Back To The Future….The Game!

Back To The Future: the game. All 5 eppisodes

Difficulty played:  Puzzler

Platform: PS3 Download only (for now)

Time : 10 hours.  About 2 hours per Episode.

NOSTALGIA’D!!  Oh man I love the Back To The Future franchise.   Seen the movies about a billion times each and it only comes in second as my all time favorite movie trilogy to Star Wars (The original ones).  Regardless when I heard that they were going to make a Back To the Future video game I knew I was going to have to snag it up as there is no way it could be as bad as the first game…..right?

RIGHT!  Telltale Games did a great job recreating  the world of BTTF ripe with crazy paradoxes and crazy sub plots that would make any physicist’s mind explode.  Not to mention the fantastic voice acting of Christopher Lloyd (Doc) and AJ Locascio (Marty).  AJ does such an amazing job as Marty it was hard to believe it wasn’t the Fox himself!

On to the game.  The game is strictly a puzzler.  There are no health bars, no deaths and no game overs.  The only thing keeping you from progressing is how quickly you can solve the current puzzle at hand and amazingly they are not just simple press switch pull lever puzzles either, but stuff that really took some thinking.  The story picks up after the 3rd movie and Marty is about to graduate high school, when suddenly the Delorean shows up back at Docs house and it turns out Doc has been arrested in the past and will be murdered and its up to you to save him.  But Jason the Delorean was destroyed in the 3rd movie where did this one come from?  They explain this (thankfully) in the hilarious ways Doc explains Science…SCIENCE!  Needless to say this was one of the most imaginative games Ive played in a while and did require you to think and use your imagination.  However I will say unless you are a hardcore puzzle fan or a huge fan of the BTTF franchise I would not recommend picking this up, I’m sure the average COD’er will probably A.D.D. the fuck out of this game (not saying COD is bad, just, well you’ve heard the people online…stupid).

Remember when I said the game required my imagination to play?  Well its a good think because the games characters are ugly as hell (Marty and Doc aside).  Their facial animations were like watching a talking doll all awkward and especially their teeth, I know its nit-picky but what has been seen cannot be unseen.  Now I know Telltale’s focus and strengths are not on graphics but seriously every time I saw Edna Strickland or Jennifer talk I wanted pound my head, shoot, anybody talking was bleh,  good thing the voice acting was amazing.  There was also a bunch of small glitches and control problems throughout the game that scream “this game was made by a smaller studio that didn’t have the time/money to fully test” but nothing too bad to destroy the game or playability.

All in all I would easily say that I loved the game and loved to see the story continued (and continued very well) All of the puzzles were typical to what Marty would have to deal with in the Movies and of course plenty of Nods to the movies were included, also Star Wars (double awesome).   Telltale did a great job with the story and the voice work and I would eagerly look forward to any future BTTF titles they may release….(to be continued?)

I BEAT IT FIRST, BACK IN TIME!