Back To The Future: The Game

First things first, Back To the Future: The Game isn’t new, the first episode was available for the PC back in December 2010, but it does bring together all five episodes in one place for the first time.

Secondly, I want to point out very clearly that I came to this with my eyes open. Yes this is a movie inspired title and such efforts are typically RUBBISH but I had no preconception about this game as its billed as a “completely new adventure” so I was prepared to give it a fair shake.

When the game started up and the familiar strains of Huey Lewis and his News started playing I have to admit I was smiling my stupid head off! I love the Back To the Future movies and was transported right back to when DeLoreans WERE cool and the sony Walkman cassette player was the only personal audio equipment to be seen with. Yes, kids, there was a time before the iPod!

The introduction maintained that feeling and the characterisation of Marty is actually very, very good. I believe that an actor called AJ LoCascio does the voice of Marty and he’s made an excellent job of capturing the Michael J. Fox of the 80’s vocal style. Christopher Lloyd reprises his role as Emmett ‘Doc’ Brown and it was brought a warm feeling to hear those tones. The controls are pretty straightforward and the introduction to them nicely paced.

The five episodes bring together a single story of the type we are familiar with from the movies. A seemingly straightforward ‘fix’ to the timeline has repercussions and much crossing over and hilarity results. The majority of the action takes place in the Hill Valley of 1931, with Biff Tannen’s father ‘Kid’ Tannen being the antagonist of choice. The first surprise of the game is the appearance of the DeLorean itself, which you remember was destroyed at the end of the last movie. Marty then travels back to 1931 to help ‘Doc’ Brown to escape both prison and death and here we establish the beginning of the arc.

At the time of release, one of the reviewers described Episode 1 as “a movie-inspired game that doesn’t suck. Instead, it pushes the characters in interesting directions and whips up a good story.” and they were right, it doesn’t suck, but I have to be honest that’s about as far as I can take this.

There is a marked difference between playing episode one and the rest of them, obviously some work went into improving things but I’m afraid that, for me, these simply don’t work. If I were to have to use only one word to summarise this game it would be “pedestrian”. At no time is there a sense of urgency, there’s nothing which draws you in to the plot. Alright, this is an adventure game, not an action game but I wasn’t drawn into the adventure either.

The puzzles are frustrating and at times felt a little contrived and crowbarred in. The dialogue trees actually aren’t trees for most of the time (on more than one occasion I picked an option for Marty to say and received a response which would have answered each and every other option too), there is a lack of continuity in the visual environment and the seemingly open environment serves as nothing more than a time-wasting set of looping detours for pretty linear game play.

During my play-through I tried to reconcile the game-play sparsity and the graphic styling with an argument of ‘well it’s for kids though’ except it’s not. This has a PEGI 16 rating due to some of the themes contained in the game (murder, kidnapping, torture, guns, baseball bats, etc.) This is supposed to be for us grownups, for those who either remember the movies with a fondness or who had discovered them though box-sets or the magic of SKY Movies.

Did they lose their audience when writing this? Did they think that this was ‘good enough’? OK, it’s an episodic game and not a AAA title, but even so I’ve seen and bought games with far better production and execution than this through XBLA and the App Store. Remember these were released on PS3 and Wii, they aren’t a port from earlier code, these aren’t old games.

I wanted to like Back To The Future: The Game; I wanted to enjoy those characters again and bits of it I did; but those bits were because of the actors and not the game.