would you ignore making use of such a great setting?

The game demands a lot from your computer and it just gets ridiculous when you look at the minimum settings and notice they look a lot like those of FPS games. It is obvious to me that Telltale spend a lot of time writing the story, but kind of forgot that a game is more enjoyable the less is requires to run. I wouldn't mind that much because I can still run the game if it didn't look like it was made in 2005 and it actually had some effects. During a shoot-out there aren't even any bullets or different animations, it makes no sense to have these requirements.

The Bottom Line
When I wrote my first review on this game, I was in the second chapter and I thought that was enough to write the entire review. The second chapter, as it turned out, is the worst part of the entire game and has pretty much everything wrong and it doesn't have the real Back to the Future spirit, so naturally I wrote a very negative review on this game. I didn't want thirteen euros to go to waste though, so I kept playing and noticed that I had wrongly accused this game of been terrible.

I am a gentleman, so I feel no shame in apologizing and therefore I rewrote this review. Back to the Future is a pretty nice game for both the fans of this movie as well as fans of point and click adventure games. People who aren't familiar with the back-story will run into some difficulties when trying to keep up with the story, but they can still enjoy a pretty solid adventure.

The Good
It's funny: just a couple of days ago I was talking on phone with my mother, who (uncharacteristically) asked me what game I was playing; when I answered "You know, they just made a Back to the Future game. Do you remember that movie?" - she said: "Do I remember? That was your favorite movie, how could I forget it!".

Indeed, when I was a teenager, watching that movie for the first time back in 1988 or so was really exciting. I still love it. I've watched it at least seven or eight times, and the last time (about two years ago), I realized there was more to the movie than its flashy, goofy sci-fi side which appealed to me when I was younger. Back to the Future is a movie about the choices we make, about our power to shape our own future, about all those eternal ethical maxims that must be repeated over and over again because so few people actually pay attention to them.

Back to the Future: The Game captures the spirit of the movie and its sequels pretty well. The game's creators proved, above all, that they knew, understood, and loved the movies. Their competence goes beyond nostalgic reminiscences and plot devices. As a matter of fact, the visual style (being somewhat cartoony and even "super-deformed") doesn't resemble the movie at all; the story revolves mainly around Doc's past, which was hardly the topic of the movies; the action elements are sparse and confined to cutscenes. Yet every fiber of this game is so unmistakably Back to the Future, that the game could have gotten away even with less superficial differences. The game breathes the spirit of the movies as though it were created by the very same people.

The overarching story of the five episodes focuses on Doc. Basically, the main objective of the game is to help Doc find his true vocation, become himself. Naturally, all this is done with familiar nonchalant time-traveling plot devices. Everything that happens in the game is absolutely convincing in the sense that it fits what we've seen in the movies. The story has its poignant moments and also carries an underlying ethical message.

The dialogues in the game are well-written. They found the perfect tone, never going over-the-top with the comedy, and carefully preserving the style of the original. Everything is written with just a touch of humor, just like it was with the movies, and things never get too grotesque or out of tone, as it often happens with installments of long series when authors erroneously begin to think that it needs expansion and mixture of styles (yes, Escape from Monkey Island, I'm looking at you).

The Bad
While the game works as a Back to the Future product, the same cannot be said of its quality as an adventure game. I understand that Telltale wanted to cater to casual gamers, but there is a fine line between catering and dumbing down, and I think that they have certainly crossed it. Every task in the game can be solved simply by applying common sense to the situations. There are no actual puzzles, nothing that could challenge the player - it feels like a mildly entertaining sitcom with a bit of interactivity thrown in.

The worst thing about the game, however, is the utter lack of exploration, confinement to small, restricted areas. Roughly speaking, there is just one location in the entire game - the town square. Yes, you visit other places as well; but, without exception, all these places are just puzzle rooms in which you must accomplish a task and then move on. The only location that offers some (rudimentary) exploration is the square, and it's really small: there are maybe two or three buildings at most you can enter, and they are close to each other.

The game imposes inexplicable restriction on your movement: often you can clearly see an area, but cannot walk there. You are confined to tiny, pre-determined pathways throughout the whole game, and that is not good. The fixed camera angles are confusing, annoying, and out of place in a 3D game. On top of that, the navigation is clunky and weird: you either move by dragging the mouse (who came up with that idea?), or with directional arrows, but then you have to simultaneously hold a key to run. Walking and running animations look stiff and unnatural.

You only see the aforementioned square in two variants: 1930's and the alternate Orwellian 1986. Four out of five episodes take place almost entirely in the thirties. I have nothing against this setting, but I think a game with such a small location could have at least offer this location in different flavors. In fact, you do make a trip to 1876 (in the last episode), but it is ridiculously short and consists of a visit to one saloon.

I think something could have been done to reflect the action-loaded spirit of the movie. I'm not saying that the game should have been a shooter or a platformer or anything like that; but unlike the cerebral, comic book-like Sam & Max, Back to the Future would have benefited from more suspense and pure adrenaline-raising thrills. Maybe it sounds silly, but I think I would have enjoyed this game more if it had mini-games - perhaps a few quick-time events, maybe driving or racing levels, or anything to spice up the languid adventure gameplay.

Finally, I must say that even though they made a good Back to the Future installment, there still can be no comparison to the first movie. The story is much weaker and doesn't quite have the same kind, touching wisdom that made the first movie so memorable. It can be compared in this sense to the two movie sequels, which are in my opinion inferior to the original one. The episodes are also uneven in quality, with fairly long stretches of dull storytelling and repetitive plot devices.

The Bottom Line
Back to the Future: The Game is perfectly satisfying as a nostalgia trip to the great film, but strip away the license and you will be left with a paper-thin adventure game that is sub-par in pretty much every respect.

The Good
No irritating puzzles, great voice acting and the episodic format that usually ends on a cliffhanger. All of this makes it a beautiful Telltale experience. Marty and Doc Brown are well done. The animation, art style and music are all good. They succeeded in making me feel like I was watching a "Back to the Future" movie.

The Bad
For a game that came around a year or two before their Walking Dead series, this one doesn't have the same kind of polish. It feels janky at times.

The Bottom Line
I kept comparing it to Telltale's signature games. That was not fair. This was a gosh darn good effort on their part. It certainly needs more appreciation because it was a great game.